Storm King’s Thunder begins with the shattering of the Ordning by Annam. The giants, freed from their bonds by the destruction of their society and driven by a desire to claim lordship in the Ordning-yet-to-come, are suddenly more active — and more violent — than they’ve been in generations. Giant attacks run rampant across the Sword Coast and Savage Frontier.
The PCs get sucked into this morass and the question of the hour is: How can we stop it?
Logically, therefore, Storm King’s Thunder should conclude with the PCs resolving the crisis. Their actions should stop the giant attacks and restore the peace.
Oddly, however, as we discussed in Part 2B, this is not how Storm King’s Thunder ends. The book instead wraps up with the PCs rescuing Hekaton (he didn’t disappear until after the Ordning was broken) and then helping him slay the wyrm Iymrith (whose schemes also didn’t begin until after the Ordning was broken).
To complete our remix of Storm King’s Thunder, therefore, we need to conjure forth the missing ending.
THE ORDNING
In the real world, the divine right of kings was the belief that a king’s right to rule was granted by God. In practice, it was fairly circular logic: Everything in the world is the way it is due to God’s plan. Therefore, the fact that I’m in charge means that it’s God’s plan that I should be in charge. And because it’s God’s plan that I should be in charge, no one has a right to question my authority.
I’m in charge because I’m in charge. QED.
(“Hey! What about free will?” “I said no questions!”)
But what if you lived in a world where the gods were real? And you could just call them up and ask, “Who do you think should be in charge?” In fact, maybe your god is more than happy to tell you who’s in charge.
That’s the Ordning.
Annam, the god whom almost all giants worship, has decreed a divine hierarchy for giant society for more than 30,000 years. This hierarchy applied not only between the giant races (so that the cloud giants, for example, had dominion over the hill giants, but were subservient to the storm giants), but also to each individual giant.
The giants sometimes speak of this as skarra, the light of Annam:
- The light of Annam is upon him.
- Her skarra is brighter than mine.
- May the light of Annam shine on you.
- She burns with fiery skarra.
Annam’s light was a guide, a spotlight, a purpose, a blessing, and so much more.
And then the lights went out.
The result was the sort of total societal collapse you often find in failed states. Touchstones from the real world might include the dissolution of the USSR, the rise of ISIS, Rome after the assassination of Caesar, or the Communist Revolution in China.
The giants are a society now riven with strife. Paramilitary organizations struggle for power and/or survival, while the common folk desperately protection after aeons of having it assured. In fact, it’s not one conflict, but many different conflicts, all spilling out and affecting the other races and nations of Faerun.
You present more of a caricature of the Christian establishment of absolutism rather than an earnest allusion. Fair enough that your post about an RPG is not a systematic refutation but it doesn’t excuse ignorance and frankly your concept is significantly less interesting than the reality.
Before Christianity the concept was often very simple, that the king or emperor or Pharaoh was a material descendent of the gods and their lineage traced back to them, which gave them both certain privileges and a decisive wisdom to rule. There’s a reason they demanded statues of themselves and it wasn’t to admire their physique. Caligula for instance would put down rebellions and then install a statue of himself in the holiest place he could find to remind the servile state to whom they owe their continued existence.
The continuity between this and Christian political philosophy is that the created order is contiguous with the human order. The same hand which set the sun in its movements and the stars in their stations also permits the rise of this or that authority. I imagine it’s fairly alien to us, having slurped up Locke and Spinoza all our lives, to reckon that a government has its origins not in its people but in a higher government. The point is really simple however, that the people of a nation owe fealty to the government in the same way they owe fealty to the natural order, as in natural law.
The Christian conception is diverse especially at the onset of the Renaissance for obvious reasons. It’s worth noting the logic is fundamentally the same: the power by which a government rules is itself participating or is in common with the power of power itself, the transcendent Deity. Thus as St Paul says in Romans, a certain allegiance is owed to rulers insofar as they represent these interests. If they stray and command something contrary to that order, for instance idolatry, then they are acting outside the bounds of their authority and their subjects are not bound to their will.
Even the most hardline proponents, such as Fr Bossuet or De Maistre, are clearly not engaging in a circular loop of saying providence proves we are right. They both had reservations for obvious biographical reasons with that kind of sentiment. Rather they insist on the fact that a subject cannot overthrow or install his own government precisely because lower powers cannot install higher powers, in other words, even if we are forced to rebellion, killing kings is not something done lightly, and you may be killing all piety along with him. Once man decides he can slay his superiors, he owes nothing to anyone but his own, not to his God and not to his parents and not to his boss.
