"Sorry, can you expand on what you're imagining here?" Korva is familiar with the idea that in real life people will call themselves paladins without any actual powers, and aware of the idea that when primary worship of anyone is allowed, then people can count themselves as members of particular churches without actually being priests, but this isn't really enough information to determine how Enric is envisioning being a 'lay member' interacting with contracts.

(Honestly, Victòria doesn't totally understand it either, she just thinks it sounds like a way to partially get rid of serfdom that'll sound good to the nobles.)

“Instead of living on the land of your lord or whoever you’re indentured to, you live in or around the church building and do work there… this does need the church to have a building, but we have the old temples to give them. Also needs work the church wants people for. Tending to any land attached to the church, cooking for the clerics, keeping the building in repair, caring for the sick, all that.” 

”We’ll need to ask foreigners about what belonging to a church looks like when the church isn’t hell. I know it happens, but the only specific story I heard is that in Osirion, it’s what women who can’t get married do. They marry Abadar instead and live together in his temple, weaving. But I think there’s something like that for other churches.”

You can marry a god????????

Abadar is probably lousy in the sack.

Lebanel was an atheist and the rest of them have never left the country... Okay, Jilia can say a little.

"A lot of churches do things differently. I think Iomedae and Sarenrae are... mostly set up like Asmodean temples. They have holy orders, lots of them fighting, but the Sarenrites run orphanages and I don't know what else either of them do. Shelyn and the Elysian gods aren't usually organized enough for orders, and I think Pharasma's orders either fight undead or tend to graveyards and crematoriums. Calistria's people have the same reputation everywhere whether they're legal or not and I got the sense it's always the same amount of accurate everywhere too. Abadar mostly has everyone under his church - or two churches, Osirion is separate somehow - and they do merchant things, insurance and loans and selling Truthtelling. Irori likes independent orders better than a proper church, I think, we even had an illegal one in Kintargo keeping track of history books so they didn't get destroyed by Hell. And obviously he likes martial monks. What other kinds of things He considers aspects of perfection worth having orders about I have no idea."

"Can you say more about 'set up like Asmodean temples'? I assume that's... less concerning than it sounds......."

The duchess said something about how there used to be lots of religious orders, before. Korva hadn't really realized how nebulous her understanding of those was until she just now tried to think about what they would consist of on a policy level, but there's something there. Maybe it's an alternative to the crown labor camp idea she had in rights this morning - almost no one would ever leave a contract for the mines, but religious service might be something people would leave for, although of course it also isn't something that can be expanded arbitrarily far. ...probably. Erastil being the god of farmers and families, it's not inconceivable that an Erastilian order could expand indefinitely, though you'd need land for them to work, and she can already see Soler's disapproving face about the entire concept of organizing people according to what lets the government keep track of them. An Erastilian order expanding across the countryside also probably wouldn't let people opt out of any and all existing marriages, as a Caydenite one might, which means it might not destroy Korva's plans to rope men into child support. 

And she can't say she isn't having second thoughts about her program itself, after talking to the duchess and the other nobles about marriage. She wants men to take care of their children, but she doesn't, really, want all marriages - all families, as she's considering making other sorts of families illegal - to become prisons, the way paper marriages generally are. Maybe it's just that all of the existing paper marriages were drawn up by Asmodean lawyers, but - not being able to leave does sort of make it inherently more of a prison? Her parents' marriage wasn't a prison. Not exactly happy, but at this point she's getting the sense that everyone sort of agrees that marriages aren't meant to make you happy, after twenty years. They didn't beat each other or rape each other or turn each other in to the cops. They didn't leave, and they could have. They stuck around because they wanted to. And maybe if they couldn't have left each other, the other things about their marriage wouldn't have been true; it's not as if either of them was devoid of viciousness in full generality.

"Some of the resurrected nobles have also been talking about religious orders as a thing that used to exist in Cheliax, probably not exactly as they exist in Osirion," which is of course kind of full of barbarians, though she has to admit - to herself, anyway - that the ones she's actually spoken to seemed surprisingly reasonable. It's possible that she has a concerning taste for barbarians, given previous evidence on this front. "I wonder whether we could - give specific religious organizations approved by the crown the right to accept members, and dissolve those members' previous contracts, in accordance with the principles that were laid out at their founding. And have some kind of work or mission that recruits can help with, not necessarily limiting it to work that supports a temple. Like - it seems good if Erastil clerics can run orders devoted to agriculture and potentially accept large numbers of people in unconscionable contracts, or -" okay, every mission statement she can immediately think of for Calistrians is bad - "Nethysite orders can run teaching institutions, or Sarenites can run orphanages. And it'll be easy to staff them with people who want to escape worse contracts. 

I think what you'd want is a system where some people are empowered to excuse recruits from other contracts, but the people so empowered will generally only use this for obligations that ought to be broken, and if they think a person will be capable of the work the order does. Call them orders of last resort, or something, and have them submit their rules to the crown, and give them some kind of responsibility for the people they accept. The crown can give the privilege of accepting all comers only to the specific orders that it approves of, and believes will use the power responsibly. Maybe have them re-apply for the status every few years, so that the crown can rescind the status if they're using it irresponsibly. And then give everyone a right to apply to orders of last resort, and to leave their contracts and go to any order that accepts them."

It could easily all but kill indenture as a civil penalty. She should figure out what killing indenture as a civil penalty would do. For her specific program... maybe it would be good, if people who irresponsibly get people pregnant have the option of serving a church. A lot really depends on what orders exist. But - if they don't just let people break their contracts and then leave immediately, she can see it being an important improvement.

