I just wrapped up a full run of Rusthenge and just want to sing it (and Vanessa Hoskins's) praises. It's a wonderful intro adventure, particularly for players who are familiar with d20 games in general and so don't need quite as much hand-holding as the Beginner's Box offers. The plot is compelling and feels epic while also being appropriate for 1st-level characters; the dungeon is evocative and intriguing (though as is often the case in published modules, a lot of the rooms feel kind of empty - my Weapon Improviser was a little sad about that); and the characters you meet are engaging, complex, and interesting to roleplay with (I had a great time with the amphibian possible-friends in particular).
While I haven't run a whole lot of 2e published content, I do also want to praise that this adventure seems to have cracked the edition's early problem of having too many Moderate-Severe encounters; a quick skim through the PDF confirms that the encounters are pretty much all Low or Moderate, with Severe reserved for the climactic fights. This works really well - the encounters in general still felt challenging, but the increase in threat for those big setpieces was palpable. There's also plenty of suggestions/guidelines for roleplay and interaction rewards. I sent my party an XP tally after each session breaking down how the XP awarded got added up, and I recommend doing so. My players were very appreciative to see that doing things like returning an animal to its carer or having a civil conversation with a potential enemy were getting them XP as well as combat.
My ONLY quibbles with this module (which might knock it down to 4.5 stars, but I'm on the fence about even that) are these:
The final fight feels a little anticlimactic, though that might be on me/my party's composition (I was playing with 6 and adding creatures to compensate; my party was barbarian, fighter, swashbuckler, monk, magus, and cleric, so also a lot of heavy hitters!). But the fight is variable and I was still using a nominally Severe encounter, so I have to imagine if the party manages to get the Moderate version it feels even more underwhelming.
The first dungeon level is really engagingly laid out and interesting - a nice semi-Jaquaysed dungeon with lots of different paths through it. After that, the next two levels are a tiny bit of a letdown, as both are much more linear (though one has a lot less space to play with as a map, and of course I have to assume page count is a factor).
Finally, for an adventure called "Rusthenge," my players commented on the relative lack of "active" rust-themed threats; there's one in the final fight, but otherwise it's mostly an aesthetic. I totally get this from a design perspective (if a player's weapon gets broken by a foe in the final fight that's dramatic; if it happens every other fight that's an obnoxious chore), but it was a glaring enough lack for my players to comment on it at the table, so I thought I'd mention it.
Overall, though (as you can probably tell from my arguing both sides of each of those quibbles), I really liked running this adventure and my players enjoyed playing in it! It's definitely a dungeon crawl so if that's not your style, your mileage may vary, but I can heartily recommend it as an intro to both PF2 and that style of play. Brava to Vanessa Hoskins and thanks to her and Paizo!