The structure of RPG divinities is often a mess so this is not feasible to implement as such in most settings, since it requires continuity between the gods and creation in a way that is classical and not, say, a matter of “biggest and baddest gets the cheese” as observed in Theranos or elsewhere. If Annam is actually the shaper of our current reality than the Ordning is not just an arbitrary system for putting tall folks into a caste system. It’s an integral part of reality on par with ensuring the tides roll in at the appointed times. The shattering of the Ordning would not be akin to dissolving a corporate entity and allowing the former middle managers to squabble over whether legal or financial departments are better. It’s an overturning of the cosmos and the fighting is an emblem of primordial chaos.
But what if… 🙂
Phil Johnson@1, What makes the people the “lower” power, and the king the “higher” power? Such that one gets to rule over the other?
That thorny question aside (I’m aware there’s a millennium of deep argument about it, and even if we no longer agree with him I’m not going to pretend I’m smarter than Thomas Aquinas), your last paragraph is a good point. There are multiple ways to approach gods in D&D, and you can choose in your game whether something like the Ordnung is just an extended feudal system like Justin describes, or if it’s part of the physics of the universe — if breaking it just means the Godfather is gone and discipline collapses, or if it truly is a re-writing of biology and psychology.
“Once man decides he can slay his superiors, he owes nothing to anyone but his own, not to his God and not to his parents and not to his boss.”
The word “superior” is doing a lot of work in that sentence, kings ruled because they had armies, hard to go against the guy with the pointy stick. The divine right is just a way to justify their rule and to divert you from the pointy stick.
It is a circular logic, because disputing their divine right is as impossible as disputing the existence of a god… but again, it’s just a diversion from tangible earthly powers.
The principle of democracy is you that all humans are peers, nobody is above anyone. Yes, some people are elected and all that, but that power isn’t permanent and more important it’s “granted by your peers”.
@colin
My use of higher and lower is not referring to a literal hiero-archy, “sacred order” as in one being notionally more heavenly than another. I’m using higher and lower to place them in a chain beginning with a “highest” power, as in affective capacity, to a “lowest” power with the least affective capacity. If we consider them notionally as in one thing is mightier than another thing, with more ability to affect, we can understand that if we consider power as a metaphysical dimension, then we can see how it relates to underlying substance, and what it actually means for kings to participate in the highest power not by blood and not by special delineation but by obligation and holding an office.
@Alberek
I don’t believe in a Hobbesian state of nature so I don’t believe governments necessarily coalesce around whomever happens to win tribal conflicts in some primordial eon. I also don’t believe in the Hobbesian account where the only reason governments have power is by supraconscious mass delusions, where we all mutually agree and spontaneously a government materializes around a kind of contract. We not only do not have material evidence of this kind of thing ever occurring (a multigenerational government that arises from a group of disconnected people, without a mutual history, conceding their natural rights to an authority) but it also doesn’t pass the basic test of reason. Ironically this type of thinking is precisely Hobbesian because he further goes to argue for the absolute monarchy of England. The point of my post was to pose against this thinking. The way human beings conceived of divine right monarchy was not a diversion from military might but a radically alien attitude toward authority. “The past is a foreign country … our own ancestors strangers.”
Respectfully, it’s a little hard to buy the idea that the divine right of rulers comes from some totally alien way of thinking when right now, major sections of the American national conversation involve arguing that a given current-day leader was or wasn’t appointed by god.
Whatever outlook leads to that argument, it’s still alive and well.
@Highbrowbarian
The historic and at least reasonable position is what I’m explicating, one defended and upheld for at least six millennia by individuals with coherent thought. That American Protestants view their God as a temporally bound agent, and America as the next dispensation of revelation, is superficially and not substantially what is referred to in this article. It is therefore not comparable and not a concern. Given your opinion I’d imagine you see continuity in appearances and terms alone. Is the modern republic the same political entity with the Roman Republic? Do they share the same principles and origins?
