Alternate idea for travel to Maelstrom

If you know who Shankjaw is, gtfo - what are you doing on this subreddit bruh?

Fellow SKT DMs - I had an idea yesterday about an alternate way to structure the adventure and goal of getting to Maelstrom, that I'd love your feedback on.

It's a common topic here that requiring a single conch of transportation is lame because it means the PCs only need to do one giant hold. The common solution suggested is requiring one conch per PC, or having the first conch they find be broken. I worry that the former may over commit players to have to visit all the giants (I have 6 players), or encourage them to split up. The latter is acceptable, but could be discouraging to the players.

So here's my idea. Maelstrom in my world will be located in the center of an ever raging storm, it's location always changing and it has natural protection from the lightning and debris hurtling around in the storm. The players will be given a device, and a spell scroll to activate it. The device could be a snow globe with a storm inside it.

Activating the device won't teleport them inside Maelstrom, but instead they would still pass through the storm. The storm will do insane amounts of damage against a combined pool of their hitpoints, that will knock the party out, kicking them out of the orb.

The way for them to succeed at this would be: obviously to level up, increasing their hit point pool and to defeat giant lords of different types of giants. doing so would allow them to trick the orb about their place in the Ordning - granting them greater protection from the storm, the more lords they've defeated.

This "hack" could be explained to them by Zephyros.

Doing this still forces them to go to at least 2 giant lords, but gives me an out in case it becomes repetitive beyond that. Whenever it undeniably safe for them to travel, the orb will glow when they all touch it.

I feel like this will also put into their minds early on that their goal is to get to Maelstrom eventually.

Would love your thoughts!