Aroden does not often think "that's adorable" but that is, in fact, adorable. 

...He thinks Cayden Cailean can do the thing He wants to do, and - relate to His clerics as friends. It's not completely different in character than what Aroden wants, of relating to His clerics as allies, not servants. And the Starstone is - better, now, it's been through several rounds of upgrades since Aroden's own ascension. This is the first time He's had a chance to test several of those - Norgorber was too soon, and not even aiming for the same things - and Aroden is pleased with the result. 

(He doesn't exactly regret not waiting longer before His own ascension; it's harder to make progress on ascension-related research while not a god, even if one is very enhanced. But He was, in fact, less able to retain a humanlike interface than Cayden Cailean ought to be able to pull off.) 

Here's how picking a cleric works! It takes attention and resources but it's handled through a specialized interface that would be intuitive if any of Cayden Cailean's new sensory modalities and new equivalents-of-limbs were more intuitive in general. Here's how to send clerics their daily spells! You can give them the ones they ask for, which is what gods usually default to for efficiency's sake, or you can give them spells they didn't ask for but where Foresight shows they'll end up being needed that day. (This is more expensive but not absurdly so.) 

Here is how the Commune interface works! It won't be relevant until Cayden Cailean has at least one fifth-circle cleric. He could in theory boost someone to fifth circle immediately, if He wants, but it's a lot more expensive to empower clerics all at once like that, rather than boosting them to higher circles as they go about the world doing the kinds of thing that also make wizards or fighters more powerful. 

Most of the never-human gods find the Commune interface really frustrating. It's nearly impossible to cram down godconcepts to a degree where you can provide yes-or-no answers to natural-language questions without being terribly misleading, but your mortals will hate it if every answer is always IT'S COMPLICATED. Aroden has a somewhat better sense of how mortals think and will interpret His answers, which makes it easier. Maybe Cayden Cailean will be even better at it! 

Cayden is going to be responsible and practical and get more used to his godsenses before he clerics anyone. 

... ... ...uh, Aroden, Cayden has a little bit of a problem. 

(Aroden has not been paying quite as much attention to Cayden Cailean after sending over the information-packets for him to poke through, because he does kind of have other priorities.) 

....Yes? 

Cayden is apparently the god of alcohol????????

Hmm. Is that particularly surprising? Did he or did he not have a go at the Starstone while literally drunk Aroden is not going to rub this in any more. 

It's not already taken as part of another god's portfolio, as far as Aroden is aware, and - you know, it seems like it might be useful to mortals aligned with Cayden Cailean, to have a god whose domain includes alcohol and using it in a way that is good for mortal flourishing and freedom rather than...not that. Aroden is not really speaking as an expert here, to be clear. 

It's not surprising. He's spent more of his adult life drunk than sober, probably even if you include the time he spent asleep, if you make some reasonable assumptions about how long it takes to clear alcohol from your system.

It's just-- he doesn't want to be the god of booze? This is not, in fact, the feature of the universe he wants to see? He doesn't want to figure out how to do good for the world through knowing the location and fortunes of every brewery and vineyard on Golarion. He'd like some more useful information, like, uh, he's not actually sure what's more useful than the expected weather conditions for grape-growing but he's pretty sure there's something. 

And... booze is a double-edged sword. It's joy and comradery and freedom from inhibitions that you're better off not having, yes; it's carnival, the time when none of the rules apply and you can do anything and say anything and no one can hold it against you in the morning. And it's dulling the pain of an unendurable life, which Cayden is not exactly for but he's against the unendurable life part and not the part where people do what they can to keep moving. But there are a lot of mean drunks in the world, a lot of kids with black eyes and holes in their shirts because their parents drink more than they should, and Cayden doesn't want to be the god of that.

You know, Cayden understands why Aroden spent so much time putting his mind in order so that he was shaped the way he'd like to be as a god! That is a good idea! It means you're the god of something you'd like to be the god of, and don't wind up getting your area of expertise picked based on your favorite hobby!

....Yeah. That indeed seems to be what happened. 

Aroden thinks - shuffling godconcepts, trying to pull together something that Cayden Cailean actually has enough god-onboarding to follow - He thinks that there was not, realistically, a path whereby Cayden Cailean ascended after first putting His mind in order. Aroden did not in fact see the Starstone attempt coming very far in advance at all, but if He had and He had tried to expensively relay advice to Cayden Cailean on how to prepare in advance to be shaped into the god He wanted to be, Cayden Cailean would probably have told Him to go away? 

