Storm King's Thunder is a good adventure module. Before playing it, I had no interest in Giants as villains or as central to the plot, but the cool cover art and the promise of Cimmerian-style high adventure in the "Savage Frontier" drew me in. The intro blurb also points out that the encounters are meant to be deadly, which was a challenge I was willing to accept.
Unfortunately I found the execution a bit lackluster. The encounters are only deadly in that the "Challenge Rating" of combat is very high, but if you work around combat or avoid it then there is no real threat. The "Savage Frontier" is actually a very tame place, most of the action happens in small towns and settlements, and the random wilderness encounters are meant to be completed through negotiation or clever problem solving. Rarely are players alone, fearing for their life. The overarching villains don't really care about anything but their own problems, and really only show up as occasional disasters until the players specifically break into their houses and try to beat them. The adventure module provides a lot of backstory and a lot of cool detail into the world, and then most of it is dropped.
I guess this goes back to that old school D&D sensibility - its the DM's job to make the game good.
One thing I wanted to do is refocus this adventure on the "Barbarian world" theme. This doesn't mean that the Barbarian, Druid and Ranger classes are the only allowable ones, or that "civilized" classes like the Paladin, Cleric and Wizard are precluded. Rather, it gives all the classes a new flavor, which I think could be really fun. For example, a Barbarian Cleric could be a Holy warrior, dedicated to the creed of some primitive god and traveling the land as part of a pilgrimage or holy quest. Why couldn't a barbarian cleric worship Annam the All-Father, the central deity of this adventure, or be styled after the gothi, the priests of the Vikings?
Secondly, the world should be much harsher. Gone are the comfortable trappings of civilization - the city of Neverwinter is just a fishing village and port city. It's still the largest city in the North, but that doesn't mean much. The outside wilderness is divided between fiercely territorial tribes of Human Barbarians, Savage Orcs, and Wild Elves who live in forests. Venturing out into any of their lands should be considered an incursion into hostile territory. Instead of most of the peaceable random encounters, players should be expected to fight or bargain for their life, otherwise be captured or killed by the wild peoples that rule the frontier.
Now, when I played through this module, I avoided every combat encounter that I could because I did not want to be bogged down by it. I'm not advocating that every encounter end in combat, but that every encounter should prove a risk to the PCs, and then it is up to them how to resolve it.
Now we get the central villains of the adventure - the Giants. The Giant races should be at war with each other. I read through the description of the Ordning several times and I still could not care about it or see the point it had in the story. Instead, the conflict should be a more down to earth one, King Hekaton, ruler of the Storm Giants and the top of the Giant hierarchy, is missing and now the domination of the Storm Giants as a whole is in jeopardy. As such, all Giants have declared war on each other and are doing whatever they can to establish themselves as the new head of the Giant races. And caught in the crossfire are all the 'little people' and civilized settlements unfortunate enough to be in the Giants' reach.
So in actual play, the initial attacks on the settlements remain largely unchanged as its assumed that the Giants are still executing their respective schemes to destroy the others, but now there would be more encounters of Giants fighting each other and crushing everything else in their wake, of Giants raising and moving with more armies of servant races, and so forth.
I realize this fundamentally changes the hidden villain of the story and the final encounter, but I did not find Iymrith to be a very compelling villain, and I had just played through Hoard of the Dragon Queen and The Rise of Tiamat, so I was tired of dragon villains. Instead, I would like to see the inclusion of a higher tier monster make their appearance, the Titans, and for the ending of this module to give way to planar adventures in the Astral Sea where players now interact with godlike beings.
This is also unlike the GDQ series, from which STK takes its inspiration from, but though I haven't played it I don't think the GDQ series ever gave a reason for the Giants to be working for the Drow, or even what the Drow's manipulation was like.
This also changes the first Giant included in the story, Zephyros the Cloud Giant. Instead of being a convenient gamist element, Zephyros would be retooled into a dying lawful good cloud giant, desperate for any option to end the war. His only hope before his life finally ebbs away is a group of adventurers he encountered by chance near the site of the last major Cloud Giant battle, and he offers them his knowledge and tools to stop the war. No silly, inconsistent explanation involving madness and clairvoyance necessary.
And I think the greatest weakness of Storm King's Thunder is the inclusion of too many taxi services. Zephyros, as mentioned before, only exists as a taxi for player characters to get from Nightstone to one of the 3 towns that really kick off this adventure. After that the players are introduced to a network of teleportation circles, and eventually a full airship and crew simply given to them by a Lawful Evil dragon for no reason. I think the designers for 5e truly hate map crawls, because this happens in every module. Instead, let the players actually walk around the map in that large, waste of space Chapter 3 that takes up a majority of the book, and simply scale up the encounters as players gain levels and complete chapters of the story.
And the last issue this would address is Harshnag. Simply have him show up as soon as possible in Chapter 3, and let him lead the players to the Temple of the All-Father in a good old fashioned wilderness adventure.
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