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I've been giving a fair amount of thought as to how to do a better job of tying together all the disparate plot points in this campaign, and perhaps even weave in some of the related content that has since been added in supplementary books when something occurred to me. There are/were three wyrms in the region of Brevoy/The Stolen Lands.
1. Ilthuliak is only a wyrm, and likely the youngest of the three, which explains why she partners with Nyrissa.
2. Choral the Conqueror is an advanced great wyrm, and possibly both the eldest and most powerful of the three.
3. Silverstep is likely a great wyrm as well, going by how old he seems to be, but I suspect he's not as old and powerful as Choral.
Black, red, and silver, each lairing on the borders of Brevoy. Ilthuliak in the swamps to the southwest, Choral in the mountains to the east, and Silverstep to the south. Rostland, and more specifically Restov, would likely have been directly in the middle of a triangle drawn between their three lairs.
Given all of this, here's my thinking:
All three wyrms have laired in the region for countless centuries, and likely fought regularly. Ilthuliak, as a black, would have been just as vicious towards Choral as towards Silverstep, so there would have been no alliance between her and Choral against Silverstep. Choral, despite being a powerful red dragon and the eldest of the three, was unable to overcome both Silverstep and Silverstep's unknown fey mother, and Ilthuliak likely would have avoided direct confrontations. Therefore, Choral hatched a plot to assert dominance by conquering the entire nation of Rostland.
With a powerful red dragon threatening to conquer a nearby nation, Silverstep would have been forced to act, and may even have given aid to the Swordlords, only to suffer such a defeat that he retreated not to his lair but rather to the home of his lover in the First World. That Silverstep has remained among the fey ever since Choral conquered Rostland speaks to how soundly he was defeated, and Ilthuliak would therefore have been cowed into submission, no longer challenging Choral's supremacy... directly.
Thus enters Nyrissa. Ilthuliak would have seen Choral as all but unassailable when Nyrissa approached her, and the power Nyrissa offered would have been near irresistible. However, rather than just the promise of Nyrissa bestowing the powers of the primal linnorms on Ilthuliak after ascending as a proper Eldest, I rather like the idea that Ilthuliak plotted the downfall of Choral and his line of dragonblooded descendants by persuading Nyrissa to test her plan for bottling the Stolen Lands on the royal line of Brevoy first.
Nyrissa, being unaware that Brevoy's first king was a great wyrm who now slumbered in the royal treasury while the descendants of the children he bore to an Issian princess ruled the kingdom as his heirs, was far more drained by the effort of capturing him and his family than she expected. She has therefore taken her time recuperating, and it's not until eleven years later that she begins feeling ready to bottle the Stolen Lands, slaying a unicorn in the Narlmarches and sending Ilthuliak to defeat one of Silverstep's young progeny in the Tors of Levenies. (The unicorn horn and a silver dragon's claw being two of the focus items she collected.)
This brings us to the modern day.
My idea is to go ahead with the idea of making Choral as the BBEG after Nyrissa, and for the players to attack Nyrissa with the dual intentions of saving the Stolen Lands and rescuing the Rogarvias. This of course means the players would have to discover that Nyrissa engineered the Vanishing, which could easily result in them believing her to be an ally of the Surtovas, rather than an ally of an enemy of the Rogarvias. Since the Surtovas would probably view the PCs defeating Pitax as an implicit threat, they would likely begin raising armies between books 5 and 6, presenting a threat to the PCs' kingdom. Rescuing the Rogarvias could seem like a peaceful way to defuse tensions, since the Rogarvias would be indebted to the PCs and be able to broker peace, but in reality it frees Choral, who would simply grant them a short reprieve from death as their 'reward', then would depart to reclaim the Dragonscale Throne from the Surtovas and then declare war on both the rebellious Swordlords of Restov and the PC's nation. This would, I feel, tie the whole campaign together much better, by ending things with the very civil war in Brevoy which had been the start of things at the beginning, and providing a truly epic foe for the PCs to defeat. (An APL +5 encounter is quite a challenge, after all, and Choral is statted as CR 25.)
Any thoughts?
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So, I wanted to do something similiar to this for my own campaign, which included adding in Kobold tribes that fit each dragon. In addition I've added in a now deceased blue that was a mage tied to Candlemere and its cult, Akirsedd, and I'm using Thelsterex from Thornkeep (pg 29).
Thelsterex is only an adult, but territorial enough to kill off his younger siblings, and thus has been kept from expanding his territory. His mother might have been part of the previous struggle but was likely killed off by Ilthuliak.
Akirsedd would outdate the current conflict though and many of her clutch have been hunted by either Silverstep or human's in the area. The Blue Dragonhide Armor and matching shield are from her or her kin in area Q.
In Dragon's Unleashed pages 16-19 are dedicated towards Eranex, the daughter of Silverstep. She may be of use to your players as she wants to reclaim her father's old lair.
As I mentioned before to enforce draconic themes early and often I started developing Kobolds of the region to fit their 'patron' dragon.
A green scaled kobold tribe is the Narlmarches, and they in turn follow the King-of-the-Forest, the Forest Drake found in area S. Green scale Kobolds were drawn to the area by Thelsterex's mother but found themselves scattered after her death and driven out by the Kingdom of Zog. I've given them Day Raider in place of light sensitivity and darkvision and Wild Forest Kobolds in place of crafty. The tribe particular to the Narlmarches is called the Gnarled Kings.
