Bring Me the Heads of the Giant Lords!

One of the things I like least about "Storm King's Thunder" concerns some of the best material in the book. After the wandering around in chapter 3 and the visit to the Eye of Exposition in chapter 4, the book then presents lovingly-detailed lairs for the five giant chiefs who have been causing all the trouble thus far. These are all really good material.

And then the PCs are encouraged to choose one of the giants to face, with the promise that if they thwart only one of the chiefs' schemes, they will all fall. And so of these five lairs, which represent both a very large part of the book and also represent pretty much the best part of the book, four are expected to be ignored. (The theory here, I think is both so that when groups meet to trade war stories they'll each have had very different experiences, and also so that groups can reuse the same adventure and take another route. The problem with that latter notion being that surely reuse of the same adventure with the same group must be fairly unusual - wouldn't you prefer to do something else.)

On the other hand, I also don't like adventures where the PCs either must deal with everything in the adventure (often because area A leads to area B, which leads to area C, and so on), or where they have a "choice"... of what order to face the various challenges. My ideal would be for an adventure where the PCs will face most things, will only deal with everything if they really look for it, and are likely to miss some things.

To that end, I'm looking at how to address the issue with SKT for my current campaign. And, as the party are just about to enter the Eye of Exposition, now is the time.

My thinking is that the Oracle will inform them that they must face one of the giant lords (to get the required teleportation device), but that they can face more if they choose. Obviously, any giant lords they don't face will be able to complete their nefarious schemes, and will stand to make gains when the Ordning is restored. The giant lords they do defeat will come lower down.

But, in addition, with each giant lord the PCs face, the Oracle will imbue them with some trait of that species (the size, the ability to throw boulders, immunity to fire/cold, a stone skin...) which they will then carry for the rest of the adventure, and which will improve their standing in the Storm King's Court.

That way, the PCs have an incentive to face down the giant lords without being required to do so. They will then be free to choose their own path - especially useful as only three of the giant lords have really been introduced thus far, while a fourth subrace has featured but not to the same extent. So my expectation would be that they'd deal with most, and not all, of the five lords.

Which is nice.

The downside is that the PCs will likely end up at a considerably higher level than the adventure supposes, which means I'll need to beef up the last chapters.

(However, one of my other objections to the adventure is that the final conflict is yet another example of one of WotC's bad habits: an overwhelming challenge, with a built-in 'cheat' to make it manageable. If the PCs are considerably higher level, the 'cheat' can perhaps be removed, and certainly downgraded, making for a more satisfying (for me) final battle.)