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This module really feels like a bunch of "this is my first time GMing" adventures that are only loosely connected to each other. The plot of them didn't feel very strong or coherent and there was nothing in the module that really stood out to me particularly in terms of plot, setting, story, or encounter quality.

This is a nice little level 1-6 AP. You have a villainous leader of the town who is exploiting you to solve his problems, you have the kobolds causing trouble, and then you have a deeper problem that is underlying the kobolds and which is the actual cause of all the issues you're facing. Despite the adventure being kind of two adventures stapled together, it actually feels like a fairly cohesive unit as a whole, and it is nice that you fight the >!real kobold king!< on the bottom floor after fighting the >!fake one!< on the third floor.

The adventure also feels like it does a good job on not beating up the players up front too much, as the encounters against the kobolds are not overwhelming and you get to feel like you're fighting more and more significant foes as you go deeper; it was a nice contrast to Abomination Vaults, which felt kind of rough up front.

The town was also nice enough, though it was also a terrible place in the sense that you sure wouldn't want to live there; my GM did some stuff to make the townsfolk more fun, which I liked, and the fact that your favorite NPC gets >!kidnapped!< is a nice touch, though it also means that the players HAVE to care about them otherwise it's just another fetch quest. I also liked the >!undead outbreak!< adding a bit of extra chaos to the whole affair, and the >!revenant!< was a neat thing to create a situation where we could actually fight a boss for a second time.

That being said, it does have some flaws as well. The >!forge-spurned!< on the second floor is an absurdly deadly encounter, doubly so because it is in an enclosed space, and can easily cause a TPK (we avoided anyone dying, but it definitely almost wrecked us). The >!necromancer!< you fight as the other main boss of the dungeon is also extremely disappointing; he is just kind of in a vault by himself and was an extremely easy encounter that didn't feel very climactic at all.

In contrast, the final fight with the Kobold King was very cool, with a bunch of encounters that easily ran into each other, making the final fight a suitably substantive end to the dungeon, with a bunch of bad guys pouring in from all directions.

All in all, this was a fairly decent adventure, and I liked it on the whole better than Abomination Vaults, but not as well as Rusthenge.

Abomination Vaults is a decent enough dungeon crawl, but it is a rather poor introduction to PF2E - I would recommend against playing this as your first venture in Pathfinder 2E, or as a follow up to the beginner's box, as it is a high difficulty dungeon crawl that violates some of the guidelines about low level encounters to its detriment.

The setup for the adventure is simple enough - an abandoned necromancer's tower called the Gauntlight has lit up near the town of Otari, and your friend Wrin has called you in to try and figure out what is going on. Delving into the tower, you quickly determine that the necromancer Belcorra who created the tower is only mostly dead, and it is up to you to delve down into her abomination vaults, fighting your way down through ten floors of undead to lay her spirit to rest for good.

This is very much a dungeon crawl, not an RP-focused adventure; while the town of Otari is decent enough, it is barely involved in the actual adventure for the most part. Early on, there's several events that involve the town, and that's really nice for keeping the characters invested, but as you get deeper into the vaults, the town becomes less and less important; by the final three floors, Otari has been completely forgotten.

This is a pity, because Otari is only 15 minutes away from the Gauntlight, and you go back there to go to sleep every night; they could have easily given the players something to do there between each level to break up the dungeon crawl, which is otherwise generally pretty light on RP, with only a few floors in the middle having significant RP aspects to them. A lot of what you're doing is moving from room to room, killing monsters.

Belcorra, the big bad of the dungeon, has far too small a presence as well; you only start encountering her at the very bottom of the dungeon, which is a pity, as it means she gets little opportunity for characterization.

The biggest flaw with this dungeon, however, is that it is kind of brutal in the first few floors. A session zero to get a balanced party together is essential for this dungeon, as otherwise the many over-level encounters in the first half of it are likely to kill characters or even cause potential TPKs. There's a wood golem on the fourth floor which is really poorly signposted, is immune to almost all magic, and which also is resistant to physical attacks, and thanks to its configuration can easily put the characters in a spot where they're dying on the ground with no possibility of escape or being drug to safety or be safely healed. This is hardly the only encounter in the dungeon that can kill players, and the first half of the dungeon is kind of infamous for TPKs. It gets easier in the second half as the players are simply stronger than they are in the first half and have more resources, and the encounters tend to be more varied in the number of enemies in the encounter as you go in deeper.

My own group of TTRPG veteran players managed to get through the dungeon without too much trouble, though there was a character death on the third floor due to bad luck, and a temporary stand-in PC made by the DM died on the 9th floor when a player was absent for a session, with that character also dying to the same thing (multiple unlucky crits). We were never in any real danger of a TPK, though, so the dungeon, while challenging, is not grossly unfair; that being said, groups of newbies regularly struggle with this module and you see a weekly post on the Pathfinder 2E subreddit of a GM or player talking about how they're getting slaughtered by this module, looking for help with what they're doing wrong.

The dungeon is also full of monsters that are immune to precision damage, as well as a number of monsters that are immune to athletics maneuvers due to being incorporeal, which can screw up some kinds of builds, and some entire classes (gunslingers, rogues, precision rangers, investigators, grab fighters, grapple monks) are heavily penalized by the design of the dungeon as their build will not work on a number of major enemies, including the final boss.

This is a fine dungeon crawl if you are up for a bunch of combat encounters with some light roleplaying aspects here and there, but it's not the greatest module in the world - I liked it OK, but I felt like it could have been more than it was, and I've preferred Paizo's other modules to this one.

I just completed this adventure yesterday as a player. It's quite good overall, and frankly, a better introduction to Pathfinder 2E than the Beginner's Box, especially for players who have played TTRPGs before.

The module does a number of things quite cleverly:

* It has a NPC healer who helps you out for a couple encounters at the very beginning, giving you "training wheels" that also feel like a natural part of the world and precondition you towards remembering that NPCs have agency, too.

* It has a variety of different (if mostly pretty simple) enemies you fight over the course of the module.

* It presents the players with a small mystery that they get to solve via RP after getting a few combat encounters under their belt, and which has multiple ways of solving it that lead to the next part of the adventure so the players can't really get stuck.

* There are actual stakes - the players aren't just doing it just because, there's a reason why they need to help out and go and continue into these dangerous situations, and it makes sense from an IC perspective that they would do so.

* The combat encounters aren't overly difficult but aren't overly simplistic.

* It teaches players about weaknesses, gives them the tools to exploit them, and rewards them for exploiting them.

* There are RP encounters throughout the module, not just in one place - each section of the game has an opportunity where you can do some roleplaying, and not just going into every encounter with bloody intentions in mind can allow you to avoid fights and get help and allies

* The NPCs who are helpful often have a good, very sensible reason why they are supplying you with stuff rather than joining in to help you fight, so you don't feel like they are just shoving it on the PCs for no reason or leaving the fighting to the PCs for no reason.

* You can disrupt the bad guys' plans in ways that go beyond just killing things that, if the players are paying attention, will allow them to make their life significantly easier.

* The little town in the module is just big enough to be interesting without being so big that you'll get lost in it and derail the adventure.

I liked it a lot! It was a fun thing and it worked very well, and had a bit of charm to it.