To quote some person or another:
You be you, boo.
The Paizo canon police are not going to come and put you in jail. You can do whatever you like. :)
Of course lore can be changed, in th service of making your game work better for everyone playing it. Just like mechanics.
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This Azlanti Star Empire is not motivated by xenophobia, supremacy, or desires for power. They believe that by bringing the known galaxy under their banner, they will end crime, suffering, hatred, violence, and even evil itself. They see themselves as saviors and messiah figures, who must end evil once and for all. But the way they do it, is what makes them villains.
I'll note that just because their view of their actions is one thing does not mean their actions and reasoning are not Azlanti-supremacist, xenophobic, or power-hungry. Those traits and similar have been dressed up all sorts of ways to justify imperialism in the past. Imperialists have often claimed to be doing their 'lessers' a favor by introducing civilization, laws, technology, and religion to them all while ruthlessly exploiting them and depriving them of basic rights. The cruelties were often also treated as a good thing, a way to force civilization on the more 'savage' people.
But yeah, you're free to alter Starfinder canon any way you might choose to.
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Reminds me of an old letter to the editor from Dragon Magazine #137:
Dear Dragon:
Recently my AD&D® game character, Waldorf, a 358th-level magic-user, created the nuclear bomb. Due to this action, all of Greyhawk has been utterly obliterated, except for a 3 × 4 mile island with a castle called Castle Waldorf.All creatures from the Monster Manuals were destroyed due to large amounts of nuclear fallout. All the deities work in a salt mine under Waldorf's castle. I would greatly appreciate it if everyone would mail their character sheets to me so that I may tally up Waldorf's experience.
All of the game manuals and modules are now totally false and untrue. Any profit made from TSR's merchandise from this day onward should be mailed to Waldorf's castle (in gold pieces, of course).
You can do whatever you want in your campaign. Just don't expect your changes to affect anyone else.
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This Azlanti Star Empire is not motivated by xenophobia, supremacy, or desires for power. They believe that by bringing the known galaxy under their banner, they will end crime, suffering, hatred, violence, and even evil itself. They see themselves as saviors and messiah figures, who must end evil once and for all. But the way they do it, is what makes them villains.
I'm slightly concerned that you seem to think these are mutually exclusive.
Firstly, yes, you can make whatever changes to the setting you'd like.
I would advise you to forewarn your players that you're going to be doing it. Not necessarily specifically how you're going to be doing it but just that you're going to be making some changes to suit your narrative.
The answer to this is always yes, for any rpg that isn't some sort of "organized play".
Well, here the idea is that once upon a time, the Empire was once very benevolent, almost like a fairytale... until things happened and now they've taken goodness too far. They do judge by character rather than race, but their methods are too zealous to be heroes. Not to mention the campaigns backstory involves an Azlanti criminal who tried to overthrow the Empire and the entire known galaxy.Firstly, yes, you can make whatever changes to the setting you'd like.
I would advise you to forewarn your players that you're going to be doing it. Not necessarily specifically how you're going to be doing it but just that you're going to be making some changes to suit your narrative.
Well the point I was trying to make was, and I don't want to make any negative assumptions about your group, but if any of your players are well informed about the setting and have preconceived notions of how things are based on the official lore, it might cause issues when you get to the parts that you've changed.
Which, granted, is metagaming but a certain degree of metagaming can be difficult to avoid. If you're running a star wars game & your players know star wars & have a guy show up dressed in all black who whip out red lightsabers, certain assumptions are going to be made by your players who might take umbrage when after they've acted on those assumptions, you reveal that for the purposes of this game you've modified lore regarding light sabre crystals & now it's perfectly normal for jedi to carry them & they aren't just a sith thing.
So what I'm suggesting is not necessarily telling them what you've changed or how you've changed it, just being up front that for the purposes of your game you're using the starfinder setting but have modified certain aspects of it's story as you see fit, and that they shouldn't rely on anything they read in a Starfinder book to be accurate and to make very liberal use of knowledge skill checks.
Firstly, you're quite free to do whatever you want.
If you have players that really on top of their Starfinder Lore, warning them you're changing it might be good, but I don't see why that would be an issue.
I'm pretty sure more than a few of the Paizo staff love knowing we, out there in the wild, are taking their stuff in weird, new and interesting directions (and have said as much).
It's pretty open on a lot of points as is.
Second, that's very much an evil empire.
Only in cartoons do bad guys set out to do evil because it's evil, oh so evil, muahahah and all that.
No matter where or when, the worse of the worse pages of history, real or fictional, have always been motived by some definition of what The Greater Good is and the pursuit of it.
That's the very reason why villains can be so interesting.