(Murmurs of "but the gods are dead," fill the room.)

"Gods from your world?" asks someone who is slightly more tapped into the rumor mill. "Are they here?"

"They can choose clerics here. Desna chose one in the town where I originally appeared."

"What does the process of choosing a cleric look like if they're not here—sorry, if you're already going to cover this it can wait."

"In her case it was an emergency situation and she received a vision to alert me so that I could get her a symbol and tell her how to use her healing on the injured. In your cases - it may feel like something, subtly, or you might just wake up at the moment of dawn with the ability to prepare spells, if chosen. It's fine if I go over these points a little out of order, don't worry about it. The gods don't live on Golarion, either, they live on other planes and can offer magic across the boundaries between them."

Wild.

"Do they take correspondence somehow?" an old man in fancy robes asks.

"Not in writing. The term is prayer, which is - speaking or thinking, either works, in a way oriented toward a god. They can receive that communication. It's almost always one-way. It is costly for gods to address mortals - they have something akin to a treaty amongst themselves, to limit how much they work at cross-purposes, and it is very limiting on the flow of information and miraculous intervention - and none of you should expect to hear from them in any form other than being chosen or not being chosen. A cleric prays for one hour beginning at dawn every morning - you can skip it but then you don't get new spells; you can cut it short but then you won't have as many as you can hold. It is encouraged in every religion I have ever heard of to pray, including for non-clerics who consider themselves adherents of a god's philosophy or who would enjoy that god's intervention were it available, as a way to orient one's state of mind towards the applicable constraints and goals. And as a way to inform the god, but I am less confident that it's beneficial directly to gods than I am that it is beneficial to mortals in a state of uncertainty or agitation."

"So it's like a type of... meditation, like [Monks] do? Which... gods can hear, but not often respond to?"

    "Do you have an example of appropriate form and content for a prayer?"

"Some prayers are rote - holy book translations are undergoing some polish at the moment but will each include a few - but it is no less standard to simply consider the problems one is facing in one's life and work. With the god as a silent audience, but otherwise not very unlike giving a report to a superior, or a letter to a colleague, or an update to a friend, depending on the god and one's individual relationship with the concept of prayer and with their patron. It is, too, customary to offer petitionary prayer even when the situation is clearly not one where it would be worth the god going to great expense - uh, a caution, here, that my own patron, Iomedae, is concerned particularly with triage, and is also a young and ambitious goddess, and chooses clerics with this in mind. My habits of thought around petition and godly expenditure may not be correct for would-be clerics of other deities and might instead simply be a sign that I am rather Iomedaean by native inclination. But at any rate, petitionary prayer is popular, and it is also not uncommon to offer thanks even if, again, miraculous intervention probably did not feature in the events one is thanking the god for."

"Similar to traditions of ancestor worship recorded in south Zeikhal," someone remarks.

    "But your living gods sometimes do something, right."

"Yes. For example, they pick clerics. You will want to be paying attention to what you are thinking about at the moment of your choosing or on the night before a dawn awakening, if you can, so you will have that information on what about you attracted your patron if anything does. Other miracles also occur, but they're harder to speak about in generalities; clerics are a fairly standardized sort of thing for a god to do and everything else is less so. Again the holy books will have more information on some notable divine activities."

They have no more questions.

He lists the gods he's trying to establish churches for and their areas of concern and alignments. Lawful faiths tend more organized and formal; chaotic ones sometimes don't even have buildings. Abadarans run banks. Shelynites might have museums or concert halls or something. Sarenrites have orphanages and soup kitchens, where those things are needful; he doesn't know what if anything they do when it's not. Erastilians so far as he is aware do not have collective businesses, since they're about family and farms and family farms. Desnans are known to smuggle books such as romance novels into censorious countries but he has a very narrow slice of information about Desnans. Churches can vary quite a lot between cultures and they might come up with some uniquely Kheltish take on all these things that is, by the vouch of the gods in question, also totally fine. Iomedae is having a busy time of it and probably won't pick anyone new but here's the rundown on Her too in case anyone wants to be Hers and is willing to wait five or ten or some number of years.

Should they be expecting Banks of Abadar, Museums of Shelyn etc. to be springing up in the next years?

If they dedicate a concert or a concert hall to Shelyn, would it make it more likely for her to patronize Kheltians, or the creators? And so on for the other gods?

If there is a complaint about the conduct of a church, is there a way to take it up with the god? Will a god take issue with their cleric being prosecuted in accordance with the local law, or is it conventional for there to be some sort of diplomatic status going on?

Blai thinks they should possibly expect that, yes. He doesn't think trying to dedicate institutions in advance of having even one cleric to confirm that these gods want anything to do with Khelt will help but it probably wouldn't hurt?

