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Quick context. My party is purposefully playing Wrath of the Righteous as 'scoundrels with hearts of gold' rather than proper crusaders. We started our game in the Waller slum and ended up in the crusade to have crimes pardoned.

Keeping with that trope, the party is sure they'll be blamed somehow for destroying the Wardstone line when they used the Rod of Cancellation on the Wardstone fragment in Kenabres. (And saved everyone and became mythic...) They're afraid of 'The Man' and want to run ahead to get work done and prove themselves more, and left Irabeth, Aravashinal, Anevia, etc behind to speak highly of them to the Queen and set up a future successful meeting together.

They're basically running ahead to Drezen without the official start to Book 2

So.

That brings up the question of how to introduce the three NPCs Queen Galfrey normally orders to go with the party.

Current plan:
Modify Wardstone Patrol (the PFS scenario). The party heads to the farming town north of Kenabres on the path Irabeth directed them to Drezen. Rescues Aron (and other farmers). Instead of the scenario going on to a fort and rescuing their lost crusaders, have Aron ask for help going after captives from the farming village. Including his love, Sosiel. Have Nurah among the crusaders the party rescues, and one who insists on coming with them after being useful in the fight.

It feels good for setting up Aron and Sosiel, but Nurah feels a bit like an 'also-ran' in this scenario. Good enough to be worth sharing in case anyone else out there needs the idea.

Thoughts? Opinions? Ways to improve? Better introduction opportunities I might not have thought of?

These days in the lore and setting, Nocticula is called the “Redeemer Queen” and has ascended to godhood.

But Sarenrae still has the portfolio of redemption.

I’m getting in way too many arguments from my players about this. That if they want redemption themes they still go to Sarenrae. Someone give me backup or tell me I’m wrong, but I’m tired of arguing that Nocticula isn’t the redemption goddess purely because some cultist (or writer ;) ) wanted to call her redeemer queen.

In my head, I’m explaining it with some of the freedom and self-determination of chaos. Nocticula wanted to be a deity and worked that out for herself. You can do you. And if you want to stop being evil, work that out for yourself. If you get kicked out for doing you, then she’s got a place for you as the goddess of exiles. But she’s not going to actually tell you to do better or handhold you through a redemption.

How do you all explain this? Am I the only one having to argue so hard for canon?

I'm starting to run the Underflume dungeon, and it's come up that aside from the ballroom, there doesn't seem to be any lighting mentioned in the area, despite most of the residents being human and not having darkvision. I'm going to be putting in lanterns in most occupied rooms, but it definitely was an unplanned issue when running the first battle on VTT where we do use lighting.

I wanted to make the Underflume feel different from other locations and set up a theme of Thassilonian magic levels making it feel more modern, despite being 10,000 years old. So I declared each room was magically lit in a flattering ambient glow from the ceiling. Except the Ballroom has it's fire for ambience. I turned on daylight in my VTT for the Underflume spaces that weren't ruins (ie flooded cavern and Arcane storm). Definitely set those rooms up as dangerous too, since 'the lights don't work' is a good trope to trigger your players with.

Great ideas and opinions everyone!

I like the idea of paying for spellcasting services too, or guide services for the non-magical members of the group.

Hey Golarion GMs and Paizo experts!

I've got an NPC group, some who are starting as clerics and inquisitors of Desna, some who are coming to this as just plain old people.

This group has been patrolling roads. Cleaning roads. Keeping back the encroachment of brush and fallen logs. Repairing roads that weather or tree roots or animals disrupt. They've made it possible for a road through a dangerous stretch of wilderness to stay active, and compete with river based merchants.

And now the story is they need to collect funding for this work.

Caring for themselves as an organization, plus the tools and materials to build and maintain trade routes takes gold!

So the group is now collecting tolls from the trade that gets to bypass barge fees.

I want to play with the line between 'we're doing the good work of Desna helping travelers and keeping them safe from the monsters of the wilderness' and 'we're shaking down merchant wagons for protection money when they're far away from town and no longer have a choice.'

Where would you draw the line of what Desna is happy with? Generally okay with? Maybe sending dreams to change the direction of your life? Is someone going to make themselves an ex-cleric by collecting tolls? By having a colleague they are affiliated with kill a traveler in collecting a toll?

There is the distinction between laymen (people just doing this as a job) and those who are using divine powers in the work running the roads of this trade route. Toll roads by regular people probably doesn't merit Desna's attention. The clerics though... I don't see anything that specifically says Desna is against toll roads, but I do see she values freedom. I'd love outside opinions.

Just to update you, my players decided they were in the mood for some morally gray characters, so Riddleport ended up being a perfect fit! I went with your suggestion of the Hellstorm Flume foundations being an advanced attack point, since I thought that made a lot of sense for the portal straight to Hollow Mountain (a destroyed one would, I decided, have had the portal dealt with).

The small gang rivalries fit in really well with Riddleport, and Jana becoming an early ally meant the PCs wanted to help keep the Gendarmes and big players out of her business to solve things internally. It was also an opportunity to kinda meet Clegg Zincher early, and the Cyphergate hanging over everything seems like it's only going to be good for the eventual payoff of getting to use it.

I'm planning a longer trip to the Churlwood. The other part that's been more work to adapt is the idea of making the Cove 'safe again' for soothing the ghost. So I'm changing that story a little. Roderic still founded the area and took care of it, and still had the same untimtely end. But it was much much closer to Riddleport than officially written, so the natural expansion of the port city just subsumed it as a neighborhood. So rather than trying to make All Of Riddleport 'safe' somehow, it's about making his Cove a successful place that knows their roots. A few of the goals for 'points' to succeed in soothing the ghost have been changed, I can write those out if anyone cares later. Basically new goal is a neighborhood with character and pride out of what was previously a slum. It seems (so far) to be really good with the friendship with Jana. As we know in real life, you can have pride in your heritage and also be in a gang, or morally gray ;)

So I don't play EVE online, but I stumbled across the following article. http://io9.com/space-opera/ Wherein an accident sent a capital ship into enemy territory, alliances were called upon, favors pulled, and 3,000 people spent hours fighting out a spontaneous epic space battle.

Or to quote what especially caught my attention:

What's even more interesting is the capacity for open-ended games like EVE Online to create emergent stories. Nothing was prescripted about the storylines that lead to the battle -– not the alliances, the mining conglomerate, the bad blood between the groups, or the events of the battle itself. EVE creates a set of economic and military factors and lets the players run loose. The stories (and battles) occur organically. Similar things have happened with other sandbox style games, such as DayZ, where your struggles to survive among ranveous zombies and hostile players can lead to bizarre, thrilling or even emotionally resonant stories.

Major events happened naturally... Reading about what happened on EVE just makes me excited about what better, more interesting, naturally emerging epic events are going to happen in our own story. Especially because there's so much more to the PFO world than just economics and military systems.