"Is this a social activity?"

"Sometimes."

"What is its intended purpose when it is not social? Is it 'fun'?"

"Sometimes," the Shelynites are probably having fun at least, "but mostly it serves to refocus the praying person on their principles and goals - since miracles are so rare most petitionary prayer serves only this purpose."

"And this is sometimes done multiple times on the same day to different gods. How many people are followers of one or more gods?"

"...almost all of them. There's one country where all worship is illegal for some reason but I don't know how good their enforcement of lay worship is; I believe they are pretty effective at finding and removing clerics."

That is a good hook.

"What are the ostensible reasons for making 'worship' of some or all gods illegal?"

"They're a breakaway state from an empire which was conquered by the forces of Hell in the aftermath of a very popular god's death, and I suppose they didn't expect half-measures to keep the Evil gods out and had lost the only one they were largely in favor of. I haven't studied their history specifically but that would be my guess."

...

"Hell?"

He wants to get back to the topic of evil gods, but first.

"The Lawful Evil Outer Plane and afterlife."

"Did you pick the translation, or did your translation spell? Here, the term refers to the origin place of Crelers and other corrupt species in Rhir." He pauses. "In a literary sense; no such specific location has been identified or visited." Technically true.

"My language tutor suggested it in response to being shared my language; I can transliterate it if it means something specific and local." He makes a note.

"It is used colloquially as a figure of speech, such as describing something offensive as 'out of Hell', and it is used occasionally as a curse. However, as a location descriptor, it is specific.

"What are the forces of Hell?"

"There are Lawful Evil gods and demigods and their servants there."

"You have mentioned evil gods several times. How do they differ from good gods? Do they have followers?"

"They differ from good gods in that they... are evil... and do and care about evil things, as I described before. Which evil things depends on the evil gods; domains of major evil gods include tyranny, disease, crime, and destroying all Creation. They have followers."

"I can understand why a person would follow a god of tyranny or crime, but not why one would follow a god of disease or destroying all Creation."

"The disease one also confuses me very badly and I don't have an answer for you there. The Destroyer's followers tend to think that Creation is bad and should not exist. Some of them may even have - benevolent-ish - motives, wishing to free the suffering from their fates in the only way that seems sufficiently absolute."

He won't dwell too much on it. Klbkch has seen stranger.

"Do the domains of gods mean more than their preferences and teachings?"

"I think they also reflect what parts of the world are easiest for them to see and affect."

"Do they interact with the world in a very different way than ordinary people? I presume this is related to how Iomedae is less able to intervene directly after she became a god."

"Yes. They can operate across planes in a way mortal spellcasters mostly can't, and since they live in the Outer Planes they mostly have to if they want to affect anything. I don't think they're actually less capable at anything than even a quite powerful mortal, but they have an agreement enforced among them to limit the extent that they only counter each other's efforts and make no progress overall, and they are also spread over many planets. - planets are the kind of landform people in my world live on, they're very big and far apart and there are also a lot of them."

"Is it correct to say that the lawful and chaotic gods are opposed, and the evil and good gods? Do the chaotic gods also comply with this agreement?

"If one faction were to win, would the victors be no longer be thereby limited?"

He picked up a vague concept of planets from Jeiss' report but doesn't really understand them; still, he's not going to waste time on it.

"The chaotic gods comply, though possibly they require more enforcement effort, I'm not privy to the details. The good and evil gods are opposed; the lawful and chaotic ones are much less so, though there is a definite tension. I don't know what would happen if someone won."

Hm.

"Is there a reason the gods of Hell were able to deploy forces into Golarion, but not the good gods? Or did they also do that, but you did not mention it?"