I'm not sure why all the complaints about the difficulty. I just finished DMing for a group of 7, APL 1, who played in the upper tier and had no problems.
Spoiler:
The trap at the beginning, while difficult, is not impossible to find as long as you have someone who has several points to their perception. If there is nobody in the group like that the basilisks can still be skipped. You don't have to kill them. Ours was found by a level 1 halfling. Once finding the trap he pointed it out to the party wizard who identified and disbelieved the fake wall. He made his save, promptly averted his eyes, and instructed everyone to look the opposite direction and walk on by. The basilisks attempted to get out, of course, but the party was left unhindered. The golem later on could have been deadly but the tactics state he grapples and attempts to coup de grace instead of attacking. The bard and wizard started making with the grease spells every time someone was grappled.
This book is no different than any other I've experienced. It has the potential to be deadly if everyone has the "tank and spank" mentality. Not every fight is a race to 0hp. A little critical thinking goes a long way here and this book really makes the party work together and think outside the box.
Overall, not a bad AP but GMs will need to tweak it a bit beyond simply adjusting it to your party's skill level. It starts out incredibly slow. The daily skill checks are monotonous and tedious, slowing the game a great amount. They are necessary, however, for the day to day tasks the PCs will undergo during their time on the Wormwood and allow the PCs to make friends and/or enemies among the crew. Skipping over this tedious process can really hurt the party later on in the adventure unless you make allowances above the table.
The fights themselves are inconsistent. They go from incredibly easy to nearly impossible. At one point a character was killed by a giant moray eel. They were level three, the eel is CR5. The book lists it as a CR4 because it runs instead of fighting to the death, but the stat block is unchanged. The attack modifier and damage is too high. While that in and of itself is a simple fix, this is a recurring theme throughout the AP. The story is fantastic, but GMs can expect a lot of overhaul work to make it playable.
