u/DearCastiel

So, I ran the Catacombs of Wrath from book 1 of RotR with a party of first time players.

They were all level 2, Paladin of Irori, rapier Rogue, Priest of Gorum, longbow Warrior.

The general feeling is that they really didn't like it.

They don't have the experience to say the right things, and at the same time I don't want to heavily railroad them into asking the "right" questions or taking the "right" actions.

For example, in the old storage room, the rogue said "I quickly look around if there's something valuable", to which I answered they shuffle some broken pots with their foot and give a look around the room, something in the the remnants of the jars seems to crumble to dust and fly around the air, but you see nothing of value.
The rogue was then confused when I said later on that the jars contained very old food that had dried to the point of becoming dust, and he asked me how what he was supposed to say to get that info (to which I answered, slightly bewildered, that he just had to say he looks at the content of the jars or just search the room, not just, in his own words "give a quick look if there's something valuable").

The players didn't understand what was the shtick about this place having a feint magic aura all over, they made terrible rolls in Arcana all along and couldn't tell what kind of spell it was (I still told them it was permanent magic despite the highest result being 6), the only thing they could identify was the purify water on the well, and didn't understand what it meant (and didn't linger or investigate further). They couldn't identify the statue, the runes, the star symbol,

They also rolled very low when reading Tsuto's journal (that I literally had to force them to read because they were hand-waving it away having read it a month and a half ago and not paying attention to it back then) and couldn't tell what a quasit was, so when Erylym showed up they didn't make the link at all, to them it was just a random bat lizard (they didn't even think it was a boss, despite killing 3 before they still thought the sin spawn she summoned was the threat in the fight and let her cast all her spells before focussing her).
While I am on her: terrible fight, she is absurdly too tanky for a low level party while also having close to 0 lethality, resulting in a fight that is very frustrating for the players that can't damage her and when they do, she just heals it up in a couple rounds, and then there's the fact the room is high enough fer her to fly out of reach and she has at will invisibility, making killing her absolutely impossible (I ended up having her try to flee before using invisibility, so melee characters would get melee attacks on her as she made to the gates, but even that didn't help to bring her down). They are very straightforward in tackling enemies and really don't try to do much apart hitting stuff, even when it does not work they keep trying it. I very regularly show characters (and monsters whenever possible) doing inventive stuff, but it doesn't really help them.

The prison, same thing, they didn't understand if there was something to do there or something to find, so they got frustrated, in the torture room they investigated and found nothing (because there's nothing) and got frustrated so in the next small room (the office/prison with rubble all over) nobody searched anything despite my 3 mentions of the fact there was pieces of furniture and papers all over the ground, they just focussed on the doors, didn't understand the deal with the malformed skeletons because they already forgot the priest knew who Lamashtu was and what I said, and at this point I had already been spoonfeeding them some stuff, so they missed one of the few loot of the dungeon (burning hand scroll).

The only glow-up was actually the Koruvus fight that I had modified, instead of the holes each leading to an individual pit with a single zombie, a room had been carved in the ground below and all 13 zombies were roaming in that room. The Rogue got pushed down by Koruvus (Rogue tried to run behind the mutant goblin as first action of combat despite not being in stealth, in fact he got in stealth exactly 1 tome the whole cession, I reminded him multiple times it could help him get his sneak attack bonus damage but instead he just kept bashing stuff with his 1D6 rapier and doing the lowest damage of the group).
Now at 1 VS 13 with no light and no idea where the exit door was, the situation was dire for the Rogue. paladin jumped down to help him, fell at the other end of the room surrounded by undeads. The Rogue seeing he was dealing close to no damage to them and the Paladin getting overrun, he ran away and the Paladin used the scroll of Fireball (beginner's box adventure loot, don't ask) to incinerate himself and the zombies. Fortunately, they had a scroll of resurrection (Beginner's Box loot, really don't ask questions about the balance of the loot in that adventure) to bring him back from death and despite most of it being taken lightly (basically just like a game-over in a videogame or no longer having money in Monopoly, to them it wasn't "oh no, Grak died!", but more like "well, Michael doesn't have a character to play now", despite my best efforts to make it an epic and then solemn moment) and the priest instantly started looting the goblin despite an explosion happening under him moments before.

So, part of the dungeon not going great was due to my first-campaign players treating the whole thing much more like a board game than like a role-playing game and struggling with how such games are played, but I really think the dungeon itself if pretty unintuitive in terms of story (specially if you play it like the book suggests with all the DC20-25 Knowledge checks that will mostly be failed) and only makes sense to the GM with the massive amounts of lore given in the book that has essentially no way to get passed on to or guessed/pieced by the players, specially if they aren't inquisitive and don't talk to each-other to try to piece things together, relying on the GM being very heavy-handed on hints and tips if you hope the whole thing to be anything else than a 5 fights dungeon with pretty low and underwhelming loot aside a magic sword.

Sorry if this feels like I'm ranting and sorry for the bad english.