I recommend this adventure module for anyone looking for a fun and challenging high-level adventure of characters at level 17+. The setup works easiest in connection with other adventures in Chult, such as with Tomb of Annihilation and with other Adventurers League modules surrounding this region. However, you easily could create a different lead into the story.

The content is organized nicely, with convenient guides and prompts about how to manage the scenes and narratives. Additionally, this framework can facilitate your own creativity in modifying specific parts along the way, in whatever manner will work best for you and your group.

The startup informatoin will need an advance effort of close reading and preparation, and then this investment will be worthwhile for supporting a memorable high-level adventure.

Most difficult mod I have run to date, is a great story but very tough to survive

Definitely felt like a T4 adventure as opposed to a lot of other T4 mods that feel like T3s in disguise. The plot is interesting and the storyline structure for the T4 saga laid out well. The plane hopping mechanic is a really neat design and feels quite rewarding with the bonus treasure if the party stays on their toes.

Not so good: The combat encounters. Maps are unnecessarily gargantuan and the majority of combat rooms don't offer enough interesting terrain features to even need maps. Too many meteor swarm archmages. Would absolutely recommend to replace some meteor swarms with other lv9 spells.
Would like to point out though that the zulkir statblocks are fantastic and offer a great alternative to regular archmages.

Overall a good adventure and one of the better T4s out there. It is a very complex mod though and requires some serious prep from the DM to make sure the game doesn't go long.

The basic story of this adventure is pretty simple. The characters are chasing down some terrible people before they do something as terrible as expected. There's some nice added complexity in having to choose between the lesser of two evils, and wether or not to spare people usually considered foul and irredemable - I could see different parties making different calls. With a small party, I ended up going beyond the four hour runtime while skipping all of the optional quests.

My only true complaint is the scale of the encounters. The chambers are so large that they are impossible to draw out at the customary 5-feet to 1-inch scale. That said, not enough to ding a star for - it's T4, things have to be big to suit the scale of some abilities.

The quality of your experience will really vary depending on your party and their own experiences in reaching T4. It is good that the module does remind DMs that these are famous heroes at this point and not to be looked down upon.

Having said that, expecting them to fall for certain things at this point is a bit surprising IMO. Furthermore, a well built and equipped T4 group should be completing encounters fairly quickly (as they should be), so might not get to experience some of the more nuanced aspects hidden within the module. DMs can of course plan accordingly. For example, our DM chose to basically merge the two phases of the final encounter, and even then, things didn't go past round 2/3.

But as I said earlier, it was true in T3 and even more so in T4, your milage will vary greatly with the quailty of your party and it is very hard to balance, especially for T4. DMs must learn to play up or tweak different aspects of encounters to suit your group.

Great module that is offering a lot of great opportunites to players to do things in unusual ways!!

I think the first version was more intersting with the fire dammage every turn at a certain point (trying to stay as sploilerless as I can)

Most fight are trivial and probably (ressource drainers)

The last encounter is amazing. THO YOU MUST READ THE FINAL FIGHT AND THE STAT BLOCKS OF CREATURES INVOVLED... they have amazing stat block but if you don't know well your creatures and the final might end in 2-4 tours (like that alawys do in AL tier4)

An entertaining mod, but beware -- a T4 mod is not for the DM of faint heart.

The good:

The plot is entertaining, and while I'm not done with the T4 content yet it appears that the AL team has learned from the lessons of S4 and is giving DMs all the information up front rather than trying to surprise us with it in later modules.

The fights are interesting, with unique mechanics and ideas that suit a T4 party, and for once the foes can actually hold up against a T4 party.

The bad:

The last room reads like it should be a massive setpiece battle that swings back and forth; in practice, I've never seen it play out that way.

The ugly:

The scale here is huge. Just... huge. This is not a 4 hour mod, it would have been better served as an 8 hour mod, just because the combats can drag on... and on... and on.

I don't know if it's a player base issue, or a signposting issue, but people dont' seem to quite 'get' that this is a multi-planar adventure and that they should be popping into the border ethereal. You just don't see people popping over in any of the rooms except maybe the orrery, where there's a rather huge hint that there's something there. Advice to fellow DMs: really play up the border etheral clues. Sometimes, you just have to use a clue-hammer and WHACK that info into your player's heads. (And if that fails, upgrade to a clue-missile)

Lot of heavy fights here, but a good way to set the tone for this storyline. Definitely suggest having some folks roll skill checks fpr hints depending on the group to keep it going

Great start to the Broken Chains series (I'm writting this during break for lunch in our attempt to run all 16h in one sitting). Combat in T4 is always an issue between everyone getting slaughtered in rd1 or enemies with 1,000 HP not knowning when to fall down. This did suffer a bit of that, with the 2 opposing army fight ending with an opening 40d6 Meteor Swarm before either side had an action (sorcerer N20 initiative), then on the other end the party not figuring out the trick to the Golem fight dealing 600+ damage to a still fighting them golem until I had to practically give them the answer because we were 5 1/2h into a 4h mod and still had 3 more 4h mods to go that day and I wanted to break for lunch. Storyline was excellent, looking forward to how the rest shapes up.

I really like the new monsters. The story is also interesting, as well as the environmental dangers.

Great adventure for those high level characters who carry a big stick and aren't afraid to use it! This one has some firepower!

This is exhausting to run. First of all, the scale of the maps is a headache. The up to 40-foot square scale of the maps makes it so difficult to run when you have a table with a limited amount of space. Perhaps it's easier if you run it online where you can scroll and zoom in and zoom out to your heart's content, but trying to fit the immense scale of the place on grids or dungeon tiles is impossible. When your have to limit your scale to 30 feet, and the average creature or character can only move 30 feet, it really makes positioning miniatures on the board or determining the range of spells confusing.Second, the HP calculations in the final encounter, with the shield guardian-esque damage sharing, makes tracking HP a big headache. I had to delegate the task of tracking HP to a co-DM, otherwise it would have significantly slowed down the pace of the game.

Speaking of pace, this ran almost two hours over schedule, even though I added none of the optional encounters and the players diplomatically bypassed the first two Thayan encounters. This is something to consider if you're playing somewhere where you have a limited time slot, or in a place that has a closing time.

An extremely fun and well thought out module. Our group has many tier 4's and we were able to play this with several very distinct resolutions (From running away to a full out fight and options in between.)

The magic item is well thought out, has great flavor and is imersive/interesting for those who enjoy a bit of extra-plane rivalry.

TL;DR: Well-written module with high replay value.

I enjoyed this module as a player, and I enjoyed this module as a DM.

The interactions with the Red Wizards has a lot of RP flexibility, and it also made the players felt like they are important characters, making decisions that could have massive impacts on the major lore events in Faerûn - which they totally should. They are Tier-4 now, basically world renown heroes. The recognition of their past adventure deeds was a huge "feel-good" moment.

The exploration of the Sanctum was also fun. The challenges presented were fair, provoking players to behave in an unfamiliar way (no divination magic, no teleport etc.), without feeling too restrictive, and were fun to overcome.

The combat were also great. Depending how they behave, they can end up fighting everything in their path, or fight close to nothing until the boss fight. Spellcasters are always what makes fighting interesting, and the Magic Tattoos did a good job in distinguishing the Zulkirs and normal Archmages.

It was a little unfornuate that since I ran this module in a convention, time was a constraint, and I didn't get the chance to explore the optional encounters. Maybe I'll go back to look into those someday.

Nice module, you can bring in additional info if there are story awards with Thayans (Hillsfar, DDAO-01, etc) with an epic battle at the end.