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I just came up with these and am planning to use them in the SoT's that I'm about to run with my spouse, and am looking for feedback. We will be running a 3 person party, with an Outwit Ranger/Druid arch, Witch/Wiz arch, and Druid/Wiz arch.
I've come up with a fairly simple way to include Ally's into Pf2e. Basically you pick a student (or faculty) to join us. The Ally can use all skills listed on their sheet (each ally has about 4), to a lvl appropriate expertise out of combat, with feats as appropriate. In combat the ally can do 1 of 5 activities,
A. debuff enemy attack and dc's by 1
B. debuff enemy defenses by 1
C. occupy 1 enemy of equal or lower lvl (basically in practice this means if there are more than one enemy they can occupy the lower lvl of the enemy's present, as long as this doesn't give too much information about the encounter away) short version occupy non boss enemy.
D. Damage enemy (equal to 2 action force barrage at current lvl
E. or heal ally, equal to lay on hands at lvl
In most cases I think each of these activities can probably be explained in different ways for different students and some may not be appropriate for the ally, but I feel like they are generic enough we can explain how the debuff, occupy, damage or healing was done, I chose automatic buffs and damage for simplicity, and I tried to make the buffs more limited than a class, because no roll was being made.
The idea is that we are a 3 person party and this will make it feel more like 4 without having to actually have a 4th full character to figure out. Also this way we can have more experiences with the fellow students and teachers, I feel we could also expand this to non-teacher/student npc's as well.
I have included information on all classmates and teachers as handouts for my spouse to see.
I'm a fairly experienced GM and I'm not worried so much about party wipes and such, But I'm hoping to have a roleplay heavy enjoyable experience for my spouse and myself, and we fairly often run adventures with just ourselves as player/gms.
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These days I tend toward the opposite extreme in party size: my Strength of Thousands campaign has seven players, including my wife and two adult daughters. Nevertheless, the party works with allies often.
And back in 2015 in my PF1 Iron Gods campaign I too started with 3 players. I asked the players to recruit a 4th party member from town. They chose Val Baine, and chose to keep her in the party despite finally recruiting a 4th player.
The main concern on my side is the encounter difficulty. If the 3rd-level 7-character party is joined by a 6th-level ally, how much enemy XP counts as a Moderate-Threat challenge? The math is that I add up the XP of each party member (7×40xp + 120xp = 400xp) and half of that, 200xp, in enemy XP is Moderate Threat. But with an equal-level 4-member party, that problem won't come up. I also sometimes nerf a higher-level ally by giving them restrictions ("I am going to stand back and give instructions and healing rather than participate directly") so that they operate a a lower-level.
However, rather than inventing a generic ally that has only five different actions, I create full character sheets for my allies. I have stats for dorm-mate Ignaci Canterells thaumaturge 2, dorm-mate Strands-of-Glowing-Dawn Tzeniwe investigator 2, dorm-mate Okoro Obiyo psychic 3, dorm-mate Esi Djana wizard 5, student I'boko sorcerer 5, student Muruwa leveled up to rogue 4, student Mkosa druid 5, groundspeeper Thema druid 5, teacher Takulu Ot raised to 6th level, glassblower Niana Ot artisan 3, teacher Nhyira druid 10, teacher Lesedi wizard 13, teacher Izem Mezitani sorcerer 14, and about the same number of allies of my own invention. (I'boko is from Hurricane's How and Muruwa is mentioned in Secrets of the Temple-City and began as a pregenerated 1st-level character in Threshold of Knowledge, a free PDF, along with Ekene monk 1, Kalaggi Nakutu fighter 1, Ufi cleric 1, and Zane Ikundi sorcerer 1. Mkosa is mentioned on page 138 of War of Immortals as a a nascent wildspell, so I statted them out for fun.
If you want stats for characters, ask me and give me three days to find two hours free in my schedule. The dorm-mates are the hardest to make, because I have to closely match their descriptions in the Students of the Magaambya article in Kindled Magic. My default for dorm-mates is 2nd level, but the Students of the Magaambya article gave some of them 2nd-level specialty spells, so those characters had to be 3rd level.
Some of the stats are already posted, such as Building Mkosa from War of Immortals. Ignaci showed up in River into Darkness Revisted. Esi and I'boko's 5th-level stat blocks grew out of a wizard-vs-sorcerer comparison in 4 years of PF 2: Wizards are weak, comment #469.
A risk with allowing the PCs to gain allies is that they could ask for allies when the module expects them to solo. I discuss such an event in Common Sense versus The Plot. That thread later became a discussion of how much the Magaambya is supposed to support the PCs and protect them from danger.
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Looks like it makes sense for what you're trying to accomplish. Though if every ally can do all of those things it'll make them feel somewhat same-y, so you might want to tweak things a bit by having some of them have certain options and not others, or be better at some things and worse than others.
Especially as you meet different students in later books that have different specialties (like Onyiji in book 3 who is a Magus and has stats, who has no real healing capability but packs a punch for her level).
Chizire on the other hand is an alchemist and thus would certainly have healing (and some other options), but may not want to actually "occupy an enemy" since he won't want something actually focusing on him.
So you can use the same basic framework but remove an option from different characters, and/or buff a given option for their speciality.
(Also don't let Mafika become this person because he has stats in Fists of the Ruby Phoenix, is level 17, and is basically capable of soloing everything in the first 4 books. I do a lot of narration of him being a badass with other opponents so the PCs can fight, but my players fought him in Ruby Phoenix so they know how strong he is.)