Free City Here I Come!

[Gwenfloor]

While the beginning of the Age of Worms Adventure Path assumes the PCs begin poor and destitute, there are some problems that have arisen. What if one 1st-Level PC bought few items at character creation and have a surplus of Gold Pieces? What if the PCs gain a lot of gold along the first three adventures and decide to leave Diamond Lake ahead of time? In the first adventure, a +1 Short Sword can be found easily. It is worth over 2,000 Gold Pieces and is probably worth more than several houses in Diamond Lake. With that money, they could hire mercenaries and a caravan to go to the Free City of Greyhawk!
I have several solutions to this problems; 1.) Any PCs at Character Creation should spend all but 5 Gold Pieces on any items of their choice. If the Player Character is finished buying any items and has over 5 Gold Pieces, his current Gold Pieces are reduced to 5. Since Silver is more common than Gold, Gold Pieces are converted to Silver, and Gold and Platinum is hard to come by. 2.) Make it more like the real world in Pre-Capitalism times of monarchy and nobility. Any commoner walking around with tons of wealth is suspected of robbing from the ruling leaders, and are shortly executed and their wealth is stolen to be given to the nobles. The Profession skill does not always guarantee half your result in Gold Pieces. Usually it is how much your master/overseer/boss/noble WANTS to pay you.
Any thoughts, ideas, or suggestions?

[Lord Of Threshold]

I thought of this as well during Cha. creation. You have to remember though, Diamond Lake has a GP Limit of 800 GP. All that loot is hard to sell in a little town. Doing so could collapse the economy in Diamond Lake, something that seems to walk a thin line anyway. Anything above 800 GP I just can't imagine anyone (except maybe a few key NPCs such as Allustan or Smenk) being able to afford something of that price.
Another way is to garner from your players, but don't outright steal from them. For example, if they want to have a hideout, someone, oh, you could say Smenk, finds out about it. He buys the property and starts charging rent. That's what's happening with the Observatory in my game. The players are being hassled by Smenk and are going to do him a favor to hand over the deed, AKA: Three Faces of Evil.
If you know what your doing, Economy can be a great part of D&D that makes the world seem more alive and fluid. If there isn't anyone who can afford to pay the full price for an item, the players will wait until they can get a better deal for it. I've had players travel all around the campaign world to certain city's because they knew that they could get a higher price there.
Just don't make it seem your hassling them, players hate that. :-P

[dungeonblaster]

Eh, I don't think it'll be a problem. Once the plot gets rolling there will be other things to think about than just getting out of Diamond Lake. Also, why split after finding that +1 sword when there might be more treasure to be found?

[Paradisio]

Yes, I really played up the fact that how much treasure was originally found. The PCs haven't even hinted about leaving Diamond Lake, they want to find more treasure.

I think its also important to tell your players that this is a module, and honostly its kinda moot to run a module if the players run from plot hooks like spheres of annihilation. I think modules require just a tad of railroading to get them to work in a lot of groups; I had a lot of trouble running adventures with my group originally because they just wanted to run around. I showed them that something that had been pre-constructed would probably would be a little more enjoyable then ad-hocing everything.