General Worldbuilding and GMing

I'm brewing up a sandbox/campaign for my group and it's coming together swimmingly. The overarching theme of the adventure will be homecoming. The players are marooned and need to find their way home, the knights of lastwall might find an artifact or two to help take back the gravelands, the firebrands want to make a land of exiles into a refuge, etc. etc. I'm struggling with the motivations of one of the six forces the party'll face in the field however.

An off-shoot of the Technic League has discovered that they can hijack a ritual occuring off the coast of Garund to resurrect the league's founder and zap her home, earning themselves a ticket to Androffan in the process. To pull this off, they need the necromantic expertise of the Whispering Way. It's a one-way trip into the storm, even for powerful spellcasters, and the Whispering Way is aware of this.

To those more familiar with the Whispering Way than I am, do you have any ideas as to what the Whispering Way would be up to on the side while out there? Why would they agree, and what do they get out of sacrificing capable necromancers to this effort?

I'm thinking that since the Whispering Tyrant hates Aroden, there might be some connection there, but it's pretty nascent at the moment, and i'm not entirely sure I can link that up with the game's theme.

I know many people tend to run the APs as written, maybe with a few changes here or there. But I'm curious if anyone has tried extensive changes to the existing lore or entirely new additions to the world and lore. Perhaps for existing APs or as

For example, based on a thread I found written back in 2012 on the Paizo forums (found here https://paizo.com/threads/rzs2p9dz?Campaign-Arc-Idea-POSTSerpents-Skull-AP ), I've been playing around with using a sort of Ancient Aliens theme for the serpentfolk, where their deities are based primarily on the Sumerian/Babylonian deities (Marduk, Ishtar, Ereshkigal, Enlil, Nergal, and so on) known collectively as the Annunaki (no relation to the Annunaki creature in PF1e's Bestiary 5). I've been adapting the Serpent's Skull AP to PF2e with these changes, and incorporating things like powerful serpentine constructs (the so-called Fangs of Enlil, statblock here: https://monster.pf2.tools/v/92ZJMRbV-fang-of-enlil ) that guard the Vaults in the Darklands, where these Vaults are chambers holding Annunaki genetic experimentation laboratories. The Nephilim (the creature from PF1e's Bestiary 3) are one of the many experiments of the Annunaki.

Instead of being a post-Serpent's Skull, I'm essentially changing up Serpent's Skull to add in these elements. I really like the idea of Ancient Aliens (it's one of my favorite sci-fi tropes, mostly thanks to Stargate SG-1) and I love the serpentfolk as villains so combining the two with a dash of Babylonian mythology just felt perfect.