@PhilJohnson
I’m not sure exactly what you’re arguing here. I think the simplified explanation of what “divine rite” is suffices to describe what going on in Storm King’s Thunder. Considering SKT is not a historical piece, and the characature is the current common understanding of divine rite, that’s probably the intention the authors had behind the Ordning too. Whether you choose to paint the fall of the Ordning as the fall of a state, or the “overturning of natural law”, the reality for those affected (mortal players and those they love) is the same. I think it’s more semantics and preference on how you choose to roleplay the giant factions and their God – are they half-divine beings undergoing cosmic upheavel, or just large and long-lived mortals who got their power structure dissolved after their deity saw them be useless during the events of Rise of Tiamat, which involved Dragons that giants historically hate with a passion? I’d say the latter is far more likely, and supported by the Forgotten Realms lore.
All manners of explanations for divine rite are excuses. The nature of the excuse does not change the reality a “divine rite” entails. We can recognize this now because we have the historical records and the freedom of thought not available to ancient scholars. You can be intelligent, yet not know any better because all recorded history has stated that the Pharoah is god-incarnate, and all must listen to him. There are more than enough historical examples, not just in Europe, where power is taken by someone without any blood-relation, yet the new leader enforces their divine rite. At most they have to marry into a family that would reasonably have claim to divine rite, and hire a scholar to explain why the rite is now theirs. Post-Renaissance, you could just ask the Pope to give you divine rite. It’s hard for dissenting opinions of divine rite to survive the chopping block, much less the passing of centuries. If you make your living by writing, there’s serious incentive to write good things about the only people with the money to finance you in ancient times.
In SKT, the giants are actively engaged in a power struggle after the fall of the Ordning. Annam’s reasoning for dissolving the Ordning is directly stated, and is far more petty than some shift in natural order. Because Annam is very much active and present, unlike any historical god/gods used to justify authoritarian rule, all the giants expect the Ordning to be reestablished. They are personally motivated to place their “caste” of giant at the top of the ladder when Annam puts it back in place. Anthropological exposition on the origins of divine rite isn’t useful for someone running the campaign, except maybe to inform what a giant will tell the players if asked to justify the countless lesser mortals who suffer because of their power struggle.
So what I’m saying is “people in charge came up with a philosphical system that conveniently maintained that it was God’s will that the people in charge were in charge and saying otherwise would be against God’s will.”
And, yes, this has happened again and again and again throughout history. Because it’s obviously a useful piece of propaganda.
“If you try to overthrow the government, then the gods will cause plagues and earthquakes and all kinds of horrible stuff and you’ll be really sorry!” is obviously super useful if you’d rather not have people revolt. Sometimes you say it’s because God is your grandpa and he’ll be really mad. Or maybe you claim that the order of society mirrors the order of the natural world and the disruption of one reflects or creates a disruption of the other. Whatever works.
Phil, for some reason, believes the propaganda.
Did some of the people who benefited from this historically ALSO believe their own propaganda? Almost certainly!
Did people living in these societies try to find explanations for the “divine right of kings” that weren’t just “because the king said so”? Well, of course! That’s the whole point of the propaganda!
I think it’s important to note that the starting point for viewing religion in the past should be that people believed in their own religions because from their point of view those religions _worked_.
See Bret Deveraux on this: “This is how these religions work. Not based on moral belief, but on practical knowledge (I should point out, this is not my novel formulation, but rather is rephrasing the central idea of Clifford Ando’s The Matter of the Gods (2008), but it is also everywhere in the ancient sources if you read them and know to look).” https://acoup.blog/2019/10/25/collections-practical-polytheism-part-i-knowledge/
I tend to agree with Bret that we should be very wary of attaching our (well earned) modern cynicism of religion to historical actors. Yes, people claimed divinity because it was useful for that to be true. But they also claimed it because they believed that they couldn’t have got where they were if they weren’t the beneficiary of the gods smiling upon them, and why would they do that if they weren’t actually divine in the first place?
Even if they had no other reason to believe that they were, that’s an ‘honest’ position, rather than the cynical power-grab it looks like from today.
I think there’s at least some truth to all the options. It’s certainly possible to engage in motivated reasoning without admitting or even being aware that that’s what you’re doing. “I need to justify that our society is rightly constructed!” is an occupation people will devote themselves to in any era, including our own.
I tend to believe that our philosophers are generally better about not-fooling-themselves than the ancients were, but that might be motivated reasoning also.
A fun thing about fantasy worlds is you can commit to a bit: “the set of stories these people tell about the world is *literally true* in all their wild detail.”
It doesn’t really matter if you earnestly believe in a god or not.
If your evidence that the gods think you should be in charge is because you’re in charge and you’re in charge because the gods think you should be, that’s circular reasoning.
It’s funny because saying that you know what god think is considered heresy… unless you are the one in power.
