A random and confusing finale.
I wanted to love the end of the big "Monastery of the Yellow Rose" trilogy for Season 2 of Adventurer's League, but I just couldn't. In principle, this should be epic - a journey to the boundary of the elemental planes to hold back the summoning of Elemental Evil. But it doesn't work. It's the very epitome of a "nonsense wizard dungeon", full of random magical nonsense and "gotcha" moments, that's neither well-explained nor thematically resonant.
Much of the module involves jumping around floating islands, attempting to rescue monks who are trapped in imaginary mindscapes. There's little in the way of work done to explain these mindscapes to the players, either while they're happening or in retrospect, or say why they're relevant to the particular monk experiencing them, meaning that players mostly end up just doing "yet another random whatsit". There's little information given that would enable players to make meaningful decisions about the order in which they tackle the challenges, so the range of content available is largely meaningless - it may as well have been linear. And the final confrontation is not very well tuned, nor does it make much use of its premise (featuring a battle on airships in the middle of a storm), other than a vague instruction for the DM to run it in a narrative style. (Yes, I can do that, I did do that, and we had fun, but the module had very little to contribute to that fun.)
And if you make it to the end, there's simply not much acknowledgement of what the players have achieved. (And of course, for all the players' successes, the Cult will be right back again in the Epic "Mulmaster Undone", chronologically the next entry in the season by release date, acting as if they've never even heard of the Monastery, let alone had their plans there foiled.)
You can run a good game with what's in this module, but if you do, it will because you know how to run a good game, not because the module brought much to the table. A sad and disappointing low point of Season 2.
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