"The Worldwound did not end the world. It destroyed a country and required a lot of investment to keep contained, but it was eventually closed when appropriate archmages came along, and would probably have provoked divine intervention if we had been unable to make ends meet ourselves. I think there is a comparable portal to Abaddon somewhere in Garund but don't know much about it."

"I think your world has a lot more global institutional capacity to deal with that sort of thing than mine does. It's possible we'd figure something out, but I think the likeliest outcome if we got a Worldwound would be that it would be pretty much unopposed once it took out the current Slayer and weathered whatever the world's largely uncoordinated spellcasters could throw at it. Either that or a god would take an action about it, but I'm not keen to rely on that since I've never otherwise heard of it happening, present company excepted."

"So maybe dangers to the respective planets or large swathes thereof pop up at a similar rate and this one just has much more limited response capacity margins. Or you're absorbing a lot of divine intervention but none of it is communicative."

"I'll be a lot more impressed with gods as a concept if it turns out they've been arranging for the world to be saved whenever it needed that."

"Is there some other reason to expect you'd reliably be in the right time and place to intervene in things? It hasn't sounded like you have an efficacious global network of spies."

"The Watcher's Council manages to keep on top of things pretty well with a combination of spying and divinatory magic, and this specific town has some kind of ambient trouble-magnet effect that makes problems tend to concentrate here."

"Why does it have civilian inhabitants?"

"You know, that's a good question. I don't personally know offhand how I'd get them all to leave if I wanted to do that, without also telling all of them about magic - actually, telling all of them about magic might not even be enough, people tend to be really stubborn about leaving their homes even if their homes are likely to experience fire or flood and I assume the pattern holds for fiends - I do know that it's cheaper to buy a house here than it is in almost any similar town anywhere in the country, so it's possible that people keep moving here for that reason, not understanding that the houses keep going up for sale because their owners keep dying, because the unknown effect that prevents people from noticing the supernatural makes it hard to think clearly about supernatural deaths..."

"I suppose that makes sense as far as it goes but I'm confused that the death rate is not keeping up with the immigration rate if the place is attracting a planet's share of trouble. Perhaps you have a very high ratio of events that could end the world to events that kill a smaller number of people?"

"I'm also stopping a bunch of things early, like that vampire I dealt with during the mayor situation. And a lot of it is weird stuff that doesn't exactly kill people but is still pretty bad, like the time someone accidentally made a wish that flipped the world into an alternate history where it was ruled by vampires, and then it flipped back when the source of the wish magic was destroyed. That might actually be the worst one of those we've had, though. Often they're more like the time someone sold a bunch of cursed costumes that turned people into whatever they were dressed as for a costume-centric holiday, or the time someone reverted all the adults in town to the personalities they'd had when they were teenagers. ...those were the same person and if he shows up again we really need to do something about him more permanent than 'let him escape while we're distracted by his shenanigans'. We did fix it both times, at least."

"Is that a euphemism for executing him or do you have other permanent options?"

"I'm generally not in the business of executing people, because I don't have good access to a legal process more justified than 'I thought about it and the world is better off with this person dead', which is not a great justification for a legal process. But I don't in fact have much in the way of other options. If it comes up I will capture him and then think about it, and you are very welcome to make suggestions."

"The standard legal system is intractably unable to think about the problem. You clearly have to kill people in combat sometimes even if they are more typically the undead than living humans. It's good to be able to accept surrenders without this committing you to releasing people or finding a way to contain them alive indefinitely, because keeping them alive for even a few calm hours may allow them to reconcile their souls to a better afterlife. You should therefore probably have a process for executions."

"You're not wrong. Any advice for coming up with such a process?"

"Well, the process I have is designed for things like capturing demon cultists and deserters at a Worldwound fort and would require considerable adaptation but might be better than starting with absolutely nothing?"

"Sure, let's hear it."

"There's no Abadaran handy on the entire planet so you'd have to strike the parts about when people are entitled to the good truth spell - I can cast Zone of Truth, but it's invisible if people throw it off or not, so you can't rely on it as confidently - though if someone proclaims their innocence and then can't repeat that in the Zone that's certainly usable. But you need to put together a trial, and have in mind a specific charge even if it's as catch-all as 'collaborating with demonic forces', and then allow them some time with a spiritual counselor - which I am not, at all, trained in, but if you don't have any other clerics I suppose it might have to be me - to try to talk them through the process of repentance, because it's in principle possible to atone even at the last possible second and thus avoid the Lower Planes. Then you can execute them; long-drop hanging is preferred but if impracticable beheadings are acceptable."

"I see the logic. Long-drop hanging with beheading as a fallback specifically because they minimize suffering, I presume?"

"Yes, though I'm not actually sure how this was determined. If you are trying to execute something weird you are to go with whatever seems likely to be swiftest."

"So, translating the general concepts into the situation at hand: I should come up with a list of charges that seems comprehensive enough to cover whatever is likely to happen, though one of the charges might in the end have to be 'behaving in such a way that the world is better off with you dead, not otherwise specified' because people keep coming up with new ways to do that and I don't know that I'm imaginative enough to predict them all. I should arrange ways of double-checking my information that include making use of your truth spell while I have access to it, and - hmm - is the rationale behind having a trial that there's a certain standard of evidence one should need to meet before killing somebody?"

"I'd phrase that as something like 'grave risk to the integrity of the world' or something formal like that but yes. I'm not sure meeting a particular standard of evidence is always possible, there's nothing really stopping imaginative villains from getting arbitrarily obfuscatory, but they should have a chance to present alternative explanations or alibis, if they have those."

"Okay. So I should have a serious conversation with them and use truth magic to double-check their story if I have it, and use other sources to double-check their story either way. I... might also be the best spiritual counselor I have... which smells a little like some kind of conflict of interest to me, but I'm not sure that's actually a problem, I'd have to think about it..."

"It might make it harder for people to listen to what you have to say about the topic but if I'm helping you apprehend people I don't know that I'm better on that front."

"Yeah. I'll keep an eye out for anyone I meet who seems like they'd be good at that sort of thing, it could be worth letting them in on the existence of magic in order to have them talk people into repenting of their misdeeds. If it comes up. And then after the convict gets their spiritual counseling one way or another, I should use whichever available execution method is most humane. I can look that up in case anyone's invented something that's an improvement on long drop hanging."

"A lot of things seem to have been invented here."