I’m no anthropologist or know that much about religious studies, but I would wager that religions show up long after societies are formed.
I’m not adbocating for Hobbs or any line of thinking around “defining the nature of man”, but it’s not up to debate that kings and similar figures had standing armies, guards, the best locations, fortified homes, etc.
Again, I’m no doctorate in philosopy (that’s my brother), to me the circular logic of divine right is a fancy way of saying “Might makes Right”.
Justin, that’s not the reasoning of a Christian King. James VI of Scotland (I of England) found the divine right in scripture – Romans 13:
(1) Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God. (2) Whosoever, therefore, resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation. (3) For rulers are not a terror to good works, but to the evil. Wilt thou then not be afraid of the power? do that which is good, and thou shalt have praise of the same: (4) For he is the minister of God to thee for good. But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil. (5) Wherefore ye must needs be subject, not only for wrath but also for conscience sake. (6) For this cause pay ye tribute also: for they are God’s ministers, attending continually upon this very thing. (7) Render therefore to all their dues: tribute to whom tribute is due; custom to whom custom; fear to whom fear; honour to whom honour.
So it’s not circular reasoning – right there in the Bible it says the person who is in charge (me in this case) is the person who should be in charge because that’s what St Paul – the mouthpiece of Christ – said explicitly.
Gotta say, of all the comments sections on this blog, this is the one where I could have have anticipated the direction it would go the least.
All of us seeing such different “obvious” readings of the exact same events does, however, leave me thinking about what form theological disputes take in a D&D world. On paper, it seems like the existence of Clerics would mostly get rid of that as a possibility, but 5E’s “talk to your god” Divinations are all very limited and totally internal to the spellcaster – with only a few words of context and no witnesses, even priests of the same deity acting in good faith (heh) could be totally at odds, and there would be no way to break the deadlock until the God went far enough to strip somebody of their powers, or somehow sent a Celestial to yell at them.
And, of course, with so many other sources of magic which could at least pass as coming from the same god and shapeshifters or illusionists to give out false prophecies, those things are hardly foolproof. Just in terms of what’s possible in the setting, there’s no reason why the Church of Annam would have any fewer sects and schisms than that of Jehovah.
Well, other than the dwindling population of giants.
@Justin
You’ll notice that in each of my comments I was explicit in NOT endorsing either a) your caricature of “divine right of kings” or b) the divine right of kings as understood before the modern period. I did not make an argument for its validity, I did not promote it and I did not say I believed it was true. I was careful to argue that your presentation of it was poor, it was detrimental to your rewrite of the module and ultimately that you should know better if you have read Will & Ariel Durant’s works. I bring them up specifically because you have been fond in the past of quoting Mr. Durant. Even the classically Chinese Mandate of Heaven was not so self-referential as to be circular, and it does not have an explanatory mechanism for the bestowal of power beyond the power being bestowed.
I do not hold Will & Ariel Durant as especially noteworthy or as experts in anything, and on most matters of substance I am inclined to disagree with them. What I can affirm is that they are for the most part fair. They try to understand arguments on their own terms, whether or not they do so well or at all. I would for example take their assessment of medieval philosophy and logic as stagnant as an unabashedly lazy conclusion. However their reasoning is not predicated on depicting the University of Paris as populated, until the 18th century, by mouthbreathers in propellor hats whose doctoral work focused on eating glue. In contrast you have assumed the tides of intellectual history rise to meet you at your doorstep, that the world has no precedent of coherent thought before your preferred philosophy.
Your hermeneutic of suspicion is weakly antagonistic to what you’re attacking and does more to damage your own argument. A state of affairs could produce such-and-such philosophy, sure; and your state of affairs produced your own philosophy and metaphysic. But this is beside the point. I can and often disagree with you without needing to comment, but uninteresting laziness guised as erudition is something that demands a response. It’s a detriment to the article and betrays sloppy consideration about an important idea for the module.
