Companions: As it stands there's no indication of where they might be found and no indication that there might even be some to find. A generic Cysealean dialogue option to ask after possible hirelings might be helpful here, and it wouldn't break the fourth wall in the process. Failing that, some "gossip" lines about the hirelings would also work. (As it stands, no one in town even seems to be aware of their existence, despite one of them having a rather attention-getting personality...)
I agree. Rumors to indicate the existence could help.
One comment I heard against that was that "you'd have to code checks into the NPC dialogue to make sure you haven't picked the companion up already", although I think you could get away with that if you worded the NPC dialogue carefully.
Leaving Town: It's true that you'll get a dialogue warning if you head out of the eastern or northern gates, but heading out the western gate (or exiting the city by way of secret tunnels) still allows you to wander over to those areas with no warning of what you're about to get into. The only solution to this that I can think of would be for the PCs themselves to pop up a dialogue about the area ahead looking like it's more trouble than they can handle right now.
Or just have the harbour gate do the same thing as the city gates. There is some dialogue - when you get close to orc tracks, the source hunters comment, indicating that there seems to be danger ahead.
