I've had my eye on Jade Regent for a while and when I got a hold of the Jade Regent PG, it looked like Paizo had made an AP just for me. The long overland trip to an exotic new world, strong cast of interesting NPCs and systems to support both of these conventions are the exact kind of things that get me really into a game. So now I'm excitedly drumming up interest with the friends in my Kingmaker group and it looks like as soon as we can squeeze our schedule together, I'm going to be running my first PF game.
While the four NPCs presented in the AP are great, and I'm sure that later adventures will provide more options, I'm thinking of providing a couple extra characters with relationship options. I'm doing this partially to balance out the male-to-female ratio, but I'll probably also throw a new lady or two into the ring, so to speak, as well. I'm also trying to account for the fact that my players may decide to buck the expectations of the AP and play matchmaker by hooking the NPCs up with each other, rather than trying to romance them on their own. You never know with these guys.
I'm not too worried about the additional relationships inflating the XP too much, as I think I'll be replacing the XP rewards with Hero Points. I am a little concerned with balancing out the social rewards, but I think as long as the Devotion/Enmity rewards offered by these "bonus" NPCs stay relatively minor, cover different areas, and don't stack, it shouldn't be too bad.
Is anyone else thinking of doing something similar? Is anyone planning on modifying the system somehow? Or are you guys mostly running it straight, as-is?
At this point probably the most I can say on the romance subsystem is that I'll wait until all six of the chapters are out so I can have a better idea of how many different NPCs are available to join the caravan in the first place. There's already a potential addition in The Brinewall Legacy that I know of (and I haven't finished reading through the adventure yet).
There may well be romance/relationship options with other NPCs that get picked up along the way. If there aren't any written into the adventure itself, there's no reason a GM can't make them up; the NPC gallery in the first adventure does a great job of spelling out the sorts of information a GM would need to come up with to make an NPC available as a romance/relationship option.