Waterdeep

The City of Splendors is a bustling, walled city on the Sword Coast. Some merchants have dubbed Waterdeep the best supply center in the world, with the largest collection of superb craft workers, experts, useful contacts, and potential hirelings to be found anywhere. Others caution that the city houses a veritable army of potential enemies for those who aren't careful--and everyone agrees that its wide crowded streets are full of spies.

Waterdhavian noble families and guilds hold tremendous political and economic sway up and down the Sword Coast, but within the city itself, true power lies with the Masked Lords of Waterdeep--rulers who convene in secret and whose identities are largely unknown.

Suggested Encounter
Shortly after the characters arrive in Waterdeep, a cloud giant castle emerges from the clouds overhead and looms above the city, its ominous shadow causing widespread panic. Lady Laeral Silverhand dispatches heralds to calm the people and assure them that no harm will befall the city. If the PCs decide to investigate, they must devise a method of reaching the giant castle, which hangs 1000 feet in the air. The castle has a configuration similar to that of Lyn Armaal and is home to a neutral good clan made up of four adult cloud giants, three young cloud giants, four pet griffons, and eight stone giants that serve as guards. The young cloud giants use hill giant statistics, with the following changes:
 * INT 10 (+0), CHA 12 (+1)
 * Insight +4, Perception +4 (passive 14)
 * They speak Common and Giant
 * They have the cloud giant's innate spellcasting and keen smell features.

These cloud giants are cartographers engaged in remapping the Sword Coast while searching for ancient battlegrounds and long-lost relics of Ostoria. They mean no harm to Waterdeep, but the city intrigues them, for they believe it was built on an old giant settlement that was destroyed by dragons tens of thousands of years ago. The cloud giants plan to meet with the city's leaders to learn more about Waterdeep's history and determine whether any remnants of Ostoria survive today. The family's noble patriarch is a scholarly and cautious cloud giant named Count Nimbolo. His wife, Countess Mulara, is distrusting of small folk and doesn't allow the characters to move about her home unescorted.

Although these giants pose no threat to Waterdeep, they know of at least one evil cloud giant who is bent on conquering the lands of the small folk once the ordning is recast in her favor: Countess Sansuri. They tell the characters that Sansuri is looking for a lost trove of dragon magic, but they don't know where her cloud castle is located.

See SCAG for more detailed history on the place.

TREASURE
If the characters fight and defeat the giants, they can plunder the giants' possessions. Countess Mulara wears two bejeweled necklaces (each worth 7,500 gp and weighing 125 pounds). Both she and the count own a collection of twenty ornate masks made of painted gold (each worth 750 gp and weighing 50 pounds). Among the furnishings in their bedchamber is an alabaster chest containing 800 pp and 1d3 magic items (see DMG chapter 7)