"It is not necessarily the case that the Watch is Lawful or requires Law of its members but it probably at least aspires in that direction. It's - not a solved problem, how to find appropriate challenges to advance with. People who try do often just plateau or die."

"I can start small. Escort some travelers. It's a waste of channels, though, spending days on the road."

Is there anything stopping her from staying in Liscor, channeling every day and going on as she is? It sounds like no, but it also seems like such a waste, to get powers from an otherworldly goddess and keep living the exact same life, except stopping by a building three times a day to blast a room with positive energy.

"So, heads up, Krshia—Krshia Silverfang, the leader of our tribe in Liscor—will want to talk to you about all of this. I just managed to escape a conversation with her this morning, but it's going to come to it sooner or later."

"Okay. What is she going to want to know?"

"She'll want to know what a cleric is and how to deal with it, and all kinds of... it's just surprising and a little threatening, right, we don't know anything about gods and don't know anything about the class, and suddenly I'm a cleric and running around with these really valuable abilities?

"Importantly, I'm appointed by Desna, but we don't have any clear expectations of what that means and what responsibilities it confers. I sort of have the picture from what you've told me, but I can't explain it to the everyone in turn, and actually I'm probably wrong about a lot of things, it's really obvious I don't know what I'm doing...

"And Krshia needs to be on top of these things. She needs to know in advance if I'm going to run off to Oteslia, yeah? She doesn't want surprises. If I'm being honest, she probably wants to know if we can get more clerics, too. I don't know if that answers your question."

"I do think this is very encouraging for the prospect of getting more clerics; I'm planning to write up summaries of some gods I know about whose presence here I think would be beneficial in case anyone wants to try now that there's proof of concept."

"I'll tell Krshia that. I think it'll go a long way."

Eventually: "You're due for a channel, but if you don't mind doing it alone I could run out this Ant Haul here before going home."

"I can probably do that. You wanted to check if [Consistent Channeling] changed it, right, but we can do that at the afternoon channels?"

"Right."

Off she goes.

Haul haul haul and eventually back to his building. He's trying to start taking appointments instead of house calls whenever that accommodates the patients adequately, for the Lesser Restorations and Remove Blindness/Deafness castings, and bundles them all right before lunch.

At this point he's getting people coming in from out of town to bid on his spells, so there are plenty of takers on appointments. There's a bit of disruption because of the undead attack, but mostly people manage to make it.

He restores! He removes! He has a sandwich for lunch and does his midday channel.

There are still some people coming in with nasty-looking injuries, broken limbs or covered in bandages, but they're largely walking under their own power.

Becoming a Cleric

There is a class [Cleric] but it is not the same thing as being a cleric of the type Golarion has. Instead, the class seems to come after empowerment by a patron. As it appears to be possible for those patrons to reach and empower locals, I will list and be available to discuss in more detail some potentially beneficial patrons. Being chosen by a patron requires philosophical alignment with their morality and their areas of concern, though it does not have to be perfect. I may be able to check formal moral alignment readings in sufficiently high level individuals by appointment.

Possible patrons below. I do not include my own because I expect that She is choosing a bare minimum of clerics for the foreseeable future but anyone feeling a particular pull in Her direction can speak to me. Others besides these exist, but I do not so strongly expect that their promulgation here would be beneficial.

ABADAR, god of trade, Lawful Neutral. Concerned with the economy, cities, coordination problems, the establishment of trustworthy institutions that (on Golarion) offer insurance policies, banking services, loans and investments, and incorruptible neutral confidential consultation and arbitration, without regard to the nature of their clients except insofar as that nature affects the client's ability to abide by an agreement.

SHELYN, goddess of art and love, Neutral Good. Concerned with beauty, friendships and familial relationships in addition to or perhaps even more than romantic love, redemption, music and performance as well as visual art.

SARENRAE, goddess of the sun and redemption, Neutral Good. Concerned with the preservation of the world against existential threats, peace, honesty, universal salvation, swift merciful destruction of the (rare) entities that are beyond saving.

ERASTIL, god of agriculture and hunting, Lawful Good. Concerned with interdependent small communities, marriage and the family, hard work, farming and animal husbandry. Has a wife who is also a god, Jaidi, whose areas of concern may not be identical but which I have no separate understanding of.

DESNA, goddess of dreams and travel, Chaotic Good. Has chosen one cleric here already. Concerned with the stars, freedom, luck, and possibly also literature or something that results in her followers sometimes being concerned with literature (I apologize for the limited information).

People have questions!

• Does he have examples of professions and classes eligible for each god? What would distinguish an individual as particularly suited among their peers? Erastil presumably isn't going to patronize every [Farmer].
• What rewards(?) and responsibilities does clerichood confer? Apart from channeling, they assume.
• Is being a cleric a full-time job in itself, or is it more like a boon or a grant in recognition and support of what you're already doing?
• ...What's with "Lawful" and "Chaotic"? (This comes from a Guardsman.)
• What are these gods you're not telling us about? Come on, just between us. I'm not going to tell anyone.

