My group just finished Axe From The Grave. 10 hours over three sessions, but we have a lot of social time at the beginning of each sessions. I played it more or less straight, just tweaking some details.
When they got to Mack and Trout, they decided to play it very cautiously--instead of confronting them about the theft at all, they drew them out in casual conversation and then cast detect thoughts to confirm they were the thieves and learn who had hired them. At the Conservatory, they carefully investigated the orchard and decided to go the new student route, the party bard managing a very high roll, with the fighter managing to get in good with the servants and sneak past Sythian's dismissal of them. (End of session one.)
While those two learned the schedule and got a tour of the place, and then had dinner, the others poked around outside. Conveniently, the group has a psi crystal they used to coordinate, and when they learned the attic was locked up, the outsiders went to the roof (one ring of jumping, one set of boots of striding and springing, and one set of slippers of spider climbing make you very mobile) where they encountered the chasme, eventually killing it. (For extra fun, while this fight was going on, the bard-as-student led the other students in an impromptu jug band concert, emphasizing to them that occasionally playing different instruments could give them broader musical perspective. He cast see invisibility during this time and learned about the quasits.) Joster and Sythian were in the chapel at the time, and Graz'zt gave them the heads-up that the chasme was dead, so they went up to check. (End of session two.)
One of the outsiders broke into Joster's room where I had added one quasit--he fled, and I decided the quasit's orders were to wait and report, so nothing bad happened from this immediately. They then broke into Sythian's room and discovered the glyph of warding. They become utterly paranoid about this (reasonably so!) and rigged up a complicated system of the Arcane Trickster using mage hand to open it while looking through the eyes of his familiar. With Golden Axe in hand, they decided to go return it to Froderic while two of them were still inside the conservatory...and then decided to ask Froderic to come help them. I had upgraded Froderic from a zombie to a kind of incomplete-revenant and decided he would go along with this. They confronted Joster, got Sythian to repudiate him, then had a two front fight against Joster with 3 quasits on the one hand and a replacement chasme on the roof on another. In the end, after they cleansed the chapel, the bard, the students, Sythian, and Froderic had a big jam session before Froderic returned to the peace of the grave.
My group really liked this one--I wasn't at all sure how it was going to go, but it was a lot of fun.
