The execution here however was a disaster in every way. The manner in which the above story hook is integrated into the meta plot is extremely sloppy,connecting the disparate elements of the Ardis Scholars, a previously more or less undefined entity, with the night hag Aslyn. There is also a ghost, and a member of the Ardis Scholars, who for some reason has an artificial heart. The story has 4 major NPCs (5 if you include Gleam the baby cu sith) and they all basically don't know anything. They can tell you the very basics, which amounts to about 3 sentences of lore and leave the PCs having discovered nothing at all.
The aforementioned mob? They just show up and leave. Nothing interesting of any sort is done with this plot element especially since the mob is very very easy to just talk down. Why was it even here?
You learn distressingly little information about the alien, the Ardis scholars, the night hags daughter who turned on her mother unsuccessfully. This scenario ties all of these elements and all of these elements contribute a little bit to the cool vibe of the weird electric lab. But that's all the scenario has time to do. It introduces you to a world of stuff and then you leave. This scenario would have been much more successful focusing on any one or maybe two of these elements.
The scenario also tries to introduce several "hard choices" in order to set up fun in character discussion but the choices first of all the choice is NOT hard (there's just an evil option and a good option) and the scenario the party is being asked to make a decision about has absolutely no flesh on the bone. It doesn't even appear to be a choice at all at first glance.
Even the mystery of what happened to the Ardis scholars is just completely dull because the answer is just "Aslynn did a thing and since she's the big bad we have no idea why."
This brings me to the fights themselves. Talk about a lot of anti-fun. One fight is harpies. Enough said.
The next is oozes and an ooze-like monster that is immune to evocation magic, so no fun allowed for like anyone with non bludgeoning weapons or offensive spells. The ooze fight happens in a locale too small to fit even the basic number of monsters let alone the ones added on for scaling adjustments and the same thing happens again for the third fight.
Then a fight with a construct that hits like a truck and is pretty darn tanky. Having to do this fight after how resource intensive the previous combats were the party I ran for actually just chose to fail the mission instead of dragging their way through to the end because too much time had passed and they didn't want to do another encounters they were gonna need to chip their way through over a long series of rounds.
Even the map itself is that same old tired haunted house map, so the PCs have absolutely no chance of being enticed to explore this thing for umpteenth time at this level. In the end there wasn't much here for the players to really sink their teeth into and there desperately needed to be more depth and less width to the proceedings.
All in all, the plot didn't make any sense, there are so many NPCs crammed into this thing that none of them are memorable, the fights are miserably unfun, and so much word count is devoted to all these extra curriculars that we in the end didn't even really get to learn anything about the alien.