I set out a long time ago to create notes for Storm King’s Thunder. Chapters two and three really burned me out. But at long last, I’ve finally finished it….
…just in time to start reading through Tomb of Annihilation >.<
Better late than never though, right?
The notebook is a beautiful one though, and I learned some lessons. I thought I’d maybe share some images of it along with my thoughts for organizing campaigns this way.
CHARACTERS:
This book features my second stab at coming up with a layout for NPC characters. This one features a “note card” setup that has an avatar and important information right at the top, followed by a statblock underneath, and then any and all information the book lists for that character. I prefer this standardized version over my old Curse of Strahd layout, but have since come up with a more preferred layout to be featured in newer adventures like Tomb of Annihilation.
Lessons Learned:
A major lesson I learned from doing this adventure is that not ever NPC needs their own page just because the book gave them a name. And this book sure did like to name as many NPCs as it could (even basic goblins!). Sometimes a guard in a keep is nothing more than a guard in a keep, they don’t need their own page.
LOCATIONS:
Locations share a similar layout to how I handed them previously, though I had began to introduce a side bar. While minor NPCs didn’t deserve their own character page, I still wanted to have them compiled into a list on the location’s page for quick reference of their names.
This list also contains Encounters, and anything else worth knowing about the location at a glance. This was my first stab at doing a sidebar like this, and so its layout has also been greatly improved in more recent adventures.
Lessons Learned:
Chapter 3 was a bit of a doozy since it is filled with locations. Here is a comparison of the land area difference between Curse of Strahd, the Lost Mines of Phandelver, and Storm King’s Thunder. Naturally the book couldn’t possibly contain lengthy information for each and every location, and so many of these were just given a blurb. Turns out a lot of these locations are also mentioned in other books like Princes of the Apocalypse.
This ultimate led to the creation of a new Notebook designed to consolidates all of the Adventures and Lore together into one place where things can be easily cross-linked.
Appendix:
The layout of the appendix didn’t see much change from the how I handled it in Curse of Strahd. Magic items and Monsters are each listed as subpages for their respective categories.
I know you’re rebuilding your site due to techincal difficulties… but will you allow us to download the onenotes for these campaings again?
They were never available previously. I’ve only ever offered the SRD notebook, the page backgrounds (which are now in the SRD book), and the CoS Barebones book.
Have you ever looked into finding out if you can sell these full packages on DMs Guild or something, with licence from WotC or something? I would definitely pay for this.
Is there anywhere I can purchase this from you? This would be very helpful for the campaign I am currently running
Nope. You’ll have to purchase the module from somewhere like D&D Beyond instead.
Can you give me the link to the module on D&D Beyond? I can’t find your OneNote download
All my download links are pinned to the right-side bar of every page. If you mean you can’t find the OneNote download for StormKing’s Thunder, its because I don’t offer SKT due to copyright reasons. This page only shows how I set up my own personal notebook.
Hi Cryrid,
first of all thank you for your amazing work! Do you plan on releasing a Barebones template for SKT, like you did for CoS?
At one point that was the plan, but unfortunately I haven’t found the time to go back through and strip out the content. I usually get an adventure all formatted for myself, and then put all my focus towards actually running it for my players. By the time that campaign tends to wind down there’s a new book out and the cycle repeats. When I do have some free time it’s usually spent trying to convert OotA and HotDQ, or a little homebrew adventure (something I wanted to do so that I can release an entire book).
My man, those pic links don’t work! Was trying to get a good look at the pic under “Locations” but when I click to enlarge image, i get “whoops, that page can’t be found” I am loving this guide and using it to model my own, but as is, on my screen the image is unreadable in parts.
Anyways your awesome man, thanks for all the work in putting these guides up!
Sorry about that. I had copied a lot of the posts from my old blog and so they were still trying to locally reference the images based on that. I’ve gone through and switched what I could find to absolute links, so hopefully that will solve the problem (though it might not, since the base screenshot itself was scaled down prior to its upload).