"I don't think you should teach people how to do that."

"I really, really don't think you should teach people how to do that."

"If you've got enough people running around as smart as moderately smart dath ilani, some of them will figure it out.  Civilization did."

"Hence, again, the Keepers."

"Fuck this, I'm joining your Keeper classes.  Someone in there needs to be the responsible officer about this sort of thing."

"Called it with 85% probability."

"What do they do to people who break oaths in dath ilan?"

"I don't seem to know, now that you ask that.  I know that low-ranked Keepers have sworn thirteen million oaths over the last forty years, and broken twenty-three of those, and that most but not all of those cases were due to insanity.  I don't know what happened to them, and don't see a simple way of deducing what the ethical theory of that would be.  But it would not involve threats, punishments, attempts to scare anybody off doing it again.  If what happens to them is that they get put directly into cryonic suspension so they can't do it again and eventually the Future decides what to do with them, maybe we wouldn't be told about that, exactly so that it didn't sound like a threat."

"The Abaddon thing - is sort of sad, you know?  People shouldn't think that's needed.  Shouldn't think that's how oaths work."

"It's - not why I would keep an oath, it's why people who aren't going to believe any confusing math words I say can know I'd keep an oath. It bothers me only in the sense that Abaddon existing bothers me. Asmodeus's working to make sure no one gets sorted there, and if He succeeds oaths won't - be less real - except insofar as people will have a harder time believing them."

"In Civilization, with rare exceptions, only Keepers swear true oaths; if you have a job like that - which, mostly, you in fact don't - you employ a Keeper or you don't start up."

"We know about oaths so that we can negotiate with Keepers.  So we can be a FairBot to them, if maybe not a PrudentBot.  And not be CooperateBot, where you just have to hope the other agent is FairBot instead of PrudentBot.  A true oath is between multiple agents, not necessarily symmetrically so, but each must know the other.  If we didn't know the real math inside Keeper oaths, ourselves, we wouldn't be a kind of thing that can meaningfully accept those oaths and do something conditional on the oath.  We'd just be a CooperateBot that maybe the Keeper would decide to be Fair to."

"If in Golarion you have truthspells, and Asmodeus never clerics anyone who'd break a compact, and swearing falsely on Law changes your visible aura in a way other people can detect, maybe you don't need any of that math.  Just - people who make promises and mean them for older reasons, more human reasons, and when you have gods and alignment auras on top of that, maybe that's reliable enough and you don't have to go to further extremes."

"Though, now that I say it, in its own way, that also seems a little sad."

"Or at least, what the further extremes would add wouldn't make them worth -

- people have broken the Worldwound oath. They execute you for it, obviously, and it - degrades the Worldwound oath, and the ability of the people of Golarion to come together and fight when the whole world depends on it, but I wouldn't expect that it weakens Asmodeus, it's not the thing He's doing. It'd be better for us not to have the power to destroy more than we already can."

"I see the case, yeah.  It still seems a little sad.  Like asking Golarion not to grow up, ever."

"...well, now that I think about it, when you have native INT 24s wearing artifact headbands, they're just going to know, probably.  Gods and mortals will have to deal with whatever comes of that."

"Golarion can grow up someday once Civilization is running it and all the kids get educated properly and there aren't lots of people running around who'll do whatever you told them is the worst possible idea."

"Are there, in fact, a lot of people like that?"

"Not in Cheliax! ....not lots in Cheliax. In, I dunno, Galt, yes definitely. Luckily they're not very smart."

"I'll try to remember to avoid certain kinds of trolling, in particular Terrible Terrible Advice, while Golarion isn't its own Civilization yet.  Asmodia, if I forget, you're the one person whose job it is to remind me."

She doesn't complain that she doesn't need another job because alterAsmodia doesn't have that other job.  "Understood."

"You know what would be a really bad idea, though?  Baking a giant cake the size of the Palace in Egorian, on the site of that previous villa that got destroyed."

"If that happens, is it evidence for tropes?"

"Yes, yes it would be."

"And - evidence for Conspiracy, I think, because it would be much much easier to do in a civilization richer and more competent than Cheliax, and the Conspiracy world would pretty much have to be."

"Spoken like somebody from a Conspiracy that's actually poorer than Ordinary Cheliax but putting up an incredibly expensive front for me, so I don't realize how desperate they'd actually be for my knowledge."

"No, see, a Conspiracy that's actually poorer than Ordinary Cheliax would have shown you the palace and claimed it was the home of a particularly vain count. Whereas the Conspiracy that's richer than Ordinary Cheliax didn't show you the palace at all, that's just some average-sized glittery building they have for guests."

"Now you've got me trying to figure out what grimdark purpose would best be served by showing me a Palace building of that exact apparent wealth level, and not only is this not what I want to be doing with my lunch, it's obviously what the Conspiracy wants me to be doing with my lunch.  So I'm not going to do it."

PL-timestamp:  Day 14 (11) / Afternoon

So has Cheliax actually managed to get him any domain experts like metal refiners, steel forgers, existing chemists, roadmakers, spellsilver miners, or people who can tell him about the current state of anti-epidemic prophylaxis in cities?

Or will he be seeing what he can do to vinegar, using Prestidigitation to try to make natural acids more acidic?  If they've even got vinegar, food here is kinda basic.

They have several of those but suggest the spellsilver miners go first; if it gets anywhere it's by far the most valuable.

The spellsilver miners have brought samples of purified spellsilver, in glass vials in oil because it oxidizes, and samples of the sand that spellsilver is most easily purified from, a heavy dark sand called monazite. They can describe their purification process at some length: the ore is washed with acids, precipitated, heated, mixed with salts, and then reduced with bone to get them in metallic form. You have to do the process repeatedly to get adequate purity.