As a one afternoon/evening adventure, we played Steading of the Hill Giant Chief. It was converted from the AD&D module into 5th edition.

There were 5 characters – all of them 12th level. There was a Dwarf Fighter with plenty of feats and maneuvers, a Dwarf Fighter/Barbarian, a Tiefling Warlock/Sorcerer, a Cleric of Light (damage dealing & suppoer) and a Cleric of Life (Healing). I gave them two uncommon items each, like +1 shield, wand of detect magic and cloak of protection +1.

We had great fun with the adventure. The group chose a wise path through the steading, found the secret stair down to the dungeon and located the treasure, explored parts of the dungeon, and fought the keeper and his pets as well as the stone giants and went back to the main hall to fight the chief and his giants as the final encounter of the evening.

Conversion notes:
Fundamentally the conversion worked well. It is easy to convert the two systems between each other. I did however make a number of changes to make it more fun.

First of all, the original module is very much made up of creatures which can only fundamental make a regular melee or ranged attack. To make it more interesting and varied I inserted an Ogre magi with a couple of bodyguards, and I change the manticores guarding the treasure to Chimeras to make it a greater challenge and to add the breath weapons, which required Dex saving throws. I also made the wife of the chief into a 9th level Cleric.

I also pulled a few giants from the main hall to the dire wolves and courtyard area.
Instead of just having two fire giants, I also added a young red dragon to the mix. The encounter was never played, but I think it would work well.

The keeper I gave a higher AC with armour and made his pets into Giant Apes.

I also changed the troglodytes to trolls, but the group did not go near them either.

The map of the steading is one of the greatest problems, if you are using miniatures. In D&D 5th hill giants are size huge, and they simply don’t fit the current map. Furthermore, as was mentioned in the original reviews of the module, some of the dungeon areas are way too small to house 30+ escaped orc slaves. As we didn’t use minis I didn’t bother converting the map, but I guess it needs to be at least double size, to fit all the giants in the main hall.

Game Play notes:
The challenge fit quite well against a group that didn’t go leave the steading and get a long rest. We were under some time pressure, so they opted to go full steam ahead. It was clear that the first couple of encounters wouldn’t kill any characters, but they did drain resources. The combat was also quite quick and smooth.
The upper level was a chance to sneak and gain information and kill a couple of groups of monsters.

The bugbears posed no challenge at all – which was fine, as they gave the group a chance to shine. The Keeper, with his giant apes really packed a punch, and I thought it was a fine encounter when the bugbears also came charging and were annihilated with fireballs.

At their challenge rating it was my impression that hill giants work well against a high level party, as a party of level 12 will most often hit CR 5 monsters no matter what, but the giants could really take some damage and deal some back. They only had 15-20 % chance of hitting the fighters, but with two attacks from each, the damage did begin to mount.

The final battle with the chief was fun, albeit a bit chaotic, and some of the players would have liked a proper battle map with minis. I forgot to include the cloud giant and stone giants (it was late), but the outcome was good, as they would have stacked the battle too much in the favour of the giants, due to their higher to hit bonus and damage output. As it were the giants put up a great fight, but had trouble getting to all the characters, which meant they were split up to try and circle the characters. At least one character was down, but the life cleric kept them alive.