...anyway, it is what it is, Cayden Cailean still has a number of decisions ahead on how to relate to His domains, but what His domains are is fairly set at this point. Does He want advice on how to use knowing the location and fortunes of every brewery in Golarion to form plans that help mortals live the kind of lives that Cayden Cailean approves of? 

Or does He want to be left alone to think about it and try things? Or maybe to talk to another god? He might in some ways have more in common with Desna or Callistria, though as never-human deities They are going to be somewhat more disorienting to communicate with until He is more used to the intergod communication interface. 

...yeaaaaaaaaaaah fair enough. 

Cayden is getting good advice from Aroden so far, and is frankly a little scared of Calistria's response to, uh, all the elaborate sexual fantasies he has historically had about her. It's really not the sort of thing you expect to come up!

Cayden assumes the best way to translate "knowing the location and fortunes of every brewery in Golarion" into "people being happier" is giving the information to Erastil who already specializes in this kind of thing. 

Maybe. Aroden is not entirely sure what Erastil would do with this information but it's definitely worth considering trading it for other information that Erastil can see more cheaply but that is relevant to Cayden Cailean's planning. 

Cayden Cailean may also be able to get more subtlety and visibility out of His godsenses with practice. It's probably not literally just the making and consumption of alcohol. Aroden, for example, can at a big-picture level see invention and progress and things-being-built, but if He looks closer at a particular instance, He can get more mortal-level detail, to the extent that the mortals involved are aligned with Aroden. 

If Cayden Cailean tries going in close-up at a well-fortuned brewery, can He get more on the people involved here? 

Okay, it's not literally just breweries, Cayden was exaggerating because he's mad. He can see drunk people, and parties, and the entire process of making alcohol of any sort from grain to tavern, and high people if they're taking drugs for fun and not for like spiritual enlightenment or something, and the process of making those drugs, and banter, and pranks, and drunken fistfights, and songs with lots of repetition that people sing together even if none of them are much good, and sex that two or more friends are having for fun as equals. A little bit of visibility into theater and fashion, even though he can't see that very well, because Shelyn probably already has the area. He can also see some other things, which aren't party-related at all. Bravery of all sorts, bravery in battle, standing up for what's right no matter what the cost, clearing out spiders even though you're scared of spiders, bravery when you maybe should be not brave because the thing you're afraid of is jumping off the roof even though you're not an adventurer. And he can see freedom. Every tiny space that a serf or slave or child or wife or subject of Nidal carves out that's just their own, off in the woods where no one's watching or quiet moments knitting or stories where things are better. He can see escapes, runaway slaves and migration to cities and suicides and tricking your father into marrying you to the man you love. He can see people breaking rules and laws that hurt them, and those who are supposed to enforce the law turning a blind eye, and everyone pushing to change the rules so this won't happen again. 

...why would Cayden trade with Erastil?

?????????????????? 

Aroden will make himself legible to Cayden Cailean again, and try to convey that he...does not understand why this is a confusing question? Trade is how gods with distinct-but-overlapping values, and different domains, exchange information and resources in order to both get more of what they want? 

Okay, but they're all Good and, uh, Aroden-- Cayden is honestly kind of confused that Aroden isn't Good if Cayden is, there are kind of a lot of people whose escape is imagining being in Aroden's Domain in Axis-- probably that's why, a lot of people can't pull Good and so their escape is that if they don't hurt anyone and follow the rules then they'll get to live with Aroden in Axis forever, and Aroden planned ahead enough to be Neutral--

(flash of sadness that Cayden is not Neutral and can't be Aroden for the Maelstrom)

Anyway. The point is, all of the Good gods and some of the Neutral gods are all here for sapient flourishing and stuff? So he can just give Erastil all the information about grapes, and then Erastil will know more and be better able to help the mortals have enough to eat and drink, and then Cayden is better off because he likes it when mortals have food. And presumably if Cayden wants some information about, like, hunting or something, then Erastil will give it to him, because whatever Cayden is using it for will make Erastil better off because he wants mortals to be happy to. 