Originally the largest groupings of Kobolds in the Stolen Lands were black scale tribes, such as the Sootscale. Between the Branthlend Mountains and the Tos of Levintine there were none greater. But then the humans showed up, and the Boggards, and there was constant predation from the First World. Their numbers, especially outside of the Sootscale Tribe, are now in the hundreds. I did not perform any customization here.
Akirsedd's presence on Candlemere and her dedication to the Old Gods caught the attention of a small tribe of blue scaled kobolds. The descendants of these Kobolds still live on the western shores of the Tuskwater and Lake Candlemere today, and go by the name, Tuskfishers. Other than fishing the lake the small tribe's presence has been very quiet, though they have taken to worshipping Ragadahn the Water Lord. No alteration have been made here either.
The Brushfire Tribe is found in southern Brevoy and the northern Greenbelt. Like other Redscale Tribes, the Brushfires were attracted to the area by Chorral and have taken up burrows in lands he has conquered.
They have been known to prey on farmers and set fires to their lands. For them I replaced the armor racial trait with Dragon-Scaled, and crafty with Wyrmcrowned.
Finally I did decide to give Silverstep his own tribe of Kobolds, altered to fit his nature. These are stronger and fewer than the other tribes, and dwell in a small abbey in the Levantines. They've been adapted to the cold of the mountains, and their scales reflect light like sunshine on snow. Because of external danger and the lack of numbers the tribe mostly stays sequestered. They call themselves the Argent Word. These Kobolds have the Boreal Template from Irrisen, Land of Eternal Winter (page 57) , and replaces crafty, the racial armor trait, dark vision and light sensitivity with Day Raider, Gliding Wings and Dragon-Scaled.
I think this turns the draconic background into more of a theme, though its easy to be wrong.
Yes, I was certainly planning to use Eranex, though probably toned down a bit. The PCs could in theory be poking around Lake Silverstep as early as level 7, though more likely around level 8-10, which also means that an ankou with no class levels at all will be quite the challenge. The idea so far is to have Eranex approach the PCs for help against the ankou guarding her father's old lair. She would explain a little bit about Nyrissa, referring to an evil fey cast out by the Eldest who most likely wishes to use the artifact stored in her father's lair to unleash a 'former Eldest' who was banished for his crimes.
This would insert Nyrissa into Book 3, where she's currently missing, provide some background on her (and a name!) that the PCs would be missing up until that point, introduce one of the three dragons, and allow Eranex to soak up the most deadly ability the ankou has (prismatic spray). With Eranex sent to some other plane by the ankou's prismatic spray, the PCs would have to guard the artifact themselves until she could return for it.
This would all tie into Nyrissa's secondary motivations, which the AP really doesn't seem to touch on at all. She wants to bottle the Stolen Lands as a bribe for the Eldest, recover Briar so that it cannot be used to slay her... and also to find Count Ranalc. She no longer loves him, as her love was town away and used to create Briar, but she wants to become an Eldest, and he was the one granting her the power to do so. Also, I rather like to imagine that Zon-Kuthon is also interested in Count Ranalc, and that just introduces a great excuse to add a few kytons as foes.
I do rather like your idea for various kobold tribes, though I'm not sure on the specifics of how I would incorporate them. I do know, however, that I want to replace the forest drake with something more challenging than APL +0/-1. (The PCs should be at least level 5 before reaching that hex, if not level 6.) A young green dragon would be a CR 8, but wouldn't really be old enough to claim the title of King of the Forest yet, unless that instead referred to something else... like perhaps a treant slain by the young dragon.
This is pretty much part of the core of my game. The Stolen Lands in my setting are part of a region called The Northlands, which is ruled by dragons playing a "game" of conquest and conflict using barbaric tribes and bestial creatures as their pawns. (My Kingmaker is set in my world's southern continent, so northern areas are warmer and closer to the equator, southern ones are colder and nearer the pole.) Most of the actual Stolen Lands area was considered Ilthuliak's territory, while the area to the north and west along the Branthlend Mountains was the territory of Cuorvhain, the blue dragon I replaced Choral with. I made the Tiger Lords into lizardfolk called the Talon Lords instead, and made them Cuorvhain's favorite minions.
My King of the Forest was a trumped-up Forest Dragon instead of a drake, who was a bit on the arrogant side for his age and was trying to seize the gap left by Ilthuliak's disappearance but brought attention to himself too soon and got the PCs brought down on his head.
The party realized pretty quick that if they didn't find some way to take an active role in the Long Game, eventually some dragon would just squash them as intruding civilization. That was where Eranex came in - they went looking specifically for a dragon who could play who would also be friendly toward the idea of civilized culture moving into the wildlands, and silver dragons in this setting are known for doing what they can to reduce or remove the effects of the Long Game, with the ultimate goal of ending it. So now they have a capable draconic participant on their side. I added the gold dragon from the same book as Eranex, whose name escapes me now, as the holder of the territory just south of the PC's kingdom, as well, and the two of them have an unspoken alliance against Cuorvhain and Ilthuliak, but aren't quite strong enough to make immediate moves against one without having to worry about the other taking advantage of their distraction.