:And one that matters a lot to the gods. I guess that's - coherent, anyway. Abadar cares about Law because it's important for commerce... Do all the gods care about it, or only if it happens to be important for their main thing?: 

:Gods sort Lawful or Neutral or Chaotic. Asmodeus, Lord of Hell, is Lawful. So is Iomedae. And Abadar, and some other ones - Erastil, Irori, the lesser rulers of Hell. Neutral ones include Pharasma, who sorts the dead, Gozreh, god of nature, Shelyn and Sarenrae, gods of love and niceness I think, and Norgorber, god of crime, and Urgathoa, goddess of disease. And the Chaotic ones are - Lamashtu, the demon queen, Calistria, goddess of revenge,  Gorem, god of battle, Desna, goddess of wandering, Cayden Cailean, god of drunks... Chaotic gods tend to think order and expectations are bad and everyone should do as they wish at all times, or at least that's the human gloss on a god-thing that's probably mostly about something else...:

Lacie is scrambling for paper. :I'm sorry, I think I need you to say all of that again more slowly so I can get it down - that's so many gods, do all of them give people magic and have - plans of the general nature and scale of 'running wars'... I guess probably not Nethys if he mostly drives followers insane:  

:I think all of the gods have important projects and aims but I don't know much about most of them and some of them sort of have human-comprehensible elements or intermediate steps, and some really don't at all, and some might be giving humans misimpressions about their ultimate aims or just not bothering to correct the impressions we came up with...: She lists them all again, though.

:Thank you. Hmm, one moment...: 

And to another mind, further off:

:- Leareth?: 

:- I think she is leaving out significant elements of the gods - value and goal systems, or else Asmodeus and Iomedae who are literally at war with one another would not be in the same bucket. Can you ask her to clarify, politely?: 

:Are there - other dimensions or concepts that the gods care about?: Lacie asks her after a longish gap. :Just, it seems like gods who both are pro-Law can still be very, er, different in outlook: 

:I mean they can also vary on Good or Evil but even within gods that are all Lawful Evil gods disagree about lots of things, the dimensions are not, like, wholly determinative of what a god is or anything and they still have strategic disagreements and different values and want resources from each other and things. Iomedae and Erastil are both Lawful Good but almost completely different in what they want. It probably makes more sense if you're a god.:

:- Can you, er, unpack 'Good' and 'Evil' and...how much the god-version is different or counterintuitive compared to the, uh, common sense human meaning of the words?: 

:Uh, it doesn't not correspond at all but the standard is set in place where most stuff is Evil, the best way to not be Evil is to just try to not take actions that have large-scale effects on the world at all. Or to worship a Good god, lots of stuff that'd otherwise be Evil is Good if you're doing it on behalf of a Good god. Almost all people end up counting as neutral or as Evil. But things like, I don't know, opening a soup kitchen to feed hungry people, is Good, so if you really want Good you can just do that and mostly not do anything else and you will probably make it. Maybe. Like two percent of people end up Good.:

:...Everywhere? I - am confused about how all of the other gods continue to maintain a power base for more than a generation or two:

:There is a relationship between how many supporters you have and how powerful you are but it's not very direct. Asmodeus is the most powerful god by a significant margin, though.:

:Asmodeus is - 'Lawful Evil', yes? Is he the most powerful mostly based on his number of supporters or from other factors as well - what are the other factors anyway - also how does relative power cache out, here, what does it enable...: Lacie stops. :I'm sorry, that was multiple questions, let's do one at a time. What makes him the most powerful?: 

:I'm not sure. I think it's a mixture of - knowledge, he's one of the oldest gods, he has seen more things - resources, which are those accumulated over time - and he has more because he's one of the oldest gods - and those being earned today, which he has more of than Good gods because most people are neutral or Evil, and innate background features of the universe like, the Lawful afterlives are finite and take resource expenditures from their gods to expand, the Chaotic ones are infinite, the Neutral ones are finite but grow on their own, that affects how gods have to spend resources...I don't think the number of supporters alive today is a very big part of that whole but it is some part of it, and he has lots of supporters, though I don't know if he has the most, there are species other than humans and some of them are very numerous and they mostly worship other gods I think.:

Leareth is absolutely not taking any of this at face value at all. That being said, he's aware that he's communicating across a vast cultural divide - and also via intermediaries. 

