I'm good with wherever the story takes us! I already have some big picture ideas that we can discuss when we get a little farther into the RP. It'll keep it going after the part in Younis, since I'm assuming we still want this to be long-term :)

I'll tell you a few of them now, so you get the idea of the kinds of "big-pictures" I've been thinking about for our RP

In a nutshell: I'm thinking we could have the group discover some dark secret of the king of Brerra that either causes them to not bring the staff back to him or to let the King of Younis keep it.

Also, there are other kingdoms besides those two, and I was thinking maybe there's a really big kingdom in the North that is doing the same thing as Brerra, which is taking over its neighbors. Basically, the Northern kingdom has spies all throughout Brerra and Younis, who are trying to get a war started between the two kingdoms. Once they're weak, the bigger kingdom plans to swoop in and eat them both up. (Maybe the rebels from earlier are secretly part of the spy collaboration, and lied about their true intentions? Just an idea.)

Basically, that would leave our characters - the only ones who know the truth - to find a way to stop the takeover from happening.

Also, we could throw in some supernatural stuff with godly intervention and all that later on if we feel like heading in a complex direction. (Not like making our characters have powers, but rather they can interact with the gods some of the time or just once). For an emotional twist, we could throw in a reunion between Penelope and her deceased mother in spirit form when the supernatural events go down. Maybe Crow and his mother too, but mostly Penelope and hers because they never got to know each other.

These are all still nubbins of ideas though. We will have to see what happens with the plot we already have going first, and then we can start throwing in bigger twists like that :)