Just got into building my house for my Wooden settlement, I'm making a big two story house to save some time expanding in the future. I'm going to put CustomNPC's into my game once I have all of the housing done, hope I don't have as much problems as you did!
If you could find a way to somehow have smart minions we make act like NPC's from Custom NPC's I would die. It would give us a "legit" way of obtaining workers.
Also masks, any Necrologist worth his salt soul has a Necromancer mask.
Awesome challenge, fell in love with it when I got into it. I'm about to start my own play through of this on FTB Monster, trying to get the biomes juuuuust right. I also got to figure out how to add CustomNPC's, but that will come later when I have need of it.