(World-destroying supervillains in dath ilani fiction are, by default, and absent deliberate subversion or aversion of the trope, negative utilitarians.  Dath ilani take for granted, in the background and without thinking much of it, that their literary characters make as much sense as everything else does on their planet; fictional antagonists are being animated by dath ilani authors who will grant those simulated minds at least the mental skills taught to children.  There just aren't many things you can intelligently want to accomplish by destroying reality, except for preferring that stuff which exists not exist.)

"...in stories in Golarion it'd mostly be for revenge because they feel the world wronged them. And the undead armies would be because the lich wants to be personally rich and powerful so he wants to conquer countries to do it. It...makes sense that since your society is so Good your supervillains would be too."

"I just don't see how being a supervillain* is an alignment-correlated thing at all.  It's an aesthetic, not a," utility function, "specification of what goals people pursue.  I wanted to be a supervillain when I grew up, and, while this was not a realistic life goal, nobody would have listed that as a reason why I was any more Evil than anyone else.  The guy heading up our Moon colony is a supervillain, his bedroom probably looks basically like this one but with a real sleeping surface and minus the chains."

(*)  The compound word 'super-villain' began as a fictional trope in dath ilan, but the corresponding real-life aesthetic and gender-trope and famous-person-behavior-pattern later took over as the primary meaning of 'supervillain' in Baseline, and the compound no longer means quite what its conjuncts say.  This Baseline term is now translating oddly to Taldane's cognate for their real-world version of the old dath ilani fictional trope, based on a similar compound which in Taldane has preserved its original meaning.  In Civilization 'supervillain' hasn't primarily referred to anything fictional since long before Keltham was born; and he's not particularly thinking about the underlying Baseline components 'super-villain', nor even that this well-worn formerly-compound-but-now-specialized term has components, let alone the etymology of the word.

"...so, most powerful people are Evil.  In Golarion. I think pretty much all of them who aren't part of some specific Good religious order. I imagine that's very different in dath ilan but wanting power except 'I want to study so much magic that lots of people come to my wizard tower to buy magic from me' is....you're almost definitely, if you actually pull it off, going to have - assassinated some people, ordered some children drowned so they won't be competition for your throne..." those are examples from a Taldane history she read this morning.  "And I guess you could do that while still intending Good but the sorting doesn't just pay attention to your - self-serving narrative - and if you're killing lots of people to amass power it's almost definitely going to call you Evil. And you cannot become powerful without killing lots of people."

"...because if you try Zon-Kuthon sends military squads after you and you won't survive unless you kill them first?  I'm not having an easy time figuring out what killing people has to do with getting power.  In my visualization it mostly gets you dead people, which, at least where I come from, you can't take a bunch of corpses to the neighborhood bartering-fair and say 'Would somebody like to trade me a lot of power for this bunch of corpses.'"

"....well, what you do, is you kill the people who were in charge of a place, and then you kill anyone who says you're not in charge now. And that's how becoming in charge of places works, pretty much."

"Assuming this works at all, why isn't the whole world ruled by the one most powerful person who can kill anybody else, who then declares that nobody else is allowed to kill anybody so that their world will operate in a quiet and orderly fashion and not go through a lot of annoying unprofitable chaos."

"Because it's not actually all that much more fun to rule the entire world than to rule a country the size of Cheliax and because there are a bunch of gods trying to counterbalance each others' power and because there are random ninth circle wizards who can't be bothered to straighten out everywhere but who make it very clear that if you harass the peasants right on their doorstep then they'll dismantle you for parts, and because lots of parts of the world are too distant and rural and low-population and speak languages no one else speaks and it's not clear it's worth ruling them, and because empires don't generally grow past the distance limit of a Teleport, if it costs several it's incredibly costly to bring enough force over to keep your distant provinces in line."

"I am willing to believe you about all of that but as a dath ilani I am used to knowing why equilibria balance where they do, and I am very far from understanding that here.  I get the basic point that, if 0.1% of a country's population is 90% of its military power, they can form an internal coalition and not let anybody else vote," assuming the populace hasn't otherwise been trained in the decision theory of coordinating their refusal of an unfair bargain.  "I could not then predict that this coalition adopts rules that look like 'if you kill the person at the top of us you now own our city'.  Why don't the 0.1% of the people with 90% of the military power form their own government-of-revocable-delegations among themselves?  If one person at the top has 51% of the military power it should work a way, which is them running everything.  If #1 and #2 can gang up to beat #0 but get beaten in turn by #3, #4, and #5, it would work a different way.  I need to play through some minigame for how this works with, like, six people before I try to visualize how it works for a planet.  What is the simplest case, with the smallest number of people all of whom are on the gameboard not just in the background somewhere, where you'd kill somebody and get power."

