Storm King's Thunder NPC Portrait Roadmap (6 commissions worth making)

A Storm King's Thunder campaign has a roster problem most GMs do not see coming. The book gives you a giant cast, literally, and the players cannot keep them straight. The Hill Giant lord is the one who throws food, the Stone Giant is the one with the stick, the Fire Giant is the one with the forge, the Frost Giant is the one in the cold place, and somewhere in there is a frost giant ranger who is actually on your side and is twenty feet tall. By session twelve your table has invented their own nicknames for half of them and the campaign's tonal range has flattened.

This is the post I keep meaning to write for the GMs who book NPC packs off the back of the Strahd pack we ran in six weeks. Storm King's Thunder rewards a pack the same way Curse of Strahd does, because a published module gives you a known cast and a coherent visual language is what makes the cast land at the table. Here is the working roadmap I would commission if I were running this campaign myself.

Contents

• Why an NPC pack works for Storm King's Thunder
• The giant-scale problem
• The six NPCs that most need a portrait
• Suggested order of commission
• Palette and lighting language for the whole pack
• What I sketch around in a giants brief
• A note on fair use and personal-use commissions
• Starting your own Storm King's Thunder pack

Why an NPC pack works for Storm King's Thunder

A pack solves three problems at once for a campaign module of this scale.

The first is memory at the table. Storm King's Thunder introduces more named NPCs across its first half than most modules do across their entire runtime. The Ordning is the entire engine of the book, which means the players need to remember not just one giant lord, but the relationships between them. Pulling out a portrait when an NPC enters the scene saves the GM ten minutes of describing-from-scratch and gives the players an anchor they can refer back to.

The second is scale. More on this in a minute, but the giants are huge, and the table-handout format is the place to establish that visually before the encounter. A portrait that solves the giant-scale problem in advance does most of the GM's atmospheric work for them.

The third is visual coherence across a long campaign. The Strahd pack approach of locking palette and lighting before the first sketch is the same approach that works here. When the Hill Giant lord enters the story in chapter three, and the Frost Giant Jarl enters in chapter eight, the players should feel they have entered the same world both times. A pack lets the studio batch the early-stage decisions and hold the look across all six paintings.

The math is similar to the Strahd pack: six separate commissions spaced over a year would cost more and look less unified than one pack. A pack lets me thumbnail all six in one week, color-block them together, and go deep on rendering with the palette already locked.

The giant-scale problem

This is the design problem the entire pack is built around. A giant lord is between fifteen and twenty-five feet tall depending on type, and a portrait of one needs to convey that scale even when there is nothing in the frame to measure against. Most fan art and most existing official illustrations get this wrong, painting giants as if they are six-foot-five humans with proportions slightly off.

The technical solutions I lean on:

• Bone structure scaling. A truly enormous creature does not look like a scaled-up human. The brow ridge thickens, the cheekbones widen non-linearly, the jaw extends. The same way an elephant skull does not look like a scaled-up dog skull. I paint giant faces with these proportions exaggerated past what feels comfortable, and they read at the right scale.
• Texture density. A human portrait has a few thousand pores of texture data in the face. A giant face needs to read with the texture density of a landscape. Wrinkles deeper, skin pitting more pronounced, beard hair coarser, eyebrows thicker. The eye sees this as scale.
• Implied camera position. Painting a giant from below is the obvious choice and it is correct most of the time. The brief should specify whether the viewer is at giant-eye-level (godlike, the giant is your peer) or below (mortal, the giant is looking down at you). The pack should be consistent. I default to slightly-below for every giant in the lineup, which keeps the perspective coherent.
• A reference object hidden in the frame. Not always, but often, the painting works better with something small the eye can use for measurement. A helmet that is clearly a human helmet at the giant's belt. A goat tucked under an arm. A handful of trees behind the head that are obviously full-size trees, making the head obviously bigger than them. One of these per portrait, no more.
• Cloth weight. The cloth on a giant should hang differently than human cloth. Heavier, slower-flowing, with folds that drape at a larger scale. A cape on a Frost Giant is functionally a sail.

Painting a giant is a perspective problem before it is a portrait problem. The face is the second job. The scale is the first.

The six NPCs that most need a portrait

I would commission these six first, before anything else in the module. They are the ones the players will remember if you give them a face, and the ones they will forget if you do not.

1. The Storm Giant: Hekaton or his daughter Serissa

The structural absence of the campaign. The Storm King himself is missing for most of the runtime, but his presence drives every other faction's behavior. A portrait of Hekaton on a wall is doing storytelling even when the players have not met him, and a portrait of Serissa carries the political weight of the final act.

I would paint this as a formal portrait, three-quarter view, the most polished of the six, with the storm-king palette of cool silvers and deep ocean blues. The light is the cleanest in the pack, because they are royalty and the painting should read that way. Camera position is slightly below but not aggressively so, because Hekaton is meant to be approachable in a way the other giant lords are not.

