A question for those that use the rules and campaign: do you think the Wilderland Adventures and/or Mirkwood campaign could be converted to regular FR? If so, would you rather set it in:
A) Silver Marches, with Silverymoon as Laketown substitute or,
B) The Dalelands with Arabel-as-Laketown?
I have a table with mostly new players who are not big fans of Tolkien-esque fantasy and this thread made me think that they would probably love those adventures, but I'm not sure if they would like playing in Middle-Earth (maybe, I dont know for sure, they dont care for magic most of the time)
Yikes. It'd be tough, I think.
Here are just a few of the challenges when converting to FR:
1) 90% of the campaign and the modules are set outside Laketown; e.g. once the party leaves Laketown at the start of their adventures, they might not be back for 4 years and 6 PC levels. During that time, they're living in small settlements and farmsteads. The important thing isn't finding a substitute for Laketown; it's finding an area that substitutes for Mirkwood. I'm guessing you're thinking Cormanthor or the High Forest? Whichever you choose, it needs to be considered a deadly location that nobody goes into by choice. You'd need a Dol Guldur substitute: maybe Hellgate Keep, or Myth Drannor (assuming still fallen). You'd also need some orc-infested mountains, which shouldn't be too hard. If your FR campaign has a demon-infested Myth Drannor, I'd go Dalelands. If not, then it'd probably need to be High Forest (i.e. Hellgate)... but a much more deadly and corruptive High Forest than I'm used to.
2) The campaign assumes that Laketown/Dale/Erebor/Elvenking are the major bastions of light, and they're all in close proximity. The journeys in the modules and campaigns assume that there are no other major settlements larger than small rustic towns for 400 miles or more. Once you cross Mirkwood to the west side, you could spend years away from a prosperous city. Wilderland really is the edge of civilization, which makes it a bit tricky to set it somewhere in the north. There are civilized nations everywhere, and you never really feel like you're skirting the unknown. In AiME, nobody is going to be visiting Waterdeep or Baldur's Gate to reprovision. It might be interesting to set it in Chult, and replace goblins with batiri. Chult feels a lot more borderlands. And the jungles have tons of giant spiders, which is also rather convenient... although there aren't very many giant snakes or yuan-ti in AiME.
3) The gods play no part in AiME. There are no temples, no priests, no divine intervention, no religious politics. There are only five wizards, and only three of them (Gandalf, Radagast, and pre-corruption Saruman) might ever be encountered. That messes with a lot of FR expectations and flavour. Depending on the era, I guess you could convert the Istari to Khelben Arunsen, Elminster and... hmm... Alustriel? Elminster would probably fill the role of Radagast, curiously, because the campaign assumes he's local, living in a village, and watching over the nearby forest. The other two are from "far away", and very rarely encountered.
4) Perhaps the biggest challenge is that a lot of the modules and campaign events are explictly tied to certain Tolkien-esque creatures and thematic expectations. Even if you convert them to FR, it's still going to seem like Tolkien-esque fantasy. If your players are fairly sophisticated, they may be a bit curious why there are so many encounters with orcs/trolls/spiders/etc... and not many drow. But it goes deeper than that: the modules and the campaign touch on themes like the inevitable triumph of the shadow, the waning of the elves, the fracturing of civilizations. I guess the elvish thing is fine if your FR campaign is doing the retreat to Evermeet, but the darkening of the land is a tougher sell. FR is pretty resilient; it gets blown up on the regular, and never really seems much the worse for wear. Also, there are always potent counter-balancing forces of Good (Harpers, wizards, Purple Dragon knights, etc). The AiME campaign doesn't have this. The forces of Good in AiME are outgunned, even the toughest goodly NPC (e.g. Beorn) is no match for a half-dozen trolls, and things are going to get ugly.
The key thing is that AiME is low magic... and also, to some extent, low fantasy. Your average settlement is 98% human (except for, specifically, Erebor and the Halls of the Elvenking). There are virtually no spells or magic items. An adventure might see you fighting nothing other than human bandits and wolves. There are no global empires, and no major metropolises (metropoli?). Yes, there are orcs and giant spiders and trolls... but a truly supernatural creature like a vampire or a werewolf might be the *only one of it's kind* in the entire setting.
Still, if you're going to give it a go, start with Wilderland Adventures. It's a neat little adventure path, running through to 7th-or-so level. The modules are mostly self-contained, and they show design elements that are not common in D&D (e.g. encounters that have to be resolved without combat, creatures that cannot be killed by mundane methods, outcomes that are determined by how the players treat people or help them overcome despair). I found them very interesting.