It is not uncommon to illegalize the worship or the presence of clerics of some gods. While the holy books do mention their gods' particular enemies, Blai is very deliberately only trying to establish churches he thinks will do okay here, and gods have some ability to (possibly mostly via prayer, so they should pray about it) note and accommodate laws making it illegal to be their follower or accomplish certain tasks in certain jurisdictions, when they're gods that care about that. A country that frowns on Abadarans will not get them, or only get Abadarans in weird corner cases where they turn out to be allowable after all; a Desnan someplace that doesn't need them for anything and doesn't like them will probably just leave; etcetera. If you put a cleric on trial then this almost always proceeds completely normally for your justice system unless you have enshrined protections for clerics (which you might want to! You can verify the purity of their motives much more readily than you can with random people - e.g. a Shelynite who is accused of murder and can still cast spells is either framed or had a really good reason - though this doesn't apply at all to laws that don't interact much with good and evil, like, uh, noise ordinances. Also since they're pricey to make new ones of, if you want clerics around at all you might want to indicate to their patron that you don't consider them disposable.) You can pray to the god about it if Their clerics are being a nuisance, but 'stop being a nuisance' is seldom to never going to be within the god's interests to communicate; better to go through the church hierarchy itself and ask them to alter their clerics' instructions, and one thing that it's good to have churches of friendly gods around for is that they can tell you when you're being a nuisance not acting in accordance with the values you asked them to represent.

That makes sense. (They're not super going to trust these gods' definition of Good and Evil yet but it's indicative if at least by reference to the values professed in their holy books, sure.)

So, uh, how does a mortal person become a god?

"There is an artifact on Golarion called the Starstone which can do it, though in most cases people attempting it die instead and I'm not sure what exactly about it makes it so lethal. Iomedae ascended that way. Some people ascend in other ways, but as far as I know all of the gods I'm establishing here are ancient in their present forms."

People are interested in understanding more about gods and their characteristics but probably they should not take up lecture time and the information can be found in the holy books.

He'll go over the Outer Planes - conveniently he has picked out only gods who live in their naturally corresponding plane, none of the weird ones who live somewhere else. Then he'll go over the range of spells a first circle cleric might prepare.

Wow, some of these are really bizarrely specific. Hey, does Recharge Innate Magic work on Skills?

This [Necromancer] would like to know how Inflict Light Wounds works to heal undead. Does it only renew the death magic or does it, for example, repair physical breaks? Does it work on e.g. enchanted bone?

Recharge Innate Magic might work on Skills! Blai has never tried preparing it because he doesn't have any other innate magic and that hadn't occurred to him, he only knows about it because sometimes a demon might have it.

Undead on Golarion are powered by negative energy, which harms the living. Blai is not sure if it will work on undead here, but he has tried the reverse and it worked. He would expect it to repair physical breaks on a damaged undead but hasn't spent much time working with necromancers personally.

There is a bit of susurration at that and an uptick in interest.

A lot of the spells overlap with existing Skills, but the way you can choose them makes them much more appealing. Normally you get a Skill or two at your first level; as a [Cleric] you're still getting a first-circle Spell and a small number of cantrips on any given day, but you can pick different ones every day!

More comparable to magic classes, they suppose, hence "spells", but a lot of the effects—Cultutal Adaptation, Ant Haul—are a lot more Skill-like than Spell-like by the local reckoning.

If there is great demand for negative energy, Lawful Neutral Abadarans can have it come out of their channels if they prefer, and the Evil ones don't get a choice. Good gods don't hand it out for spontaneous use but one can still prepare Inflicts.

He's planning to write up what he knows about higher circle spells, but people on Golarion don't improve much with low-stakes experience, and cleric circles continue to work that way here, so he's not lecturing on the higher circle spells in any depth. The traditional way to circle up is combat against e.g. monsters, but other circumstances work, it's just that they have to be dangerous to something you care about even if that something doesn't happen to be your own life (could be hostages or disaster victims or politics or something). The Abadarans on Golarion sell resurrection insurance and warn that it will slow and in some people completely plateau their advancement, but operating without a safety net gets lots of would-be archmages and high priests and supernaturally adroit martials killed.

How inconvenient, combat-leveling... or, well danger-leveling classes. No one has any immediate brilliant ideas of what to do about that. Does it have to endanger people or does it work if it endangers a construction project you are really invested in?

Will Blai be offering alignment reading services? Inquiring minds want to know.

The construction project might work if you care about it enough, he's not sure he's ever heard of that working but that could be for any number of reasons, like high stakes construction projects routinely being assailed by monsters on Golarion so everyone assumes they were responsible for any increases in power.

He can prepare Aura Sight on days when he doesn't expect to need two Planar Inquiries and read a room if there's demand.

(If he asks for a show of hands there's plenty of people who want to be alignment-read.)

Where do they submit inquiries or, uh, applications? Is there a thing to be applied for, or are they just supposed to go home and pray about being clerics?