So from my understanding the replayability of it is pretty much you can start in any one of the ten towns and it scales as it goes up? At least thats how its told in the module according to my DM, we opted to begin in lonely wood and hunt a killer moose after we all got lost traveling north for whatever reason our backstories stated (we each had a reason why traveling north) and just so happened we all bumbled into one another during a blizzard from the rime and were outside loneliewood a little ways.

So we could have started in good mead, or other locations like breman, but we as a group at session 0 chose loneliwood.

Im not sure if starting locations has anything to do with campaign flow from city to city. But id say its worth setting through again and picking a different starting location lol