"That's a strange distinction to make, for us."

    "What would you consider a religious perspective compared to a non-religious one?"

"Well, for one thing churches don't lean on the WYRF nearly as hard to keep quiet about church abuse scandals," says Dave.

"The Interreligious Convention doesn't admit atheists," says Ramona.

"Hm," says Jenny. "You mentioned before that if you feel strongly about a cause you can be a cleric of it without associating with a particular god? If you imagine the members of these organizations as clerics maybe the Convention has a bunch of clerics of different gods who, though their gods have very broad interests, themselves specialize in protecting kids; and the Foundation has a bunch of people who, even if they are religious, would instead pop out as clerics of protecting kids without a god attached. That's a very loose analogy, I don't know if it works."

"It makes sense," one of them nods.

    "I'm sure there are people from our world who will want to work with the Foundation, but the Convention makes more sense for us. I suggested gnomes because their system seems the closest to your voting, not because they're especially involved with children's rights."

"Either one of them has a lot of stuff going on at any given time but rotates what they're concentrating attention and effort on. If voting isn't your thing and you don't want to sign on to their protest this coming election in... looks like India... you can work with them on something else," says Dave. "Avoid the runaways question till you-know-who's clerics are more socially acceptable if you like."

One of the scribes makes a questioning face at Raafi; he mouths 'later' at her, and then meets the eye of the cleric who's trying to get his attention and nods.

    "We can do that."

"What else should be in the FAQ?"

Ramona hmmms and says, "'How can I get clerical healing for myself or a loved one', 'what other magic can clerics do', 'what are wizards' - since you'll separately have pages for the churches you want centralized explanations for all the Oerth stuff here - 'what is a druid', any other kinds of spellcaster too, if you get books from Oerth translated and online you can have a 'where can I learn more about Oerth' link to a page to download those... you do need a statement about Ganymede, mayyyybe frame it as 'what went wrong on Ganymede' and answer with something like... 'due to a breakdown in communication'... ugh, it's going to sound so weasely. I'll think on that one. And 'can I visit Oerth' and 'how can I explore opportunities created by contact with Oerth relevant to my vocation or industry' and after Boccob does his thing 'what is the anti-WMD effect'."

"We can call it 'what went wrong on Ganymede'. It's perfectly fine to say that he should have waited."

    "Should we have something about the various species of people?"

"Oh, yes, you should, 'what kinds of people live in Oerth'."

"How much can or should they censor things? There are lots of kinds of people, for example, it gets much more alarming than dragons."

"How alarming?" asks Skip.

"Maybe not in front of the scribes."

"If you start with the highest population and go down, does that leave out anyone important or include anybody alarming at whatever cutoff would seem natural? You can include dragons even if there aren't many, just because they're cool, but other than that."

    "If we go by highest population on the material plane we can stop at just the common species, we're called that because we are. Maybe bring up orcs and goblinoids if we have some reason to want to explain that not all species of people are civilized or safe, they're common enough and bad but not too strange. If we go by highest population overall, I have no idea."

"Highest population overall will include fiends before it includes gnomes, we don't want to do that."

    "Definitely not, then."

"You can do material plane. But this is to buy time, you want to have warned folks before any show up."

Pelor nods. "We should speak with your - governments, I assume - about that, rather than the public, to start with."

    "If any fiends do show up that's a crisis worse than any volcano," adds the halfling.

"Yeah, you'll want to be in touch with planetary defense about that, they can brief their fairies and whatnot," Skip says.

"All right." He considers. "I understand that this is a touchy subject here but our world has underlying moral magic that affects various things, and I think in the long run we'll need to be able to talk about that to understand each other; is there anything we can do now to lay the groundwork for it?"

"Define moral magic," says Skip.

"This is a fundamental natural force in our world, similar to gravity or the four elements, or actually four paired ones - good and evil and law and chaos. They relate to minds, not strictly speaking to actions, though you'll hear our people talk about good or evil acts at times. A person is good if  they believe in a fundamental way that it's correct to treat people well and do things that help them; if they believe that it's correct to treat people badly and do things that harm them they're evil, and if they have no particular belief about that, or a mix, or do helpful or harmful things for reasons other than thinking that they're intrinsically the right way to act, then they're neutral between those two. The other pair works the same way, but with personal freedom and being true to oneself versus cooperation with broader groups and arranging oneself to fit the needs of others. We have magic to detect these states, and they're important to determining who can be the cleric of which god - I can for the most part only take clerics who are good, which is part of why my church is so trusted. The magical forces underlying all this can also empower creatures - fiends and undead are examples of that, and are universally evil. And spells that draw on those forces influence their casters toward the moral alignment they're drawing on, directly, in addition to whatever other effect they might have."

"Correct to treat people badly and do things that harm them, just - generally?" says Skip. "Or like, people who think if you do an awful job parking you kind of deserve to have your car keyed?"

"That would be a very minor evil impulse, yes."

"Can you... change... how your translation magic... translates things," says Skip.

"Not easily. We can advise people to use different words, including ones we've invented."

"Pitch me, crew," says Skip.

"Justice and mercy," says Jenny.

"Solid. We run into any problems if we use that for 'evil' and 'good' here?" asks Skip. "Obviously we have to re-run everything through our international department, for all the other languages, but in English."

From the appalled faces there's probably something wrong with that, yes. None of Pelor's party seems to quite know what to say.

"Justice is specifically lawful good," offers Raafi. "I don't think I'm running into a translation problem on that."