How did you handle the “surrendering” at the start of the adventure? Knowing my players they would rather fight to the death then have their characters surrender.
That is a general issue: player characters NEVER surrender. Ever.
I am usually quite open and direct to my players, tell them, this pre-made adventure requires them to surrender at this point. Yes, you probably would wipe the floor with the blood and entrails of the slain poor NPCs, but, please, indulge me and surrender - and have a Fortune point for your cooperation to this “coercion”.
The Fortune point compensates the players for lost agency a bit.
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As FrankF says - talk to them openly. “This is how the adventure starts”, lock them up, give them a Fortune Point and call it a day. If the players refuse, then absolutely kill a character or two. Players who think that PCs are invincible inevitably start a slide into not roleplaying but power fantasy.
Best piece of advice I read somewhere in relation to railroading - there’s nothing wrong with taking a train to the destination.
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Upon further consideration I think I’ll just narrate the battle and start the adventure with the pc’s already having been captured.
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It works for pretty much every Elder Scrolls game 
I’ve noticed that the adventure makes a lot of assumptions about what the players will do and a lot of events just happens regardless of the players actions. My players don’t mind some railroading but this adventure sometimes feels like the author wanted to write a novel and not a roleplaying adventure. I still think there’s a lot of interesting ideas in the adventure but I’ll have to do a lot of tweaking to make it work for my players.
I find most pre-written adventures are like that, primarily because they need to appeal to a wide audience as opposed to an individual group. The only games I find really hit a sweet spot between open world and pre-written well is Free League with Forbidden Lands.
All that being said, Waves is a pretty great framework with a solid reason for the PCs to follow after Maledict Mer. So I’m weaving my own stories into that chase and structuring elements in a way that makes sense. There’s at least an entire chapter’s worth of stuff my players just skipped but there’s another chapter that we expanded on.
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Having been a GM for more than 30 years I like to think I know a thing or two about adventure design, and taking away player agency is one of the worst sins when making an adventure. Unfortunately it’s pretty common in premade adventures but Waves stained crimson is one of the worst examples I’ve seen in all my years of gaming. Fortunately it is well written and has a lot of cool ideas, but for an inexperienced GM I can see this adventure as being pretty hard to run.
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There is a huge gap between writing/designing an adventure for your own players and your own campaign and one that needs to be sold to a mass market well enough to generate revenue. In that regard Waves is no worse, nor any better, than the bulk of pre-written modules. The most grievous issues I’ve had with it are the opening (which would 100% be better if it just did a cold open with the characters imprisoned rather than rely on them surrendering) and assuming that the PCs will go back to Argos to talk to Emerina’s father.
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That is the reason I haven’t started to run it for my group at home, yet. I will have to re-work a lot of it to give players more agency.
And, of course, the problems with the application of the Conan rules in this campaign need to be fixed, too.
So more work than I wanted to put into it for now - I might do that later, though.
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I’ve been using it as a base and events rather than an “adventure”. The through story is pretty good and some of the NPCs and encounters are great. So I use skeleton of the story, add in some stuff of my own, move elements around to better suit our game and voila.
Basically the same thing I do with any pre-written adventure. I haven’t noticed it takes any more time than usual but that’s likely because there’s already a fair time commitment into getting things into Foundry to use.
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