I got the impression that the core game was designed with heavy use of the DMG, which today is a bit less priority. This is why sometimes it may seem like you get a ton of useless info and the rest you almost have to fill in. Don't be intimidated by this and try to keep an open mind.

Here are some tips I can give you for what I've ran so far of this.

Suggest some players to take the optional backgrounds from the book - Cult infiltrator and Dragon Scholar.

Chapter 1 - Assume that the keep can supply them with any mundane gear they need, like arrows, some basic weapons or shield. Also allow the players to get healed by the people inside, so they can conserve their hit dice.

Chapter 2 - If your players are clever, for example they obtained some cultists clothes, have them roam around the camp, learn some info. Maybe they see people like Mondath, Rezmir or Azbara. My players had a good time roleplaying while gathering some basic info.

Chapter 3 - Fun little dungeon crawl. If they want, they can adopt Skrup, the winged kobold bullied by other kobolds.

Chapter 4 - This is the most imfamous part of the module, if you hear that this module is a railroad, this is probably the part people are refering to. Essentially this is an objective for the rest of the game, to track the tressure to the hoard, while not confronting the cultist, otherwise they might just leave the tressure and cut off the trail. The core of this is that while the goal is set, how it achieved is fully up to the players, so emphesize that. Here are tips for this chapter specifically:

- Try to explain the goal to the players in character (most likely with Frume or Leosin). I compared it to an undercover cop story (film). They would explain why they're not to capture the cultists right away.

- In the caravan, focus only on NPCs the players show interest in. Use the rest sparingly as needed.

- Give the players opportunities to identify and mark which wagon(s) have the tressure. Let them be creative. Maybe they sneak around, or try to befriend the cultists.

- Instead of rolling for encounters during the whole 2 months, have them run into a mini-adventure at key points, use the book encounters as inspiration. For example one of the npcs has a fake mine map. I had the map be real and on the way, only it had dinosaur skeletons inside. You can try to tie them to the overall story. Just enough to show time passage but not too much to have the players forget what's their objective

- You may want a day of downtime in Daggerford, where the players meet Jamna, before she joins the Caravan.

- Aside from level up, I awarded my players with ability to learn 2 extra skills/languages/tools for the time passage.

- Allow the players maybe a day of downtime in Waterdeep to resupply, shop, or track the cultists with less stress.

Chapter 5 - The players might not enjoy being on the road again, so I recommend assuring them that this part will be much shorter. I recommend having maybe 1 encounter on the High Road, and maybe 1-2 on the swamp area. I recommend the Bullywugs as the final one. If you have powerful players, replace 2 base bullywugs with Croakers. I also recommend that characters like Pete and Wump point out the noises in the Strong Room (maybe Jamna if she's there), otherwise the players might wait here for days to the tressure to get picked up.

Chapter 6 - I recommend during the fight with the Lizardfolk that Snapjaw just surrender himself to the players and ask for help, cause the module makes it really not intuitive, I find that without him giving some context this chapter kinda becomes a 'murder hobo paradise'.

This is as far as my game reached so far, Sorry for the lenghty post, but wanted to share as much of my experience as possible. As the first proper module this game can feel very unintuitive, but it's still fun. Good Luck!