This is a great adventure which highlights the often neglected exploration pillar of D&D. The premise is fun, and the novelty of the time ticking down added tension and excitement to the table. The players gradually worked out what the keys did, and seemed to genuinely enjoy the feeling of "working it all out". The laboratory feels like a fun house type dungeon. There are reasons for everything to be there, but each room is thematically distinct and so there is plenty of variation to be had. I love that this module is replayable because of the varied configurations that are possible. There is a lot of combat and not much role play; I modified some of the encounters to build moments for the more RP-oriented players to shine.

The following comments are not negative - they are recommendations and suggestions for DMs planning to run this adventure:

1. There is no way that I can see any party exploring every room of the dungeon within a 4-hour time limit, so don't have that as your goal!
2. Prepare well before hand. Every key placement, room configuration, and place in the initiative order is easier to set up before hand rather than during the game.
3. Other reviewers have made very useful suggestions about practicalities of the prep work - I followed their advice and was SO grateful that I did!
4. The actual tracking of time and initiative order either works or doesn't depending on DM preparation and player engagement with the idea. This adventure could run just as well with a less formal time tracking system and a more narrative sense of tension building. (What I liked best about tracking the initiative order for the whole thing and keeping track of the time was that it meant every player regularly took 'turns' even for exploration - this kept everyone involved and stopped any single party member from dominating the table).
5. Be flexible with key placement. Sure, prep beforehand where the keys are. However, I found that as the real game time continued on I needed to place a couple of platinum keys that happened to be where the characters searched just to get it done within the 4 hours!
6. With one hour of real game time left, aim to be commencing the Vault (level 2).
7. My party of 5, APL7, thoroughly completed 2 outer rooms and skimmed over 2 more outer rooms in the first 3 hours if that helps others guesstimate the likely progress through the laboratory.
8. Make sure that room 3 is one that the party definitely explores (Spoiler alert - that is where the permanent magic item is located).
9. If you are a more spontaneous / on the fly DM I would suggest you don't bother with the time tracking and instead use narrative to build a sense of time pressure. I would suggest you place rooms that you really want the players to explore behind the doors, and as a priority learn how the keys work before the game. (Simply put, a narrative style DM could use the following basic tips: Copper keys open doors; Silver keys rotate the outside rooms; Gold keys give more time; and four Platinum keys are required to be found to open the vault door).

SUMMARY: This is an awesome exploration and combat focused module, highly suitable for players who like solving puzzles, as well as motivated and organised DMs who enjoy doing thorough prep work prior to adventures. This is a replayable, cohesive funhouse dungeon crawl with a steampunk vibe. Highly recommended!

I liked the trilogy a lot. There were four elements I changed.
1) At the end of the first mod I had the clockwork door too complex for the adventures to unlock. They instead walled off this section of the chamber in order to comeback at a later time when they were more skilled.
2) I changed the central "clock"/trap. I ran the central pillar on a timer that had a tank of poisonous gas on the inside. This forced the party to only take one short rest in order to avoid getting gassed. I removed the element that would have locked them in the tower forever.
3) The mod was lacking in story connecting the first and third adventures. I left a notebook in the last chamber that explained that the Tempest Mage was trying to live forever by experimenting with clockwork devices. He could not gain the level of precision in his devices to allow him to live on while still working magic. He gave up and pursued necromancy research in a shrine to Velsharoon. But there was no map to the shrine.
4) The adventures end the mod by visiting Windy Valley. As they entered the tavern they found many people receiving medical services from some type of attack. That is where I ended the adventure. The attack is from undead that have awakened within the shrine for part 3.

Players be warned: spoilers ahead!

I want to start off by saying that this mod is excellent: all my players have had a great time, it's well written, the timing aspect is unique, and if you roll randomly every time you can seriously annoy any pesky meta-gamers that read the modules ahead of the game! The one thing I'm still working on is figuring out exactly how much to allow in one turn: none of my players have felt the time crunch (the longest in-game amount of time they've spent is 10 minutes), but the inability to take a rest (with one exception, if they find it) definitely stresses them out.

That being said, if you're the type of DM who doesnt read and prep ahead of the game, this is definitely not the mod for you! I read the mod in full 2-3 times, then skimmed certain parts another 2-3 times while prepping. In all, including reading, the prep took me 10+ hours. On the bright side, once the initial prep is done, when I run this mod now, I just need to fill out some documents with random rolls and I'm read to go. Here are my suggestions for DMs running this the first time:

• Print out to-scale maps of the exterior rooms (2-9) and the vault; these don't quite fit on a normal sheet of paper, so you'll need to get them printed at a shop, tape them together, or glue them onto posterboard and cut them out. Alternatively, draw them on the big 1-inch graph paper. Write the room number on the back so they're easy to find. With them printed out, you only have to draw the main room, and when the rooms rotate, you can just replace the previous room with the new one.
• Print out 1-2 extra copies of the laboratory map. On one, I made brief notes about how the keys work, labelled each door with a letter from A-G, then laminated it. I cut out all of the circles of the second one, numbered each of the rooms from 2-9, then laminated these and cut them out again. I attached velcro to each of the circles and the circles on the intact page so that the rooms can be attached and moved as needed. This way, when you randomly roll rooms, you can start with Door A, roll a d8, assign a number and move on to the rest of the doors. When the room is rotated, I ask the players which direction and how many times, and rotate the central room to correspond with their directions, and it's easy to tell which rooms will now be open with the current rotation.
• There are a couple documents I print and fill out prior to the game. I have 4 tables (1 per key type) with columns for: randomly rolled room number, randomly rolled location within room, and search DC. I also have all of the monsters listed out by room number and roll their initiative before the game starts.
• I have two documents that I fill out during the game (both laminated for ease/reuse): a list of PC names and initiatives; and a table with 20 rows and 10 columns to represent the time they have spent/have left--after each round, I check off another box, or erase boxes if they use the right key.
• Other useful things to have behind the DM screen: I highly recommend printing out a copy of the traps so you don't have to go back and find it. It's also really useful to have a note to yourself at the end of initiative to mark off that another round has passed.
• Player handout: I made a crude version of what the PC's would see on the central pillar, with the copper, silver, and gold keyholes, and the dial; this is also laminated, partially because I velcroed in a clock hand (which doesn't work as well as I'd imagined since the increments are so small), and partially so that the players can mark off which keys they've used, mark the direction they've been turned, etc.