"Victoria, I just mean that they're mostly central churches with priests assigned to and tending to communities, and the rest is a minor factor in what they do as religions. Obviously what they do as local priests is completely different."
"...I like the idea of using religious orders to organize specific options for people, though, ah, I think it would go over better without Nethys. Better to have it be under gods who are good influences on their priests, at least politically and maybe practically, and Pharasma might be but Nethys isn't."

"If they have to be approved by the Crown the Crown could just not allow religious orders that are a bad idea, and it saves us the trouble of having to have a floor fight about which gods people like."

"Needing to get the Crown's permission seems awfully complicated. If one of Erastil's people wants to start a holy order, I don't see why he should need to get the Crown's permission. Erastil's blessing should be enough."

"Because - well, two things. One, I absolutely think that an Erastilian should be able to form a holy order independently. The crown's permission is to allow the priest to excuse people from their existing contracts in the process of joining the order. So, any Erastilian can form a holy order, but for the order to freely get people out of indentures, apprenticeships, or marriages, it has to be an approved order that the crown believes is going to be responsible and do useful work. I think that giving that power to every cleric of an approved deity - any set of deities, really - is going to be an enormously hard sell after the riots. And I'm not sure we want it? I trust clerics of Erastil to be suitably reluctant about letting people leave marriages. But if someone is an apprentice in the city and wants to go home to their family, I'm not sure I trust every Erastilian in the country to limit their permission to people who are actually going into holy orders, instead of just breaking large classes of contract for anyone who wants to leave, without imposing any costs on them. And if there's no record of who the person is or what it is they're doing, and the permission is automatic for any cleric of an approved deity, there's no way to stop them from doing it.

Second - while I'm not sure there are churches where I trust every priest to have good judgement about this, there are also a lot of churches where most priests will have poor judgement, or be doing something useless, but some will be doing good work. Most Nethysians shouldn't have the power to excuse anyone from contracts. But maybe one of them starts a teaching institution that consistently provides education to the poor, and keeps track of its members in ways that the crown approves of, and the crown wants more people to participate in it. Making it by crown approval - I guess maybe realistically by the approval of some agency that answers to the crown - allows you to approve orders headed by responsible people with good organizations and work set out for them, even if we absolutely wouldn't trust everyone from the church in question."

"I'm concerned that making it weakening contracts will make people require oaths of their apprentices instead, and then we're filling up holy orders with oathbreakers."

"Maybe. The paladin on the rights committee was saying that - I'm not entirely clear on who, but her order, maybe the whole Iomedan church - considered it an illegal order to oblige someone to take an oath. Maybe we can forbid it in some circumstances, or forbid requiring oaths to ignore a call to the church? I don't know. I can't think of a way to prevent people from extracting promises from people under threat, and then using that leverage to do anything they like to them. But it still seems important to have someone who can break off legal penalties for contracts that are insane, and - I don't actually see that giving that power only to the courts doesn't produce the same pressure towards requiring oaths."

Privately Korva does not really understand the big deal about oaths. (She believes in unbreakable promises for her, and maybe for some specific organizations, but not really in general; that would be ridiculous.) Though maybe one could adopt them as a thing that does the opposite of a contract, a promise that people care about but which has no legal penalties for breaking.

Obviously not everyone keeps their oaths, that's the whole problem.

One of Jilia's staff walks in and whispers to her.

"Korva, there's a few people my guard noticed in the taproom we might want to invite up. Delegate Thea Iroria, who runs a women's monastery nearby. Delegate Fernando, an elected first-circle wizard. And the fifth-circle wizard Lisandro, who almost read a mage's decree about slavery on the floor, but isn't technically a delegate. Any of them you think we should invite up here?"

Left unsaid: Jilia wouldn't be naming them if she wasn't in favor.

Fifth circle wizards do not really seem like commons, even if they were born that way. "Let's have the delegates up."

Why are they inviting an assassin. This meeting could really stand to have fewer Evil people. ...Not counting Lluïsa, Lluïsa is great.

Fernando arrives, his head held high and his notes on his latest constitution draft tucked under his arm.

It looks like the Archduchess is directing this meeting.  That’s good, she saw his work in the committee earlier so she knows what he has to bring to the table.

Thea arrives with Dia trailing behind.  She sizes up the room.  Korva is an obvious choice to have here.  It stings her pride a little realizing Victoria and some random soldier were apparently already there and thus invited before her, but Thea pushes the feeling down, as long as she gets he desired privileges through virtuous churches and no idiotic proposals get passed elsewhere the convention will be a success for her.

Considering the room carefully… Victoria might be a problem.  Thea thinks she’s made any progress on her, but Victoria did still seem kind of hung up on Thea’s past.

The archduchess is in fact, sort of ostentatiously, avoiding looking like she's directing it, as much as she can, what with giving Korva the head of the table all to herself and only sitting around the corner from her. But she's here, and no one else here has a title not granted by a god, so it's a reasonable impression to have.

He nods politely to the new arrivals. "Pleased to meet you," he says. "We've all been sharing what we want to see done at the convention. Porras here was just telling us about an idea of his, letting holy orders take lay-initiates who've gotten themselves in bad contracts."

That would provide a nice pool of lay-initiates to recruit from, so Thea is in favor!

“That sounds like a sensible idea!  For myself… I’ve been happy with the ideas being developed in the Virtuous Churches committee, we are taking our time working carefully.  We have a variety of ideas like Delegate Porras’s that should help the churches to help the people of Cheliax!”

“Besides that… I mostly want to make sure the convention avoids any disastrously bad ideas.  Some proposals have sounded sensible at first but would have very disruptive effects.”

Considering who is here it is probably okay (maybe even advantageous) to call out one specific proposal…

“For instance… the censorship law that didn’t get passed that required everything go through a censorship board that doesn’t exist or have funding yet would have halted too much harmless non-pamphlet writing I think.”

"Yeah. That was why we passed that mess through Rights, because we were pretty sure it was coming."