"Yeah, it does. They're somewhat uncommon but we did a bunch of adventuring with one a couple years back, trying to stop this cult. I'm not surprised you can't create water, Mahdi can't either, arcane and divine magic just allow different stuff in some cases and all arcane conjuration spells that do straight-up creation are temporary.  - also I was talking with Yfandes and it sounds like your world doesn't have the concept of alignment, probably because of the lack of divine magic? So we should explain that, it's important -"

"Er, right." Vanyel listens. 

"Hagan should help me out because we have theological disagreements you should probably hear both sides of -"

"When you die, you go to the god of the dead, Pharasma, and she judges you based on how your actions in life pulled the material world towards the - forces the gods think in. There are two of them, Good and Law. Good is - uh, defending the innocent, feeding the hungry, fighting evil, trying to improve the world. Law is - obeying the rules, keeping your word, doing your duty, respecting authority - but not exactly, because they're god concepts, and the human concepts you'd be using if you didn't have magic access to what the gods think would probably be kind of different."

Nod. "It sounds like your gods still think in concepts that are, er, a lot closer to human concepts than how our gods think. Which I guess would make sense, if they talk to people and directly work through them more. Anyway, um, Fazil, what's your stance on it?" 

"Haven't gotten too far into the stuff we disagree on yet but - the opposite of Good is Evil, the opposite of Law is Chaos, and you can also be - mixed, on an axis, or indifferent to it. Abadar is a lawful neutral god. This might seem odd because Good and Evil are sure a thing to be indifferent between, but - Abadar is the god of trade, of markets, and markets are neutral tools. You can sell healing and you can sell slaves. And yet - and yet when people can trade enough with each other you get valuable things, important things, somehow, despite the utter neutrality of every trade, because people only bother to do the ones that get them things they want. And so the world can end up more shaped like - things people want - without any Good having happened at any point, and that matters."

"Huh! You know, there's someone in my world who in general isn't a fan of gods at all, but - would be quite intrigued by a god of trade, of all things!" 

"Abadar is the best god! Though, I would think so."

"Osirion's Abadar's pet project."

"He selects the pharaoh and makes the pharaoh an aspect of Him. It's the most directly a country is ruled by a god except arguably Cheliax, which is ruled by Hell."

" - we should explain Hell. So, you die, you go to Pharasma, you get judged based on how you lived your life. Mahdi's lawful neutral and would go to Axis, the city of cities, it's where most people in Osirion go. Fazil's lawful good and would go to Heaven unless Abadar can, like, ask for him anyway, or unless he stops being good at some point, it's sort of unclear. Heaven is the lawful good afterlife, it is the base of organized opposition to evil in the universe, it has - armies, and an entire pocket dimension for debating ethics more usefully, and probably some other stuff but we know much less about it than Axis because Abadar enables safe tourism in Axis and most of the Outer Planes are not remotely safe for tourism. 

If you're lawful evil, you go to Hell and get tortured for thousands of years."

"Ack!" 

:That's... Um. That's horrible! And there's an entire country ruled by Hell? Do I even want to know about their international policy?: 

"Cheliax is the largest power in Avistan. They're not expanding right now but if they decided to it's not totally clear who could stop them, maybe everyone else working together but people are terrible at working together. Right now they seem content to aggressively grow their population of people damned to Hell when they die and to contribute the bulk of the forces stopping the Worldwound from expanding, such that it would also be kind of a humanitarian disaster to topple them even if someone had a way to do it."

:Gah. I hate it: 

It's probably noticeable from Vanyel's face that he's thinking about whether he's powerful enough to conquer Cheliax, regardless of whether that would even be a good idea. He probably isn't powerful enough anyway. Maybe Leareth– nope, that is an insane idea. 

"Anyway. There's also a neutral good afterlife, and a neutral one, and a neutral evil one, and a chaotic good one, and a chaotic neutral one, and a chaotic evil one - the Abyss, which we've mentioned. All the evil afterlives suck. All the neutral afterlives are, like, mostly fine for the sort of person who goes to them. All the good afterlives are - well, they attract the sort of people whose biggest objection to the neutral afterlives is 'but we can't do anything about Hell? that's terrible."

"You're Neutral Good," he tells Vanyel. "And you're Lawful Good," to Yfandes.

"I guess I am the sort of person who would object to being shoved in an afterlife where I couldn't fight Hell. Anyway - you can just tell by looking at people?" He's a bit surprised that he isn't Lawful per their system just by dint of being a Herald. 

"There's a spell for it, but it doesn't work on most people because most people haven't - tugged the world very much in any direction of interest to the gods. Powerful people will reliably show up to it, though - politically powerful works, not just magically powerful. I have the permanent version of the spell because it's - it's not always the right answer to the question 'who do I want to help, here' but it is a lot of evidence. The cleric in the village said she cast it last night, and if it had informed her that both of you were Evil she'd have been much more cautious. Or if the dragon hadn't been Lawful - actually why did you trust the dragon to keep its end of the deal, I trusted it because it was Lawful -"

"...I mean, I didn't entirely trust it to. I did put up a lot of magical detection and some protections on the village, so if it does break its end of the deal, I may not be able to get there fast enough to save the villagers but I'm a lot more confident I can kill it with advance preparation. Since I got a good look at its magic. I told it that I'd know if it kept to the deal." 

"Huh, I guess that makes sense. I'd expect it to keep its end of the deal. If nothing else you must've left an impression."

"That's a relief. I think I could take it on if I had to but that doesn't mean I want to fight it. It'd be exhausting and also, I don't know, I don't like killing people even when they're doing bad things? I guess arguably I have an ethical obligation to, if it's going to go off and eat a lot of people somewhere else, but - I didn't feel like making that call on the spot. I might keep an eye on it with Farsight." 

"They should put you on a poster for Neutral Good."

Vanyel makes a face.