- There are not specific professions or classes required for any of the gods, though the gods will in most cases bear in mind whether it would be compatible with whatever the individual in question is already doing - for example, if someone already has time-dependent obligations in the hour following dawn, they probably wouldn't get full use out of a clerichood. Good candidates have above-average Wisdom, and would be disposed (without more detailed marching orders form their god, which are almost never going to happen) to use their abilities in ways the god approves of by their own intuitions, and would be positioned to be received by the people around them in ways that also support the god's desired relationship for cleric/layperson relations.

- Clerics can channel, though it is not out of the question for a cleric of Abadar (out of the ones listed) to channel negative energy instead of positive energy. They can prepare spells, here's a list of all the orisons and the mainline first-level options. Abadarans get a special first-level truth spell but the value add over the truth stones isn't huge so it might not be worthwhile around here. Gods have domains relating to their alignments and areas of concern and people get two of those each and minor abilities that come with them, here are some he remembers.

- Clerics usually do something other than channel and cast spells, since that doesn't take all day even if you're very Wise and Splendid and get extras of both. Some clerics go adventuring. Some pick up mundane healing skills. Abadarans are usually bankers or something like that. Shelynites can and indeed are supposed to be artists. Erastilians are usually farmers. He's not sure what Sarenrites do, they're not very popular on his continent, but sometimes Good churches in general operate charitable organizations like orphanages and maybe they do that. Clerics will be renounced by their gods if they fall out of the permissible alignment zone or otherwise act badly against the interests of the god, and will advance more slowly or not at all along the circles if they aren't doing a sufficiently exemplary job of living up to the god's values (though that last will only be obvious if they're also adventuring; it is normal and expected for a cleric in a nice safe position their god presumably approves of wholeheartedly to remain first circle all their lives).

- Law and Chaos are alignments, like Good and Evil but orthogonal. He can prepare Detect spells for any of these on a prearranged day if people want to be assessed but it will probably only work on high level individuals and he isn't sure how high level. (It also works on clerics but if the cleric isn't personally powerful the god's alignment just cloaks the cleric's entirely.) Here again is his description of how Law and Chaos work minding again that he is temperamentally a Lawful guy and does not have a very sympathetic or inside view of Chaos.

- Can he make this last person go away by telling them in a slightly conspiratorial voice about Shizuru?

• So it's like patronage patronage, where they basically like the look of you and want you to keep doing whatever you're doing, just they're giving you powers instead of money about it.


• Watch Guy isn't terribly reassured but it's not illegal to so vaguely promote lawless behavior or anything, and those domains listed don't sound bad.


• The last person will soak up Shizuru gossip and also knows the information provided definitely implies evil gods, but if Blai won't spill the beans, whatever.

- Yeah pretty much except insofar as it being understood you represent them and have magic powers may change that. Blai isn't allowed to lie but he used to do it a more normal amount before Iomedae chose him, he just stopped when he entered her jurisdiction. (He doesn't know the listed gods to have rules like that, though most of the ones he listed could conceivably choose paladins instead of clerics and none of those are allowed to lie or do anything not Lawful Good.)

- Blai is very deliberately avoiding naming chaotic deities he doesn't think he can explain in a constructive enough way to get only net positive clerics out of them but he understands the wariness!

- Shizuru used to be the Empress of Heaven and then went nigh catatonic when her lover died; she's still worshiped on this one continent but doesn't do things besides picking clerics who maintain the status quo. No beans about evil gods or even dodgy neutrals or even Cayden Cailean whom Blai cannot remotely explain, nope.

Wow, did she get deposed, then, or what? who's the Empress of Heaven now? 

Keisha shows up her channel, and pulls off one nearer to the upper end of what's possible for a first-circle cleric, and to Detect Magic looks like the flow of positive might be more—regular?

Shizuru is still sometimes called that but Iomedae is now the main coordinator of the forces of Heaven when they need to be doing forces-of-Heaven things.

"I think your channels might be something like Empowered - that's a trick people learn to do to their spells, to make their effects a bit stronger though not usually at peak. It doesn't look exactly like that but it's more like that than anything else I've seen."

"Sounds useful," she says. "Especially for a starter Skill."

The Shizuru guy is gone, but she overheard. "I didn't know gods had—governments?"

"They're probably not much like mortal governments, but they do have organization and levels of power."

"Mm-hm. I saw your poster. Any takers yet? I don't know how rare it's supposed to be. If more clerics turn up we might want to spread out a bit, more efficiently distribute the healing." No motivated reasoning here at all.

"I agree, I'm not presently presuming on you being here long term. No one seems like an obvious candidate yet."