2. The Frost Giant Jarl: Storvald or Drufi

The cold-court antagonist. Frost Giant Jarls are the most martial of the giant lords, and their portraits should carry the most physical presence. I would paint this one slightly below eye-line, with heavy fur and ice-rimed armor, a beard or braid that has frost worked into it, and a palette pulled toward bone-white and pale blue with a single warm accent in the eye or the firepit reflection.

The trick on this portrait is that frost giants can read as costume-y very quickly. Real fur, real weight on the cloth, real ice crystallization on the metal. Restraint on the ornament. The Jarl should look terrifying because they are large and angry, not because they are wearing a lot of skulls.

3. The Fire Giant Duke: Zalto

The forge-court antagonist. Fire Giants are industrial, more so than any other giant type, and Zalto specifically is a duke obsessed with a project. The portrait should sit him at his forge, with the key light coming up from below in hot orange and the ambient fill from cool blue ambient shadow. The palette is the warmest in the pack: deep bronze, fire-red, smoke-gray, with a single point of white-hot at the forge mouth.

I would paint Zalto with visible tools, a hammer at his belt and tongs across his back, because Fire Giants read as craftsmen first and warriors second. The hammer should be sized correctly. It is bigger than the players.

4. The Cloud Giant Count: Sansuri

The aristocratic antagonist. Cloud Giants are the most refined of the giant types, and Sansuri specifically is the floating-castle-and-magical-experiment villain. The portrait wants a formal interior setting (a cloud palace, marble columns, a tall arched window) and a palette of pale ivory, gold, and a cool sky-blue.

The face should read as imperious rather than physically threatening. Cloud Giants do not need to hit you. Sansuri's portrait should make the players nervous in a different register than the Jarl's does. I would paint her seated, in three-quarter view, with one hand resting on something the players cannot quite identify at first.

5. The Stone Giant Thane: Kayalithica

The most underplayed of the giant lords, and the one I would commission specifically because the players will not be expecting her. Stone Giants are reclusive, philosophical, and their leader is a thane rather than a king, queen, or duke. The portrait should sit her in a cave setting with carved walls visible behind, in earth tones of slate gray, ochre, and deep umber, with a palette restraint that makes her feel separate from the more flamboyant lords.

I would paint Kayalithica without armor, because Stone Giants do not really wear it. Her ornament is carved stone jewelry, a single carved staff, the faint dust of her own kind in her hair. The face is calm. She is the quietest threat in the lineup.

6. Harshnag the Grim

The one good giant on the roster, and the NPC who carries most of the campaign's heart. Harshnag is a frost giant ranger and Uthgardt-connected hero who travels with the party for part of the middle act, and he is the NPC players bond with most. He earns a portrait specifically because he is the giant the players will want to remember.

I would paint Harshnag in a more relaxed pose than the giant lords. Leaning on his weapon at a campsite, perhaps, with a small fire visible at the edge of the frame. The palette is warmer than the Frost Giant Jarl's, with browns and dirty whites rather than icy pale blues. His face is the most weathered of the pack, and the most readable. He is the giant the players are allowed to look directly at.

There are other NPCs worth painting in this campaign (Zephyros the cloud giant wizard, the various human officials who tie into the giant-Ordning plot), but if you are commissioning six pieces, these are the six that earn their slot.

Suggested order of commission

If you cannot do the whole pack at once and want to spread the commission across the campaign, the order matters. The Strahd-pack approach is to paint the central duo first to lock the palette and let the rest follow. The Storm King's Thunder equivalent has a different structure, because the giants enter the story at different points and you want each portrait ready in time for its chapter.

Here is the order I would suggest, based on the module's pacing:

1. Harshnag. He enters the campaign around chapter three and travels with the party. He is the NPC the players will see most often, and he is the one whose portrait does the most table work. Commission him first.
2. The Frost Giant Jarl. The first giant lord most parties encounter, and the antagonist who establishes what a giant-lord portrait feels like. He sets the standard for the other lords.
3. The Fire Giant Duke (Zalto). Often the second giant lord visited, and a strong tonal contrast to the Jarl. Painting Zalto second lets me lock the warm-versus-cool axis of the pack early.
4. The Cloud Giant Count (Sansuri). Refined, formal, and the right counterweight to the brute-force giants. Commission her third to round out the antagonist roster.
5. The Stone Giant Thane (Kayalithica). Quiet, philosophical, the visual outlier. She works as the fourth portrait because the pack needs a tonal break from the spectacle giants by this point.
6. Hekaton or Serissa (the Storm Giant). The most polished of the six, painted last because the pack's visual standards are highest by then and because the storm-giant portrait carries the campaign's final-act weight.

If your budget allows only three portraits, the cut-down version is Harshnag, the Frost Giant Jarl, and the Fire Giant Duke. Those three give you the most table-day usefulness across the campaign's middle act.

