Cult of Undeath "plot" outline updates

The following is my first stab at fixing some of the elements of the "plot" of the adventure path, both to make it much less linear in feel, much less railroady and much more focused.  This isn't meant to be the "final" version, I'm brainstorming with myself on how to improve the material I've already got.  Because it's a "brainstorming with myself" post, it might be all over the map, and it probably will be subject to future change.

First, let me make sure I'm clear with myself and what I don't like about the original outline.  Even though it features some significant modifications from the "plot" of the Carrion Crown adventure path, it still follows the general gist of the adventure path, sorta, and some of that may well be much of what eventually gets changed.  The things that don't work for me are basically:

1. The first act feels a little too scattershot and maybe unfocused.  I think I need to better narrow down on what's going on, and not have too many things that are, essentially, tangents cluttering it up too much.  Or maybe find a way to make the tangents more meaningful rather than just "here's another monster to fight."
2. The second act with its trips to the werewolf forest and the Lovecraftian seaside town feels tacked on, like the entire act is treading water rather than progressing towards the third act.  I kind of tried to fix that by making it less of a tangent and more of a rivalry between two bad guys, but I didn't do a great job of it, and the second act still feels kind of superfluous not only because it doesn't lead to the third act, but also because now it feels too repetitive with the third act.  The second act should make things more difficult for the characters, and leave them even more in the lurch.  Either that, or I treat each act as a separate "volume" or self-contained module of sorts, and have each of the three of them have their own satisfying conclusion.  I probably prefer that the second act act like a second act, not a second self-contained volume in a three part series, but we'll see how it ends up being when all is said and done.
3. Either the second or third act needs to be significantly reformulated so that they're not essentially the same plot for both.

Anyway, let me focus today on the first act, not only because that's the easiest to do, but also because, well... it comes first, after all.  This is what I had for that in my original wrap-up outline for CULT OF UNDEATH, and let me repeat what I had before I go start making changes to it.

• A well-loved professor, Alpon Lechfeld has died in what appears to be an accident—although there are some suspicious clues that cannot rule out foul play.  For the sake of getting the game going, I'm going to tell the PCs that they've all been asked to be pallbearers and are named as (minor) heirs in his will.  He'll give them a few things, but most of his fortune is left to his daughter Revecca.
• Ghosts are appearing in town, threatening (or at least frightening) many residents, that can be traced to a haunted and abandoned ruin of a former prison.  Why are they leaving their normal territory? (linked to the murder above.)
• A rampaging Frankenstein-monster is blamed for some more townsfolk murders.  This, and the ghosts, are probably happening at the same time, so nobody knows which is responsible.
• A mob of townsfolk wants to exhume Lechfeld and "put down his corpse"—of course, it turns out that someone has already exhumed him and dismembered his corpse, as well as apparently eaten some other recently dead in the graveyard.  Notably, an amulet that he was buried with is missing.  Revecca suggests that this amulet kept the ghosts in check in some way; if it's gone, that explains their extraordinary aggressiveness.
• The Frankenstein monster was a creation of Lechfeld himself in an extremely foolhardy experiment years ago, and it has come into town looking for him when he stopped visiting.  It really is a monster, though, not some misunderstood something or other—he's killed numerous townsfolk viciously.
• The ghosts have to be put down (salt and burn their remains) in their haunted house.
• The flesh golem needs to be dealt with as well.  And then when that's done, the amulet is still missing, and hints point towards the possible thief, which will lead into 

(The last bullet point I just added, but it seems kind of obvious.  Maybe that's why I forgot to include it the first time around.) Part of the reason that this may feel disjointed and weird is that it's really two modules that I've combined.  Mostly what I did was combine the two characters and two plots and try to intertwine them.  The haunted ghost stuff and the Frankenstein monster are really two separate plot threads in the original source material.

I think maybe it would work better if I got rid of the idea (which came from Paizo) that the flesh golem was just a hobby of Lechfeld's and it's only out of control because of his death.  He didn't create it in a burst of curiosity or loneliness; he created it because he knew that as soon as he was dead, his undead amulet would be targeted by people who couldn't be trusted to take it.

This also serves to make Lechfeld much more sympathetic, although flawed, because his plan didn't work.  He protected his amulet during his life, but after his death, his plan failed.  Why?  Why didn't the flesh golem manage to ward off the depredations, and if it was unsuccessful, why is it now killing people instead of having been destroyed by those who stole the amulet?

I'm actually thinking that maybe some kind of vaguely Lovecraftian or daemonic parasite is attached to the golem's head and scrambling its programming; a contingency that was completely foreign to Lechfeld, which is why he didn't make a plan to protect against it.

Curiously, it also makes the Frankenstein monster somewhat tragic again, although not in the comically inept virtue-sniveling way that it was originally written in Way of the Beast, or whatever the module was exactly titled. Not entirely, because it's only semi-sentient at best; more like an AI than a sentient being exactly.  But still; it's failure is also not its fault, so there's that.

My first thought is that although once they find out what's going no at the very end, the two strands tie together better, for the majority of this act, nothing is different than it was before.  Maybe that's actually totally OK.  In fact, I kind of think that it is.  The presence of some kind of vaguely Lovecraftian entity also allows me to figure out a way to salvage the trip to fake Innsmouth too, maybe.  That helps set up my next post in this series, where I try to untangle the awkward threads that I have for acts II and III.

As a migrate further and further from the original Paizo plot, I'm even wondering about a couple of things: 1) do I want the pallbearers and heirs set-up that the module provides, and 2) do I want the ghosts to come from a haunted ruin of a prison, or are those distinctive enough to the module that I'd rather come up with something else?  If I do, I want it to be better, so we'll see.  The ghosts certainly don't have to come from a prison, or even from the same source at all, if I don't want them to.  That's easy enough to change.  Heck, they can even come shrieking down into town from the wilderness just outside, where their original versions were bandits.  Or they can just come from whatever source they originally came from; a random collection of psycopaths united only by geography.  

But changing the funeral set-up is a bit harder, because it's a good set-up, and no obvious alternatives suggest themselves (other than having the PCs be an investigative team looking into the possibility that he was murdered—but that's even more of a railroady introduction than it already is.)