I was posting on this thread earlier, but ended up dropping out. My campaign did get to the end, though! We had a TPK in the Air Temple, mainly because the party accepted Windharrow's offer of an audience with Aeresi, and followed him right into the wind node, where she promptly identified them as enemies and attacked. That didn't go well! Afterwards, we had a discussion about what to do.
We were playing at a university student society, and term time was draining away fast. I proposed that we skip some content, creating new level 10 characters, and move straight onto the final Temple, handwaving away the Fire and Air ones (we'd done Water already). Since time was running out, we also did not do any side quests. This was just about enough time, albeit I actually had to move the game to my home in the event anyway and so the time pressures disappeared. The end result was that we did a really intensive burst through the final few levels of the adventure, and without any variation I found it tough to keep excited. The players faced Yan-C-Bin for their final combat, and that was actually a really great fight! We rounded things off with a short sidequest to the Halls of the Hunting Axe, then did character gen for
Curse of Strahd.
Thoughts on the module: I think that this is a really solid adventure, with some strong environments (the Keeps were all interesting) and a great theme, but that there are definite issues. The delegation hook turned out to be as weak in practice as many had feared; my players had difficulty remembering it. I also found that the 'sandbox' elements turned out to be a bit thin in practice. Because I didn't use any of the sidequests, the players never actually went more than ten miles from Red Larch, except that one time they went to the Riverguard Keep via Womford. I had this beautiful map of the Dessarin Valley, and used basically none of it!
What I would change: Move the different dungeon levels far apart. We can keep all the of Keeps in the same place, since that way Red Larch makes a solid low-level base. But then, instead of stairways down into the lower levels, I'd have clues to find them in other parts of the valley. Have the river one be accessed by literally swimming down into the river! The Earth temple could be moved up into the Dessarin Hills, near Yartar. The Air temple perhaps into one of the forests, I'm not sure. Fire into an extinct volcano in the mountains? In short, make the players actually travel around the place.
Furthermore, I'd probably either scale the adventure back - have fewer dungeons in total - or add way more side quest action than I used the first time. The dungeons are great, but huge, and you can spend weeks without any real variation if you're not careful. Finally, I'd strip out the Delegation hook, and think hard about how to approach it instead. Perhaps I'd just straight up have the players be members of the Harpers, or just be wandering nearby when they get attacked by some Elemental cultists, a much simpler hook that also helps to remove time pressure. At the same time, I'd maybe remove the world ending element of the finale; that would give it a more leisurely pace, and let the players choose to do other things, rather than feeling compelled to delve ever deeper without leaving.
Thanks all for the commentary throughout! It was really interesting to read about how other groups approached the same situations.