"My country was recently conquered by an adventuring party including either two or three archmages depending on how you count someone who's sixth-circle but one of the sorcerer types whose circles lag their overall strength, and also the god of trade's high inquisitor, and also our new Queen. They're at least most of them Good - the inquisitor is probably lawful neutral and the arguable archmage I hear very little about - and have been working with an arm of my church dedicated specifically to conquering my country because it needed doing. I admittedly don't know how much their colossal amounts of good deed doing could be covering for, in their aggregate alignments."

"Well, I wouldn't tend to look favourably on conquest, but depending on why and how badly it needed doing..."

"It needed doing very badly."

"I'll take your word for it." She makes another move. The theme of this game seems to be Weird Risky Knight Stuff. She's managing to keep on top of the consequences of her actions so far, though. "So people can do a colossal amount of good and a moderate amount of bad and you just see the aggregate and not how much of each there was?"

"If the bad was all very recent and the good longer ago then the alignment might shift to track the new habit but if it's all interspersed, yes."

"Hmm. That makes sense. It does mean that alignment is... a crude instrument with which to measure someone's character. But given the limited number of possible labels I guess I knew that already."

"Empowered followers of gods you can get a little bit more specificity - Abadar, the god of trade, can and does pick Lawful Evil clerics, but not ones who will cheat people, if they can still create water they're not embezzling, not even under loopholes that would let them remain Lawful to a detection spell. There are a lot of contexts in which I'd rely on a Lawful Evil Abadaran cleric and far fewer where I'd rely on an arbitrary person who read that way."

"Oh, interesting... and what might you say about a cleric of Iomedae, that way?" She makes another move, for once not Inexplicable Knight Behaviour.

"For some reasons of personal background I have actually had very little contact with other Iomedaeans. I expect there are commonalities and that Iomedae would not have selected me if they were not true of me but I don't know what they are."

"So you were selected, you didn't seek her out?"

"Yes. I think that's unusual but I don't know how unusual. Though 'Select' is the standard title for all Iomedaean clerics."

"Unusual for Iomedae or for clerics more generally?"

"I think unusual for organized churches. I wouldn't be surprised to hear that a cleric of, say, Erastil, was surprised one morning, because He's the god of farming and communities and is going to usually choose people who were focusing on those things and not haring off to seminary in a city somewhere."

"I think I see what you mean, yes." Back to Inexplicable Knight Behaviour. "So what are your plans while you're waiting to find out if your move to this world is permanent? We're happy to have you in the guest room, especially if you can conjure food reliably and especially if you're interested in helping me fight vampires and solve other Slayer-related problems. Though I'm not sure how well you'll take to a Slayer-related schedule if you wake up at dawn every day - I'm out past midnight most nights, patrolling."

"I can conjure food reliably but it takes up my only freely allocatable third-circle spell slot, if you want me on support casting and can generally afford to feed yourselves it's probably not the best use of the slot. I can go back to sleep after I pray for spells, if that's called for. I would usually say that if there is only one cleric on the planet it would make more sense to deploy them in a safe behind-the-lines healing capacity but if that invokes the curse I don't have anything against adventuring per se."

"If we deploy you in a safe behind-the-lines healing capacity and try not to invoke the curse you'll be healing... me, mostly, which seems less efficient than you healing me and also helping me fight vampires. You were doing pretty well against those two. Also, I wouldn't say one person who can heal everyone within thirty feet a few times a day is a world-changing amount of healing, whereas one person who can keep up with me in battle without getting killed might conceivably be a world-changing amount of combat effectiveness. What else can you do with that third-circle slot? Food is pretty cheap so most things are probably worth more than the food, but Slaying doesn't pay spectacularly well so if we run over budget on monster-hunting supplies it's possible we'll be grateful for the food as a backup option once in a while."

"The food won't last, it'll be gone twenty-four hours after I cast the spell, so it's really best if you're feeding more than a dozen people. Or some horses. But even if you're eating solely by spell you can get away with casting it every other day, and have a big dinner followed by a big breakfast on a day you aren't casting it. At third circle for combat I like Channel Vigor and Summon Monster III because you don't have to decide all the details till the moment of casting; Dispel Magic, if you're fighting casters sometimes; Greater Hide from Undead, though there's a weaker version at first circle; Locate Object might be useful; Protection from Energy; Remove Disease; Speak with Dead if you ever need to interrogate a monster victim; Stone Shape is good for fortifications but that does not seem to be the kind of operation you're running..."

"Yeah, fortifications aren't really a factor in this kind of conflict, since the people I'm trying to protect mostly don't know there are vampires after them. What does Greater Hide from Undead do and what's the difference from the weaker version? What are the limitations of Speak with Dead?"

"Hide from Undead ends like invisibility d- excuse me. Hide from Undead ends if any of the hidden individuals channel positive energy or attacks anyone or touches any of the undead. Also they get a save, so it won't always work. The Greater version allows a save but it'll be harder because it's a higher circle spell, and instead of it automatically ending if someone attacks or channels or touches an undead, they just get another save then. In both cases if they guess you're there they can act like they've guessed you're there, just not in a way where they can sense you. Speak with Dead only works on corpses, not undead, and gets - probably ten questions or so if I cast it, maybe more, and how useful the results are is never fantastic and will depend on whether the dead creature would have been cooperative with me in life, and it has to be mostly intact to be able to talk. I'm not actually sure if the soul in the afterlife can register the conversation or not. It will only answer questions it could have answered before dying, so probably not but it could just be another limit on the spell."

"We don't really know much about afterlives on Earth besides being able to guess that there might be some, is it different on Golarion?"

"Yes, with the right spells you can view or speak to or visit the dead. There are nine afterlives corresponding to the nine alignments."

"I see." Her Inexplicable Knight Behaviour is starting to catch up with her; it's looking likely he's going to win this one. "I wouldn't have guessed 'nine', but then, if they correspond to the alignments it makes sense... maybe we have a different arrangement since no one has heard of alignments here. Or maybe this is just the Ignorance Planet where people are ignorant of a bunch of things."

"Or you could have something strange going on, I certainly don't know about all the strange things that might be going on in the world. Check. I'm not sure not knowing about alignments would be in any way a barrier to facing Judgment intended to rule on one's alignment. Pharasma the Creator does not claim to be Good. Or Lawful."

She weasels cleverly out of check and manages to nab a bishop on the way, though really she's only delaying the inevitable. "I guess more to the point the one thing I do know about the collection of planes that may or may not be afterlife-related but certainly exist is that there's, like, thousands of them, which is a bigger number than nine. So either the rumours that those planes have something to do with the afterlife are false because the nine-alignments thing is true instead, or the nine-alignments thing is true for you and false for us, or something else is going on."

"...maybe many people are creating demiplanes? There are more than nine planes, it's just that the nine Outer Planes are the afterlife ones, and that's not necessarily exhaustive, there's a god with a divine realm in the Plane of Shadow instead and I think He collects His people there."