"That isn't remotely recent enough to tell you anything about modern politics. And even if it had been last week, Chanai thinks it didn't call for a majority of humans to get involved, and doesn't think it would have been very easy to pull off being surgical about it even if they'd wanted to leave the better half of them with their powers, and I'd trust his guess about that kind of thing."

"Okay, so more like 'small circle of archmages' than like 'widespread consensus'."

"Probably somewhere in between. Maybe more of a large circle of archmages."

"On Golarion you don't get large circles of archmages, even single archmages are really rare, but maybe less so here."

"Do we mean the same thing by 'archmage' given that we have different kinds of magic in the first place?"

"Probably not, that's just why my mind went there. What do you mean by 'archmage'? Do you even meaningfully differ in power levels?"

"I mean people who've studied magic in enough detail that they can invent new spells without much guess-and-check, their spells don't leave you feeling unreal, and you couldn't trick them into thinking a spell does something other than what it does. Humans do vary in how many spells we can have prepared at once but most of the difference in power comes from differences in your budget for materials."

"Okay, yeah, then you don't have archmages in the way I mean it."

"How do you mean it?"

"Wizards increase in power - not just knowledge, but also power. If I had a ninth circle spell in my book I couldn't prepare it, and that would hold even if I were as brilliant as, say, Nex, famous legendary archmage, and understood it perfectly, I just lack the raw ability. But that raw ability grows with experience, centrally combat experience."

"Amazing. That’s even worse than getting magic power from being rich."

"It might sound worse than it is - like, it's bad, but there is no shortage of genuinely bad things to fight and I don't think all of them are themselves derived from this incentive system."

"Sure, okay, in that case your planet sounds just perfect."

"Absolutely not, it's lousy in so many ways, I just want you at all calibrated on which ones are how responsible for the general fog of nastiness."

"Reasonable of you."

"I don't know if you want to hear more about it or nah."

"I'm interested but I know you can only say so many things in a day."

"Yeah, but every day is another opportunity to say things and we might as well use this spell since it's already running. Ask away."

"Well, what is the worst thing about your world?"

"Gigantic planar rift letting in hordes of demons held back only by huge budgetary outlays by some nearby countries who hate each other's guts. Or possibly the universe-annihilating monster sealed up inside the planet but it's dormant lately."

"Wow. And here I thought polio was bad."

"We have that too! Though rich people can get it magically healed."

"That sounds better than 'rich people can swap with someone healthier'."

"That we don't have but, like, I'm not actually sure you'd get a bad afterlife for accepting a lottery to be somebody's younger vessel, so it might be fine."

"...A bad afterlife?"