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Here’s the deal… this adventure is under appreciated. What an incredibly novel idea.

I’ve noticed that you have been offering incredibly deep and thoughtful advice on all of the adventures that you’ve rated, which is an act of community service that earns you additional stars in my book (well, and in the rating that I’m going to give you.)

I’ve also come here to offer a criticism, which is that there is something about the keying in these rooms that doesn’t really nail the ‘high level capstone’ that you outlined on your jam page. I’m seeing rats, I’m seeing copper, I’m seeing relatively low DCs.

The really cool design angle that only exists for high level adventures is the prevalence of extremely powerful magic like teleportation, power words, traps and obstacles where the adventure writer clearly wasn’t imaging a specific solution, instead coming up with the most diabolical thing they could think of and trusting that the inventories and spellbooks of these high level characters would be able to buy themselves out of danger.

I think that this adventure would be a 5* down the line for me if it embraced that high level adventure design ethos, and was willing to throw really insane stakes at the players in exchange for more exciting rewards.

That's an absolutely fair assessment. My biggest reason for going with large numbers of lower fights was the high likelihood players would end up lost in there for a very long time. A war of attrition where there's only one safe location, only one place to get more rations, and only one location to get more torches. With bad luck or bad decisions, they could be trapped in there for multi-week sessions. I really wanted to playtest it better, but with hundreds of ways it could play out depending on group makeup, player styles, rotation choices, etc... it wasn't possible. I resigned myself to making the baseline creatures a bit lower and then allowing the danger clock/encounters to ratchet up the risk of major threats. One of the things I considered if I do an expanded was altering the danger clock so it not only increased the risk of major monsters, but also drops off the lower ones over time entirely so you get to a point where only the bigger threats are showing up. I'd still need to work out rooms, but with more space, I could have what appears in them change over time too!