I will be DMing Storm King's Thunder in about two months. Me being a first-time DM and my players only having played a year ago or never before.
The special thing is that we will be in a flat for a week and plan to play as much D&D as we can during this time.
How do I best prepare for this?
I want to make use of the fact that Storm King's Thunder is quite sandboxy. It seems to me that usually when running sandbox campaigns, the DM has at the end of a session a good feeling of where the players will want to go next session and thus is able to prepare for that location. I will not have much time between sessions though, because we will be playing most of the time.
How can I prepare in advance without railroading too much?
I intend to have a few encounters ready which would fit anywhere. What else can I do?
Clarifications:
How much free time will you have between sessions? You say "not much"
in the question, but that's a detail that seems more important than
something that vague. – HellSaint
I assume that we will have a few hours per day when some of us are cooking or buying food or other neccessities. Also, we will probably not be playing before 10am or so. So I should be able to take an hour or two for preparation per day.
How worried are you about following the book as it is? – HellSaint
As a new DM, I feel like I wouldn't be very good at improvising everything. I hope that we will stick to the main story arc, but I'm fine with changing up things as neccessary or as fitting. If the players want to go and explore something, fine by me. I think it's easier for me to make the story compelling if I don't have to make one up on the fly.
What are you more worried about – preparing encounters, loots and
these things or remembering the story, NPCs personalities and
locations? – HellSaint
Encounters and loot, I can easily prepare in advance. I'm more concerned about NPC personalities, the story and most importantly about the possibility that players want to investigate something that I just couldn't have had the idea they would. E.g. if they react to a pillaged city by going to the next large city to inform them.
A final question: how much do you want to play specifically SKT? –
HellSaint
I have bought the campaign book and like how open it is, that it offers many possibilities of roleplaying instead of just hack'n slash and that there seem to be many magic items. But I'm not too bound to SKT apart from my insecurities about improvising.
Best Answer
I have not played nor DMed SKT. I have some experience with sandboxes, though, both homebrew and published. For published sandboxes, I would say most of my DMing time was with Curse of Strahd, so my advices might be a little off for SKT. I hope we get better campaign-specific answers.
For actually learning the content needed for a session from a published adventure, I would usually take roughly the same time as the session, e.g. 4 hours preparation for 4 hours session.
With your time restraint, it seems more like a 8 hour session for 2 hours preparation. From my experience, that is simply not enough time to learn what you need. It means you will need to learn it with a lot of antecedence. For that, some things I usually already do, but are even more important for you.
"Study" the campaign
That means read the whole campaign before starting play. Use whatever methods you usually use for learning things - make notes, simulate yourself speaking as an NPC, tell the story of the campaign to someone else that is not going to play.
By actually learning the campaign before the time, when you play it and have the 1-2 hours for "preparation" you mentioned, you can just review what you already know - remember some details and all that. You won't actually need to learn that again, just like you don't need to learn the combat rules because you already know them.
In particular, make sure you know well the main story. As you mention yourself, you want to stick to the main story arc. Then focus on learning that.
When I asked about strictly following the book, I was mostly thinking about NPCs, side quests and locations. It seems you major concern about following the book is with following the main story, so, about everything else
Don't worry too much.
If an NPC is described in the books as the funny, joking one, and then you forget it and play him as the grumpy and sad one, it is fine (unless he was like the Court Clown). If a location said the market is in the center of the city and you placed it in the east corner, it is fine (unless that distance is mechanically important somehow). If you should have given that important piece of information and you forgot... it might be fine. Worst case, players lose some time, hopefully still having fun.
Remember: the main goal of TTRPGs is to have fun, you and everyone else. This is a general concept that applies to essentially every RPG problem. Even though I told you to "study" the campaign, you are not playing it to pass a test. It's fine if you make mistakes. Your players probably will make mistakes as well. Have fun.
About my third question: the thing is, while loots and encounters are easy to prepare (as you yourself said and I agree), they are the things that actually need preparing. Creating a balanced encounter on the run without breaking completely the pace is a nearly impossible task. Make sure you have those actually prepared.
NPC personalities, locations and everything else are easier to improvise. You mention you don't feel secure for that. Well, first, read the section above. Second, read the first section. It won't be a problem when they want to go to the next large city because you already read about the next large city and you know the important locations and NPCs that will be there. You probably won't remember if that was the Stonehill Inn or the Blue Water Inn, but that's fine. You know there is an Inn with an important NPC that will give an important quest.
It might get overwhelming
As I said, I have not played SKT, but I do read the internet. Perkins puts the campaign at 100s of hours, Mearls concurs with 20-25 sessions of 6 hours for a total of 120-150 hours, and the Internet often states similar times of 100 to 200 hours.
That might be too much for you to learn and remember. In a week, you probably won't even finish the campaign, even if you play 8 hours a day for 7 days, that's still half the stated expected time. That means you don't need to actually learn everything, in particular the end-game.
Unfortunately, without having played the specific campaign, I can't offer further advice on exactly what chapters/sections are the most important for you, and what chapters are likely to not get played in your gaming week.
By the way, my question about playing another campaign was just to make sure. In particular, I would personally suggest playing something that you could finish during that week, i.e., a ~50 hours campaign. That's not a too important suggestion, though.