Fantasy RPGs succeed precisely where they “materialize” nomaterial things. Evil is a place that can be visited. The soul is a substance that can be manipulated, bottled and sold. The influence of ancient rulers is sustained not by legacy or cause-and-effect but by Regional Effects. Framed like this, your account of the divine right of kings is reduced to a decision that is only gilded by a stat block with large numbers, the equivalent of a middle manager deciding on which salesperson to give a company car. In contrast the actual historical account might emphasize the ontological and fantastical effects upon the giants themselves. Rather than a king-of-the-mountain competition, the module could draw to itself identity (e.g. hill giants are not aloof cavemen because that’s “just how they’re made” but because of their place in the previous Ordning) and literal hierarchy (and whether such order is necessity or desirable considering how it boxes out and injures the lowest giants) and the actual undoing of past wrongs (e.g. the manifest guilt of the storm giants for the wicked deeds that established them at the top in the first place, and the opportunity to “do it right” this time) and what the desired outcome even is (did Annam really think that dissolving a rigid hierarchy would make them MORE apt to tackle the dragons, by disuniting them?). This is tossed aside because instead we get a cheap, sterile narrative on what exactly? That more powerful agents call the shots and we have to suck up to them? That it would be unpleasant if we had mutable, irascible governors? These are the musings of middle schoolers with Internet connection.
Given your remix of Avernus and your usually insightful probing into issues like the metaphysical dimension of a campaign’s core issues, your failure here was a disappointment. Not the end of the world, but your response is also similarly discouraging since it’s the same kind of laziness from the outset.
@Phil:
I had missed it until now, but it looks to me like you’re saying that the solutions Justin is developing to the Ordning’s dissolution (help one clan of giants to seize power, form an alliance against the dragons, or personally try to claim Annam’s favor) are uninteresting to you, and a deeper understanding of the divine right of kings could lead to better ones.
It’s possible that I’m missing something else, so please help me out here: what endgame are you advocating?
@Highbrowbarbarian
Yes that’s pretty much it. Having read his stuff for a while now one of Justin’s strengths is treating the material seriously and keeping a mind as to how this all is cashed out. I think that’s the lapse here because the overturning of the Ordning is not incredibly compelling if it amounts to “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss” with a dash of improbable party antics. The Ordning seems to be prescriptive of what giants are individually capable of and what they are essentially: Annam made the tallest, strongest and smartest giants to inherently rule over their inferior kin. A giant that lives in a cloud city was never going to be subject to a giant that lives in a cave. The dissolution of their order therefore may well introduce more ontological jokers than first blush. Ogres not only have a shot at being top dog but there might be ogres that are emerging as culturally rich and intellectually adept because they are for the first time not rigidly locked into a metaphysical pecking order that barred them from ever transcending what they were made to be. Now the question of which giants to help becomes one that is not choosing what flavor of Jotun ice cream to make king or queen. Now there’s an interesting and incomparable and MEANINGFUL decision about what clan deserves to rule in the coming order. The transition between this age and the next is all the more uncertain because we don’t know what is going to happen if we install trolls in the highest office. They’re not going to be swamp dwelling hydra palette swaps any longer, they are bequeathed the same superiority as fire giants over stone giants. The new Ordning should be as consequential as lightning and the heavens bowing down to fire and stone.
The examples I gave of different kinds of divine right monarchy is to get the gears turning on what kind of political dimension follows from each. A strictly volition-based Mandate of Heaven, the closest instance to what Justin mentioned, still has strong political overtones that parallels the real world Middle Kingdom. You know who might have an opinion on who ought to be at the top of the Ordning? Dragons — specifically metallic dragons who consider giants their enemies even if they’re good aligned. No group is more invested in the outcome of political upheaval than that polity’s mortal enemy. We get a glimpse of that in the module but there’s nothing done with it, insofar as dragons are thinking in short term victories rather than in possibly permanent crippling of giant hierarchy.
However the options really open up with the two I mentioned in my OP. Perhaps the party recognizes that the dissolving of the Ordning could be a vote of no confidence in giants that means that Ostoria actually can’t be restored, and that giants are as much exiles now as any Far Realm creature. It’s the complete abandonment not by their chief god but by all gods, and that they are effectively nomads bearing a mark of Cain. The solution then is not to build up a new Ordning but to find a place for giants among other creatures. The question then also becomes how giants can continue to exist without losing giantness, if their hierarchy is indeed what made each one a partaker of their birthright.
If the Ordning is a vestigial artifact of a fallen empire, it might function like imperial titles and orders inherited by Byzantium. These therefore are not mere ashes preserved by giants in pitiful remembrance. They might be all that’s left of Annam himself and he might possibly change if the Ordning is inverted and evil or neutral giants dominate the top of his Ordning. Perhaps the Ordning is not merely a tool for social correction but is a literal ascension up into participating in Annam’s transcendent power. He dwells in each giant like how parents live on in their offspring and the Ordning is the conscious awareness of Annam in every giant. So the dissolution and reforging of the Ordning is a new identity altogether for giants instigated by necessity, one Annam did not choose but one forced because of their collective slumber.
