The very first person to arrive is a cleric of Erastil, taking advantage of the fact that he isn't on any committees to arrive fairly early. He's still not sure about this whole idea, but Porras invited him, and Porras seems sensible enough.

Korva really should have prepared for this more. Preparing for stuff is hard. Insofar as she has a plan, it's mostly to determine what other people want. Now that she's given up on schools, for now, her major priorities are emptying the orphanages, maintaining as much equality for women as possible (she still can't quite wrap her head around the idea that the people who declared all slavery an Asmodean institution are apparently also against that), and, apparently, contract reform. But while the last one is obviously a priority for the commons in general, the first two are decidedly not. They are, she figures, priorities that most women should share, and she can be keeping an eye out for women who she'd like to discuss them with individually, but probably in this general company she should try to at least tone the women's rights down a little bit.

Still. She would much rather the commoners have their interests represented than not, and that really does require figuring out what everyone else's priorities are. And fighting popular battles might help get her other priorities through.

Right now Victòria's biggest priority is for Juan Ventura and every nobleman like him to die painfully, and for absolutely no one to be ruled by men like that. (She is not planning to mention him by name in the meeting, but it really seems like everyone who's not an Evil noble should be okay with "Evil nobles are not allowed to randomly murder people for no reason," even if they're otherwise completely terrible.)

Theo's not really planning to talk much, but he does want to be present.

Has he got the right place?

He does! Wave wave!

Séfora slinks in. She can be stealthy when she wants. 

Where is the water. Out of paranoia about taverns she has bottled some water just in case. Delicious, clean water is the lifeblood of all useful work.

There's also water but people mostly prefer very weak beer to water, especially when you're used to, uh, a vastly lower density of first-circle clerics than Westcrown currently has.

Of course, the type of little feast that’s for bringing people together always happens over light beer. 

You don't grow up in an inn without getting something of a taste for it, and it's always been a much safer way to do it than anything that might risk her actually getting drunk.

Pure water for her, though. She likes her mind working normally and her judgment completely unclouded, to say nothing of how covering up the taste of bad water is the kind of mistake you don't want to repeat.

(She's still wearing the armor; one would be forgiven for assuming it never comes off).

Well, here goes nothing.

(Five women, four men, but three of the men are Enric and Theopho and an Erastilian. Hmmm.)

"Well, I doubt this is everyone, but we may as well get started. Basically, the pace and content of the convention has so far been dictated almost entirely by the nobility, who are able to get things done because they are organized, they talk to one another, and they know which favors they can trade to get their preferred bills through. This leaves everyone who isn't a noble on the back foot, mostly just reacting to whatever the nobles work out ahead of time. But if any of us have battles that we want to pick that the nobles don't, we're going to have to bring them to the floor proactively.

'Everyone who isn't a noble' in fact being a very diverse set of people, I think there are a lot of important priorities that most of us are probably unaware of, and we should at the very least be aware of what the other commoners think is worth paying attention to. I think it's very likely that many of our priorities are not in fact in conflict, though obviously some of them will be. And it's possible that if we talk it through ahead of time, we can get some obviously good ideas passed that wouldn't necessarily pick up enough support in twenty minutes of floor discussion to pass the floor. Or we can give ourselves some breathing room to talk through what a good proposal would look like in a complicated area, without always relying on the nobility to dictate terms.

I am mostly interested in hearing about other people's priorities tonight, but there are two major ones that I've become aware of so far. First, contract law and civil courts. Bad contracts can obviously be used as a tool for enormous evil, more powerful than almost any other. We're not actually without them right now, we just don't have any tools to regulate them. We should be concerned with making sure we get a system that doesn't ruin most people's lives, with limits on what kinds of contract terms are legal. We may in particular want to abolish or significantly limit serfdom and hereditary contracts, and place limitations on apprenticeship, employment, indenture, and marriage contracts, ensuring that there are some things a master can't order. I don't yet know what limits are appropriate, or which ones we can sell the floor on.

Secondly, the orphanage system is in financial crisis. I have learned that it costs more than half the cost of the entire military, despite being funded near starvation levels and no longer offering daycare. I do not want to solve this by securing more funding from the military and putting it towards orphanages, which all the officers in the room will oppose. I want to solve it by creating a policy that will encourage parents, especially fathers, to commit to raising their own children, and creating another policy to encourage adoptions. This should take strain off the treasury, so we can probably get many of the officers to back it on that basis, if we can come up with a reasonable pair of proposals.

What's everyone else got?"

"It's hard to pick just one, but I reckon dishonest loans have got to be important. There's lots of good, honest men back home who took out a loan in a bad year and got trapped by a dishonest lender, who've paid back double or triple what they took out but the lender keeps saying they owe more. Not to mention the lenders who'll claim you never paid when you did, or threaten your kids to get you to pay it back, or refuse to take payment in paper. I've been lucky enough I've never had to deal with them, but not everyone can say the same."

Enric nods at the contracts and loans. Both of those things are Asmodean. Even it's true that Abadar has less evil versions of them, right now the land is full of the Asmodean versions.

"Don't know if we can actually do it, but land. Without any way to support himself or his family, most will end up an indenture or serf again, just to eat." 

"There's a lot of ways to do land reform. I've never thought of a particular reform plan that seemed like it would stick. And... I think it's maybe the worst time to try, since there's a lot of nobles, especially the new halfway-decent ones, who have nothing but land and are trying to rebuild things."

"I read a pamphlet last week that suggested each family should just be allowed to own the land they were farming. It sounded pretty reasonable to me, if you could get people to vote for it, but probably the nobles wouldn't... And my mom wasn't a farmer, so I don't actually know if it'd work."

"You could allow tenant farmers without making them be serfs, if you can't pass land reform."

"Ending serfdom seems like a fight worth picking. I don't know that it'll win, a lot of people suck, but it really ought to, and I think it's the kind of thing where being strategic can get it over the line."

"Do we know what exactly we mean by that? Inherited contracts? Contract terms for longer than a certain number of years?"