Palette and lighting language for the whole pack

I would lock six decisions before the first sketch, the same way I did for the Strahd pack:

A unified palette of nine colors. I would build a palette spanning the temperature range from Fire Giant warm to Frost Giant cold, with a near-black, a bone-white, and a desaturated blue-gray as the bridge tones. Saturated yellows and pure cyans get banned. The Stone Giant palette and the Storm Giant palette anchor opposite ends of the chroma range, with the Cloud Giant Count sitting closer to the Storm Giant end and Harshnag warming up the Frost Giant range.

Two light setups, used consistently. Six portraits do not need six lighting designs. Five of them get a single warm key from frame-left at slightly below eye-line with a cool ambient fill. The Fire Giant Duke gets the inverted setup, key from below in hot orange with cool ambient from above. That single exception is meant to signal "different giant type" without breaking the visual logic of the pack.

A consistent reference-object policy. Each giant gets one human-scale reference object in the frame to imply scale. Hekaton's is a human-sized scroll on his hand. The Frost Giant Jarl's is a captured human helmet at his belt. Zalto's is a hammer the size of a person. Sansuri's is a small bird perched on her wrist. Kayalithica's is a single carved stone tablet. Harshnag's is the campfire visible at the lower edge of his portrait, which any human looking at it would recognize.

A consistent format. All six portraits painted at the same canvas dimensions, cropped at the chest-up or knees-up range. I would not paint half of them full-body and half head-and-shoulders. The format consistency is what makes the pack feel like a pack.

A consistent finish. I would deliver all six as painterly, in the house style. Anime would not carry the giant-scale problem well. Lineart would not carry the political weight of the giant courts. Semi-realistic would over-individuate each giant in a way that hurts the pack coherence. Painterly is the right tool, full stop. The commission style breakdown covers why painterly carries this kind of work best.

A consistent delivery format. Each portrait gets the high-resolution print file plus a circular VTT token crop at 280px, color-matched across the pack. That way the GM has both the table handout and the digital token ready for online sessions.

What I sketch around in a giants brief

Every giants brief that arrives includes parts I quietly ignore at sketch:

• The cliched "looking up at the giant" composition with the player character at their feet. Hard to compose, easy to render as bad anime, and not actually useful at the table because the GM does not want to choose which PC is in the frame
• The full Ordning explanation. The brief sometimes summarizes the entire giant hierarchy. I have read the book. The portrait does not need to explain the lore. It needs to show the character.
• Excessive heraldry on the armor. Giants do not have human-style coats of arms. A single carved sigil per giant type lands. Five sigils on one giant reads as costume.
• Glowing eyes, dramatic weather, magical effects. Stage effects. Storm King's Thunder has enough genuine drama in the giants themselves. The painting does not need extra lightning.
• Over-described clothing. "Fur cloak with rune-stitched border with skull-clasps and snow-encrusted armor with the family sigil." Pick three elements. Let the rest read as appropriate-for-the-giant.

The notes I lean on, on the other hand:

• One specific moment from the GM's planned scene
• The faction or court the giant represents
• The relationship to the party (antagonist, ally, neutral)
• A reference for proportions if the GM has a specific build in mind
• Any deliberate visual signature the GM wants to use to mark this giant as theirs rather than the book's default

A note on fair use and personal-use commissions

A note on the legal layer, because this comes up. Storm King's Thunder is a Wizards of the Coast trademarked module, and the named NPCs in it are WotC intellectual property. The studio's policy on this kind of commission is straightforward: we paint fan-art portraits of published-module NPCs for personal use only (table handouts, character sheets, online VTT use within a private campaign). Not for commercial resale, not for use in commercial publication, not for redistribution as a printed product.

We are also painting our version of the character. Hector's interpretation of Hekaton, not a reproduction of an existing official illustration. The brief should describe the NPC's role and energy, not point me at a specific piece of official art and say "make this." I will gently push back on that kind of brief regardless.

The same rules apply to other module-based commissions and to horror-adjacent character work that touches on published settings. Personal use, our interpretation, the painting belongs to the client for their campaign.

Starting your own Storm King's Thunder pack

If you are running this module and want the six-portrait pack ready for the campaign's middle act, the order form is the most efficient way to get the brief in front of me. There is a field for module name, a field for the NPCs you want included, and a notes field for any specific moments from your campaign you want the portraits to capture.

The GM and world-building service covers NPC pack pricing and scheduling. I take a limited number of packs each quarter to keep the per-piece attention high, and a six-portrait Storm King's Thunder pack typically takes eight to ten weeks. The VTT token service covers the digital handoff side if your campaign runs online or hybrid.

For broader context on commissioning D&D character work, the complete guide to commissioning D&D 5e character art covers the full pipeline. The Strahd NPC pack walkthrough is the closest sibling piece in the existing library, and the workflow described there is exactly the workflow I use for any campaign-module pack. If your campaign has individual hero PCs you want painted alongside the NPCs, the warlock player's guide and the paladin commission guide cover the class-specific brief side. For the broader fantasy commission frame, see the fantasy character art commission guide.

Send me a list of which six NPCs you want, the chapter you are currently running, and any specific moments from your campaign that the portraits should anchor. The Ordning paints better when the brief comes from a table that has actually played the book.