"Sure. Imagine a small village on a river somewhere, far north with poor farmland, maybe claimed by a distant King but he neither collects taxes nor enforces law so he doesn't feature in this story. In practice, the village is led by a priest of, I dunno, Pharasma, who is the only person in the village with magic; when villagers accuse each other of crimes, he hears them out and fines or punishes the one at fault. He collects a tax from them, for the church, of ten percent of their fields. Then someone's wayward son who went off to be an adventurer comes back, third-circle, capable of impressive things, rich with goods from out of town, and he is welcomed back by his family, until he drunkenly hits someone else in a quarrel over a girl, and kills them because he's an adventurer now and hits harder. And this is brought up before the old priest, and the priest says the adventurer must pay a fine and serve the family of the man he killed at harvest and planting time for ten years, in the place of the laborer he took from them, and the adventurer spits in his face, and then kills him too, and then says 'hey, from now on, I'm the one who will hear out accusations of crime in this village'."

"Leaving aside the decorative horror and focusing on the underlying game theory.  So.  Even assuming the villagers have no way of killing the adventurer even by cooperatively sacrificing themselves - there's a saying in dath ilan 'Anyone can kill anyone but they probably shouldn't' and maybe that's just not true here, in which case fine - and even assuming they don't all go 'fuck this guy's unfair division of gains from trade, let's head to the afterlife and leave him with an empty village' - then, if nothing exists in the world outside this village, if there are no hidden players not on the gameboard, then it would seem to be in this person's best interests not to let anyone else kill anybody and run the whole village for his own profit, until somebody else comes along who's stronger and kills him.  Which is the case I described before."

"I agree that, assuming the villagers let the adventurer get away with that and don't just leave for the afterlife, if one is a fourth-circle cleric, one could perhaps come in and kill the adventurer and get a little sad bit of power.  It doesn't - seem like something that scales.  The reason it works is that it's isomorphic to a two-player game where one player has all power, and the other player has none but goes along with an unfair division of gains instead of leaving for the afterlife."

"...your confusion is why the adventurer doesn't ban killing in the village? He probably does. He doesn't run the whole village for his own profit but mostly because that would be more likely to make people get fed up and leave, having to deal with one asshole who also maintains order is one thing but if he's also raising taxes a lot and picking fights and taking wives then at some point people leave, so he is limited in how much he fucks with them.

I don't think - I think the villagers could kill him by cooperatively sacrificing themselves. But why would they do that, individually, it just results in them being dead."

"So I was going to say that maybe you didn't have enough Law to solve that problem, but it sounds like you have an artificial substitute which would be fine for something like this.  Swear an oath that only binds you to action after you've heard every adult in the village swear the same oath.  Publicly generate random numbers.  Three people picked by the random numbers, or however many it takes, sacrifice themselves to kill the adventurer."

"Put up a sign outside your village saying this is how your village does stuff.  The adventurer reads the sign and goes somewhere else, so the people never even have to sacrifice themselves.  Other people hear about what a great adventurer-free village that was and say 'Hey why don't we put up a sign like that too.'"

"...so, in Cheliax, where children grow up understanding that they are Lawful, and that means something, maybe you could make something like that work. But in most places - people won't actually go to their deaths because they swore they would, not all of them, not enough of them that that works I don't think, and more people would just decline to swear to it in the first place because it's not that bad having an adventurer be in charge of your village. And some people'd read the sign and take it as a challenge. And...it's weird, so people wouldn't do it."

"I was going to say something about it sounds like you might have a problem that gods and ideal agents don't have, which is a key fact that I needed to hear in order to understand what is going on; but I am suddenly arrested by the possibly even more important notion of 'it's weird, so people wouldn't do it' which sounds like it would stabilize literally any possible behavior because if everyone does that then any other behavior is weird."

" - I mean, yes? But - but most weird things that someone smarter than you came up with and that you don't fully understand aren't in your interests, so not doing weird things is better than doing weird things, if you're not very smart."

"I may possibly need to think about that for a bit."

"You do that. I'm going to figure out whether they gave us a key to the chains or whether they're supposed to be magically operated."

They have a big iron key. Very fancy. Wizards into bondage usually use Unseen Servants, which can only apply twenty pounds of force but are enough for if you're not expecting serious physical opposition; twenty pounds feels like a lot, shaped right.