Perhaps too the dissolution of the Ordning is a rejection which is in favor of a complete renovation of all giants. Annam so to speak is remaking his people and domination is not his means for determining the next order. If we broaden this to include some of the above content, we can see it in more providential terms. He never abandoned his children but was guiding them with a subtle hand to restore Ostoria in a grander way: he meant to open up his kingdom to all creatures and allow them to be embraced by him as truly all father, by heritage or by adoption. Now Ostoria belongs to all because all belong to Ostoria.
I don’t think the article is going in the wrong direction but it is stymied by not more thoroughly working out the corresponding mechanics found in its real world parallels. My write up here is a 45 minute brainstorm that isn’t necessarily a knockout solution but it’s a start at least. I don’t think if we are being honest that basing a campaign resolution on a misshapen notion of real world precedents is altogether very sound. In other articles Justin demonstrates real care for empathy and fidelity which is why I brought up Avernus, since he goes an extra mile in actually working out what a redemption looks like. If he took a childish baseline for redemption then it would feel unearned for Zariel; likewise if we take a childish baseline for divine right of kings we are left with an arbitrary orgy of violence which accomplishes nothing.
Definitely some interesting philosophical options there, but I’ll admit that I’m coming up a little empty on ways to bring them to the table. Especially in a campaign with the kind of “disaster movie” pitch that SKT always struck me as – I can imagine a game where much of the final act is traveling across the world to bring people into harmony with some new theological idea (whether that’s helping humanoids accept their role within the Ordning or helping giants accept their role without it), but it’s not the endgame I’d set my character up for after hearing “Giants and Thunder!” That might just be me.
Your discussion of the Mandate of Heaven, however, did get me thinking about one simple way of tying the Ordning crisis to Hekaton’s disappearance: what if Annam isn’t passing judgement on Giantkind as a whole, but simply upon the monarch at the top? What if Hekaton, personally, is responsible for this problem… because he isn’t so much “missing” as “allied with Iymrith” and in hiding as they try to summon Tiamat/become an eternal Storm Lich/replace Annam as giant god/kill a ton of innocents to rebuild Ostoria/whatever?
I’ll allow that lacks some of the nuance you’re talking about, but it does play into a classically monarchist narrative where the entire crisis is resolved by ousting The Bad King and elevating The Good One.
(In theory, any of the scenarios you or Justin lay out could have a similar resolution where someone supplants ANNAM, but I’m already self-conscious about flattening some potential ideological discussions here without resorting to that extreme of an appeal to violence.)
There’s an abundance of reasons we might spend time in an RPG, but for me it is precisely this occasion. There’s a line in Blood Meridian, albeit from the reprehensible villain, that there is nothing more serious than play, nothing of higher stakes than a game. I agree with him on this one point. There’s a reason why players can feel incredibly persistent emotions about their characters, or about the world. There’s no take-backs, no save states, no multiple-choice answers, no distinction from reality when it comes to our intellection about our choices. We make choices in a game the same way we make choices outside of it, and we treat the stakes like real life or death situations. Players get frustrated with the DM if he or she creates a bad scenario or abuses the power associated with DMing. I think all this testifies to the seriousness of our fun.
I agree hooks should be relatively simple in the outset, be it a “disaster movie” in media res or something else. Then again meaningful choices become much bigger when they draw on player wisdom and discussion about the good to be obtained in a fictional environment. Can a solution be bigger than the problem itself? I think so, if the solution draws in the player who is on a meta level bigger than the game. I ran a hexcrawl about dungeon delving and looting where, at around level 10, the players were having an emotionally involved discussion about whether to use a specific artifact because they were trying to determine if an evil object could be actually used for good given the way that the campaign had thus far implied was possible: an underlying theme of everything having its proper place in the universal order, and everything having a bit of good in it. That conversation sticks out because the first conversation they had about an “evil monster” was to kill it without question, and now the circumstances dictated higher consideration.
Your take on the Mandate of Heaven works out well because it is precisely centered on a historically conscious perspective of what divine right monarchy looks like. When heaven rejects the king, it dissolves the hierarchy in a tangible way, and perhaps the disorder that follows is all purposed to get giants to a state where they take any order over chaos, with a loose inclusion of what kind of good the gods seek in their anointed.