Tomb of the Lizard King is usually run as a rescue. A swamp, a dead lord, a tomb full of what killed him. You go in, you deal with the undead, you come out. That is the dungeon reading. ACKS looks at the same pages and sees a border holding that just lost its management.
The swamp is not empty. It has roads, villages that paid someone, and a reason the neighboring lands have been quiet. The Lizard King was not a random monster. He was the local authority. Clearing the tomb does not restore the old order. It creates a vacancy. Whoever walks out with the treasure is now the person standing on the only fortified ground in the region. The villages will notice. So will anyone else who was waiting for the old regime to fall.
A kingdom starter does not require you to invent a new map. It requires you to decide what happens to the people who used to pay the Lizard King. The gold you took from the tomb is the same gold that used to buy their silence. If you leave, someone else will fill the gap. If you stay, you inherit a swamp that already knows how to be a domain.
You can treat the module as a tomb and go home.
Or you can treat it as the moment a border stopped having a ruler. The walls are still there. The payroll is not. That is the ACKS version of the story.
