Cult of Undeath next steps

In reviewing my outline and next steps, I see that I've got a few choices to make and a bit more thinking to do.  I think I've figured out what to do with Broken Moon, and I'll probably do something more or less similar with Wake of the Watcher—pull out the encounters, convert them, and hang them to a much less railroady structure.  That said, I've noticed that I've got two minor arcs in a row that basically rely on Revecca being kidnapped for sacrifice, and the PCs being motivated to rescue her.  While I'm a fan of bringing back the lost art of saving a damsel in distress, which has been vilified now for many years, it's clear even to me that... this is a bit much.

As with Broken Moon, the 3rd module in the adventure path, I'll be more or less converting this into a side quest that has little to do with the main thrust of thwarting the designs of the Black Path, other than offer up some clues that bring it back again.  But the gist of doing something that sounds even a little bit like Carrion Crown, I have to have a "Shadow Over Innsmouth" like adventure of some kind, followed by a trip to the capital city, a bunch of vampire stuff.  Because my outline doesn't require the last part (the climax takes place right in Grozavest, and the last adventure is just "quest and dungeon to kill boss" I eliminated almost all of it except for the concept of killing the boss—who, as in Carrion Crown isn't the real boss; he's a guy trying to resurrect the real boss.  In both cases, a threat beyond the ken of the PCs.)

As you can probably see if you've been reading this CULT OF UNDEATH project, what I started out in fairly high spirits about eventually disenchanted me, both because the modules themselves weren't very good—they're full of lots of really bad idea cliches, and avoid the good idea cliches, but also because they require running the game in a fairly heavy-handed fashion that isn't really my style.  I knew this before I started, but I thought it would be easier to work around than it actually has ended up being.  And even if I do do it, I'll still be stuck with a "story framework" that is riddled with fairly dull ideas.  The only thing that really becomes salvageable are the very specific encounters.  Sometimes.

What I've done is try to reshuffle and restructure the adventures, mostly so they're shorter and less grueling, tedious death-march-like in nature, but I haven't substantially changed the structure otherwise, because that would defeat the purpose of converting Carrion Crown into CULT OF UNDEATH.  But what I'm finding is that I kind of wish that I had been more radical in my restructuring after all.  My satisfaction with the result the way it is has diminished as I've done more work digging into the details.  If I end up doing another one of these—a conversion of Legacy of Fire or Serpent's Skull, I'm going to do it quite differently.  I'll go through all of the modules, listing them as encounters; and then find some totally different structure to hang them on.  Or, I dunno.  Maybe I'll use the structure of the modules, or at least some of it.  But what I've done with CULT OF UNDEATH was start with the de facto assumption that I'm using most of the structure, whereas if I do this again, I'll take them completely apart like all of the component pieces of a Lego set and rebuild them without reference to the instructions.

I suspect that by doing so, I'll be happier with the result.  Professional Lego set designers are really good, and back when I had the hobby of messing around with Legos, I couldn't hold a candle to their design expertise.  I find that I don't feel that same gap of expertise in turning encounters ideas into an RPG campaign.

And honestly, I'd like to restructure the encounters to mimic Chris Perkins' three act encounter structure.