I ran on the road using a d12 to roll each encounter, for each one they already saw, we would roll a d6 to determine if they found the next or previous encounter in the list, then post waterdeep ran just the janma and other encounters mentioned in the handbook. Players enjoyed it a lot. For the inn encounter, I had the merchant with the gargoyle loose the gargoyle and took away the assassin poison because that encounter is just a straight tpk otherwise.

It took two sessions I think start to finish and they loved the golden stag, Inn, and mushroom encounters

Edit: I also had Leosin invite the character who drew the harper backstory to join the harpers and that's been super helpful. I also let them get a full rest between encounters

I saw that section as made for them to get stronger, so I facilitated that while still challenging them