Wreckers (D&D 5E AL Adapted to Shadowdark for Forbidden North)

Overview

Ran Wreckers by William Beers as the intro to our Season 3 Shadowdark campaign in Daj Kodan, the frozen north.
Ran like a charm. Wreckers was designed as a short Adventurer’s League adventure, so slotting it into an open table was easy.
Even with sparse maps and no handouts, the group understood the layout. Plot points/story beats were also understood.
Cultists are building a false beacon on the shore south of Skaal, which caused the adventurer’s boat (also their first session in Daj Kodan), to crash on the rocks. Cultists were fought, along with a weird fish-monster (one of the sea-spawn from WOTC’s 5E) and the cult leader.
Where things deviated from the Adventurer’s League plot is the group laid an ambush. They figured out that the cultists were stealing goods from shipwrecks, and ambushed the sloop coming to pick up the current batch of loot.
Hence, the adventurers now have a small sloop, previously used for smuggling. They also rescued a group of sailors who they’ve hired to crew their ship, and found a captain to navigate.

Not hard to adapt to Shadowdark or an open table.
Consequences from story events segued nicely into ongoing campaign goals.
Since the monsters are mostly cultists, it was a straightfoward swap with Shadowdark’s stat blocks. For the sea spawn, I basically just used Shadowdark’s brown bear but gave it a near-range tongue attack. Since I didn’t hit with the tongue, I didn’t cause any CON damage (which was my basic idea, 1d4 CON damage from blood drain).
Shadowdark continues to be a superior RPG for flexibility. One player wanted to sever the star-spawn’s tongue, which I allowed. It was a heck of a play moment, and it didn’t devolve into “AC, 4 HP to sever, etc. etc.” Just a single roll and an outcome.

Adventurer’s League as written comes with a lot of baggage and adjustments. I just chose to run this as an average adventure, but parsing the AL fluff from the actual adventure takes some work.
Wreckers as an adventure is about 8 pages long. The PDF is 22 pages, which includes 4 pages of maps and 10 pages of Organized Play filler.
Wreckers, as written, as very set in Forgotten Realms. Thankfully, it was easy to strip out the major story beats and encounters.

I didn’t display the maps on the table because I didn’t print them out.
I know William Beers, he’s a friend and we’ve written several things together. He has excellent design skills and understands the spirit of gritty adventures.

This approach was used as an intro instead of Forbidden North’s more staid “you arrive in a bureaucratic hall.”
I prefer to jump into the action directly when running open-table games. People aren’t there to go shopping and drink storytime tea.
I do wonder what other early Adventurer’s League content would be adapatable to open tables and/or Shadowdark play. Something to investigate.
Earlier Organized Play work is generally better than later stuff, where there was no oversight or attempts at quality control.