Anyways, once you do the initial prep and figure out what works best for you, this mod is awesome to run again and again. If anyone needs clarification on what I suggested, or would like to see the documents, I'm happy to share!

Great dungeon crawl adventure! This will take some prep work and even the explanation of the clockwork mechanism is difficult and there are many ways to get it running. I would just find the way that works for you and have players start in one room and go room by room to save time. Overall it's pretty fun, but you have to come up with your own system to run it.

This adventure requires a lot of prep work, but it's well worth it. The overall mechanics took more than one reading to understand completely, and I ended up making cheat sheets for each room to reduce page-flipping between room descriptions, trap descriptions, and stat blocks. Still, there is a good combination of puzzles, investigation, and combat -- and, depending on if players can speak Primordial and are willing to hold off attacking the azers, roleplaying.

PRO

• Players liked the challenge of figuring out the mechanics and identifying the goals.
• Good set of challenges in the different rooms.
• High replayability because players don't need to complete all rooms to move on.

CON

• Requires a lot of prep work.
• Difficult to run in 4 hours if making all room rolls randomly.
• If the party lacks at least one character proficient with Arcana, Perception, Investigation, and either Tinker's Tools or Thieves' Tools, this module is very, very difficult to complete.

From the minute I downloaded this mod, I was super excited aboout running it. The mechanic of running the entire mod in initiative order is not one Ive seen in another mod, and the "puzzle solving" element of having to find various items to slowly unravel the different rooms (which can be placed in any order for replayability) was something I couldnt wait to try. It wasnt going to work in my usual element of theatre of the mind by skype though - so I had to wait til my gaming group were together in person - because the maps are very key. But I amused myself in advance by scaling the maps and printing them so i had maps ready to go and re-arrange, and I did all my pre-rolling of the random locations of things.....I didnt mind the prep because I quite like to prepare. Finally the day came. And was it fun? - yes, absolutely. Probably two main things made it not quite as euphoric as I expected. 1. ironically, the everything in initiative order to show limited time, actually makes the mod take more time. Took us 6 hours. 2. By the time they'd tackled one third of the rooms the group was low on resources and once theyd done the minimum necessary to get to the final area they got out of there and left some of it unexplored. So only partly unravelled. In summary, I give this 5 stars because for me this mod stands out as having a vision I have not seen anywhere else. But despite having a lot of replay potential, the long running time will likely mean I will settle for my one glorious run.

This is my first CCC and I was impressed. I ran this for 7 5th-level players, mostly melee. The game took about 4.5 hours and we explored 4 out of 8 clockwork rooms.

We enjoyed the game mechanic, searching for the keys and battling a chaotic room. Much of the game elements are "random", which really means the DM has a lot of wiggle room for controlling the pace of the game. i.e., if they are rolling poorly on the searches, you can reveal a key at wherever they finally rolled well. Or, at the 4-hour mark, Hey! you found the last key!

My gripe is time management. The whole game time event takes less than 30-minutes, but reality is 4 hours. The module doesn't provide a good way to handle the timing. I think you are supposed to do the whole thing like a single combat, i.e. moves and actions are in 6-second increments. That broke down very quickly since players aren't used to that for out-of-combat puzzle solving.
So the threat of the doomsday clock was less threatening than I had hoped.

Other comments: I would have liked a bit more puzzle in some of the rooms.

There is a lot of prep work. I spent about 6 hours?

Most of the rooms have 2 types of monsters. A few have 6 different types? that is a lot to stat blocks to keep track of. I, simplified them down to 3 types.

When I run it again, the clock will be shorter say 10 minutes? and the gold keys will add more time, maybe different amounts depending on the number of keys...

This is not a module for newer players. Only veteran players will recognize that they are on the clock. A table of newer players will require you to spell it out for them.

However, the rotating dungeon is quite unique, and also, quite humoruos while the players are attempting to figure out how the keys and locks actually work.

1 recommendation if running this module, Have a copy of the 1st rooms trap table handy, as you will be referencing it a lot. To be honest, I wish it was a DM appendix at the end of the module.

True to expectations, this is a very good and very different module. What this series has done has been missing from AL games: It makes players pay attention and take interest. Not only in the deatil, but this brings a sense of wonder that is often missing. There are traps, puzzles and most importantly there is serious time pressure and some good battles along the way. This is no cliched dungeon crawl. It is one step away from being Vincenzo Natali's 1997 movie "The Cube"

Now, you can't just grab the module and run it; it does take more prep work than usual. You need to read and reread the module, but it is worth it.

You can also replay it as many random things happen.