:I want more detail on this: he sends. :Ask her what Evil's goals are, other than...'having goals' in the abstract: 

Lacie asks this. 

:Evil peoplehave all kinds of normal people goals. To discover new magic, to inherit a duchy, to run a successful business, to travel and see the world. The goals of the Evil gods - I don't know that they have much in common with each other. I know Lamashtu is the most powerful demon in the Abyss but I have no idea what He wants. People say Urgathoa is the goddess of disease? I guess she values disease, or one of its correlates? Asmodeus is opposed to free will because it made everything on Golarion much worse for everybody but I don't think that's because he's Evil particularly.:

:- What do you mean, free will made everything worse for everybody? Can...you define the term 'free will', I wonder if this is another thing like Law where our world doesn't - have this as an ontologically basic concept...: Lacie has a feeling it's not quite that but she's so confused and also starting to feel moderately disturbed. 

"So, if you're a very talented wizard you can make a construct-person who is reasonably intelligent and can follow reasonably complex instructions, but it just does that, it doesn't drift and decide it'd rather run off and do other things, it doesn't resent the purpose for which it was created, it has goals about the world not goals about itself. Mortals - used to be like that. They were a thing the gods made for god reasons and they were meant to do that thing, and they did that thing, and there was something that it was like to be a mortal and it was pleasant and satisfying because the goals and circumstances were aligned. And then this god called Ihys made mortals - the way we are now, instead, where people want all kinds of things and are very unhappy about being made to do things someone else wants them to and spend most of their energy pursuing little mortal goals. Asmodeus was upset about this. Kind of like how you'd be upset if someone turned all your possessions into people and they wandered off to do their own thing."

Lacie, for lack of any better response, calmly takes notes on all of that.

:I - see. I think that's not quite a philosophical concept we have in our world. Our gods - don't seem to interact with mortals on that level, though I'm guessing they find it inconvenient when we go having goals: 

She takes a deep breath. This - probably isn't the helpful or strategic thing to say, but she thinks she's kind of lost the plot here, this interrogation has just gone several levels more bizarre and confusing than she was prepared for. 

:I realize she may literally not know, but I wish to learn more about how 'Good' thinks of itself, here, can you ask. ...Also make sure to read her thoughts too: 

Deep breath. :...Does 'Good' have any philosophy other than fighting Evil?: Lacie asks. :I - assume they tell themselves something different, 'we fight anyone who has goals' isn't very, I don't know, convincing to follow: 

:They have been trying to explain it to me but they weren't very successful. I know that they think that they can defeat Asmodeus and that if they do this then they'll be kinder rulers of everything than He is. I know that they think that everyone in Cheliax is brainwashed and otherwise we would want to worship Iomedae like they do. I know they think that it's very very bad when anyone has painful experiences, even if the person having it is fine with it and wants the end result, and they don't think we're able to say that anyway because once you decide people are brainwashed then it also makes sense to decide they're wrong about what they want. I know they think that they're better than us because they follow weirdly specific rules that prohibit some ways of hurting people even though you can hurt people just as much other ways, and they have done that, and they think that's fine. We agree on the destruction of souls being bad. We agree on the Worldwound being bad, and are successfully cooperating with them about that. We also agree that more people should go to school to learn to be wizards, and that ideally people wouldn't get in trouble if they hadn't done anything wrong, and that it speaks well of places when they have enough discipline to not abuse their prisoners in ways that don't advance their goals, and...I think that's all the common ground we had run into.:

Lacie is yet again very unsure how to respond and falls back mostly on noting it all down and relaying it. 

:What is the Worldwound?: she asks when Sevar finishes, at least that one's concrete and non-philosophically-baffling question that might have a comprehensible answer. 

:A hundred years ago a hole tore open to the Abyss and now demons pour through it constantly trying to eat and destroy everything in the world. It's very far from Cheliax but the nearby countries couldn't handle it and a problem like that doesn't stay in one place so we keep as much of an army there as we can supply, keeping the demons penned in.: