The Top 100 Things I'd Do
If I Ever Became An Evil Overlord

I hear you. Although, I should check that you actually want to get into this, in case you were going to complain about something you thought would be easy to complain about and then it turned out that the context required breaking your policy about when to lie to people.

Sometimes you're careful about things in a way I don't understand - I don't understand why you'd want to help me keep secrets from you. It doesn't seem like it could help you.

By your own admission, telling me your protocol for deciding when to go knives-out wouldn't be useful to you any more than telling you was useful to your father; sometimes people do things that aren't to their obvious selfish benefit because one of the nonobvious things they selfishly want is for someone else to be well-off. 

Hm. You make a good point. Maybe the reason it threw me so, is that I can't imagine not wanting to learn someone's secrets. Anyone who pleased could become ten times more desperately interesting to me if they simply resolved to keep some secret and let me know it existed without letting me know what it was.

I'll keep that in mind for if I ever want to be ten times as interesting.

I think you already expect me to lie to you sometimes and there's no harm in telling you when I wouldn't, so I'm good to continue if you wouldn't rather talk about the weather.

In that case, I'm all ears.  

If having Law is to be laudable, it must be the case that having Law is useful. Which is to say, useful to the individual. 

This is a point which many have gone to great lengths to obfuscate, as it plays to a sovereign's interest to encourage a less self-interested type of Lawful attitude in their subjects than it is in any subject's interest to possess, and also because it's in the interest of a werewolf living among men to pretend to an unconditional Lawfulness and espouse philosophies in support of it. 

Ask a father how children should behave and he'll say that they should obey him; ask a queen, she'll say the same of subjects; ask it of Asmodeus and He'll say it of everyone. This has everything to do with what is in their interest to say, and absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with how you should comport yourself. 

Any of the three could and would present compelling arguments and philosophical justifications for why you should sacrifice yourself for other's benefit or for the sake of principle, and if you're not stupid you'll just let their poisonous advice roll off you like water on a duck's back.

Or so says Aberian Arvanxi, and as my father it wasn't to his advantage to admit, and so I know it must be true. (Unless that's what he wants me to think.)

Well, you know he believed it. He could be wrong.

I am entirely convinced you could task my dad with correcting Tabris' encyclopedia, if you only had a way of verifying the man's actual beliefs. It's frightening to disagree with him, honestly - like juggling knives you know for sharps on the theory that they're dull.

Except sometimes he's just lying, and sometimes, I am nearly certain, and one day I will prove it, sometimes he's mistaken.

No offense, but if he's so smart, why's he going to Abaddon?

He's not. He sold his soul to a contract devil... and that was plausibly a mistake, he never talks about it so I don't know if he's on track to deliver his deliverables, but he warned me not to sell mine. That doesn't really count, though, since it happened before I met him and I've got nothing to teach him on that count.

Why'd you sell your soul against advice?

To get superpowers! And the chance to eat an erinyes. Besides, I'm making myself immortal so I'm never going to Hell anyway, or not for thousands of years and by then maybe I'll be soul trapped or soul eaten or Rovagug will have gotten loose or I'll have ascended as a god or whatever else; a lot can happen in a thousand years. Especially if you're compressing Paizo's crazily long timelines. And even if I do go to Hell, I'll get favored treatment and I'm not even necessarily staying there. I had an Infernal Duke over the coals and I got a really good deal - read this from Curse of the Crimson Throne: Crown of Fangs, pg. 60, section "Continuing the Campaign": 

Yet even if the PCs defeat the Curse of the Crimson Throne and Ileosa no longer poses a threat to Korvosa, they might wish to continue adventuring. Ileosa might be gone, but that hardly means that nothing remains in Korvosa or the world beyond to challenge them. The following campaign seeds can serve as starting points to inspire numerous new adventures for your PCs.

Ileosa’s Revenge: Great evil rarely seems to stay dead for long. In Ileosa’s case, her death sends her soul spiraling into the depths of Hell—her contract with Sermignatto all but ensuring such a fate. Yet mythology is thick with stories of souls who escape from Hell. If Ileosa manages to do so, perhaps by using her silver tongue to bargain with an archdevil for a second chance, revenge against the PCs who disrupted her bid at immortality should loom large in her mind. If you wish to use this plot, you should probably hold off for a few levels. Let the PCs think Ileosa is gone, and then have them learn of a strangely familiar-sounding enemy who led an army of devils against a distant town. Upon arriving, they might find a resurrected Ileosa ready for a rematch!

I'm less optimistic about all of this than you seem, but I'll be glad if it does turn that you can die and avoid the big fires down below. You should give me your contract to read over; PCs are pretty good at finding loopholes in these things.

If we're both alive after our climactic showdown, I'll let you take a look - I don't want you learning anything that'd help you fight me.

Anyway, circling back, Law to be laudable must be useful.

If you ever find yourself wailing and gnashing your teeth because your Law is forcing some bad outcome or preventing some good outcome, you've done something very wrong and you should stop it immediately.   

...Are you saying that you should break any promise you regret making? I do not think that's Lawful.

It's not tracing the Lawmost edge of the alignment chart, but Law, like light, is a spectrum! Imagine you have Aspex the Abadaran, Eco the Erastilian, and Mephistophelia the Baphomet-brained Mephistophelian, and you've invited them all to your birthday bash tomorrow. "I promise I'll be there," they each say, except Mephistophelia, who insists on putting it in writing and writing four pages of fine print about how she won't be able to attend if her house floods. Later that night, a dragon attacks the city and chews off all their legs. 

Aspex drags himself across the city by his fingertips, which he doesn't enjoy, so he can attend the party, which he doesn't enjoy either (on account of how he's in a lot of pain and would rather be resting). But he gave his word and can't break it, so party he must.

Meanwhile Eco sleeps in. If he's feeling especially Lawful today, maybe he sends a messenger to tell you he can't make it.

Mephistophelia, meanwhile, has one of two fates: either she remembered to include dragon attacks when she was listing conditions, or include something broad enough to cover what happened, in which case she can honorably sleep in, or else she didn't, in which case she needs to crawl across the cobbles while cursing her contract-drafting incompetence. 

Eco is Lawful. 

Be like Eco.

Eco has Law enough.

Okay, but consider: dragging yourself across the city to attend a birthday party because you said you'd be there and your word is your bond would be metal as all hell.

...You aren't wrong that it would, but - do you take my broader meaning?

You can append an implicit "unless my legs are chewed off by a dragon, probably" to most of the things I say I'll do. Not all of them, but - most. I wouldn't describe that as "guile," though, so I don't think I take your meaning. 

It seems of-a-kind with other broken promises to me, or at least on the same continuum as them... when I say that I'll do something, I either strongly intend to do so, or do not intend strongly to do so, and this shades quite continuously into intending not to, or strongly intending not to.

And this is a description of Lawful behavior?

Yes! And it's also a description of Chaotic behavior! I'm describing human behavior, from a thousand feet in the air, and whether it's Lawful or Chaotic depends on details on the ground. 

What kind of promises do you anticipate making and regretting and keeping anyway?

Something might have seemed like a good idea at the time, or maybe things came up which don't rise to the level of having my legs chewed off by a dragon, or it could be that I wanted to buy now and pay later and now's the later.