Cayden gets why he'd trade with-- okay, Abadar is a bad example, Abadar would do trade if it was totally pointless, and Cayden likes Calistria enough that he doesn't want to be a stingy bastard with her either, and he's not going to trade with any of the Evil deities-- Gorum! Cayden Cailean would trade with Gorum because giving Gorum more information only occasionally helps with the sapient flourishing thing. But if the gods are all legible to each other can't they just... give each other things?

Meanwhile, because Cayden can totally have two conversations at once--

Hey, Desna?

Yes?

You send people dreams, right?

Yes.

Desna talks like one of those rangers or druids who spent too much time in the woods and has forgotten how mouths work. Cayden instantly likes her as a person and not just as someone he worshipped a bunch.

Can you send my friends a dream like 'hey, I'm Cayden, I ascended to godhood, you're not going to believe this dream but I did in fact tell you before you found out from the Church of Aroden'? 

She does not so much say something as shove over a packet of information, the upshot of which is that conveying any actual information through dreams is expensive which is why Desna confines herself to symbolic kaleidoscopes of butterflies and so on. 

Man, all the rangers and druids Cayden knew would also have wanted to be able to shove raw knowledge at people instead of making conversation. 

Is it cheaper if they don't believe it? I don't want to make them believe anything, Aroden's got that handled. I just want them to know I didn't forget about them now that I'm a god. 

Yes. 

Okay, uh, great. I know this is a favor for me so I'm not expecting you to do it for free or anything, just take whatever amount of my intervention budget you think is reasonable and do some kind of non-information-conveying-but-definitely-me dream? I want to learn how to send dreams but this is a bit time-sensitive.  

Yes. 

....So there's apparently kind of a lot to unpack there, which Aroden will do his best to do. 

It's true that you need to be less careful about trade with Good and Neutral gods. It is, for example, possible to trade with Asmodeus, He is after all a Lawful god, but Cayden should generally not attempt this, and go through Aroden if it ever comes up. Trade with Erastil isn't adversarial; Cayden is unlikely to stumble into a trade which is actively a bad idea per His values, because Cayden and Erastil have a sufficient values overlap. (Trade with Abadar is also generally not adversarial, because Abadar is deeply committed to positive-sum trade as a concept and leaving His trading partners better off or at least not worse off for having interacted with Him.) 

In the non-adversarial case, though, trade is - fundamentally about allocation of resources? Which is a very complex problem, because there are just such a huge number of places where a god could choose to intervene, multiplied by all the different ways They could intervene - 

- and the advantage of conceptualizing resource exchange as trade rather than freely-offered Gifts, even between gods who are both generally focused on the flourishing of sentient beings, is that it quantifies the tradeoffs between different choices of intervention. The Erastil who receive a no-strings-attached offer (of information, of 'use my intervention budget how you think best') from Cayden, is less informed on what Cayden is trading off against, by offering that instead of doing a different thing, and Erastil - who wants to continue to have a positive-sum working relationship with other Good-aligned gods - wants Cayden to be better off for having collaborated with Him, and has more information about how to make that be the case if their exchange of resources is quantified. 

And, see, in the overall system that emerges from a pool of entities making pairwise trades, in any case where a trade leaves both parties better off than not doing that, it can be the case that no individual entity in the system has all the information about where to most effectively intervene, but they don't need to, the pattern that emerges is one where resources are, overall, allocated more efficiently, where the average intervention-budget spending is buying more. 

- okay, look. When Cayden Cailean was human, especially as he became a very powerful human, there are a number of cases where his actions were in areas that fell under Aroden's domain (or sometimes Abadar's domain, Aroden and Abadar trade information quite freely), and thus Aroden can assess how efficiently something accomplished– well, Aroden's goals, but now that Cayden has made Himself legible to Aroden, He can account for the areas of non-overlap and also form an estimate according to Cayden's values. 

Human!Cayden Cailean very rarely made things worse, relative to the case where he did nothing. But here is a list of over a dozen cases where Cayden gave away a powerful magic item, or stepped in and dedicated a week to helping certain people, and his interventions worked, but - sometimes paying a lot more for that success than he strictly needed to? Sometimes the magic item was massively overkill for its use case, or just not the ideal tool for the job, and if Cayden had instead sold it at its best market price and thrown money at the problem, he could have solved it and had money left over to solve different problems. Or in many cases, especially later in human!Cayden's life, Cayden's earning potential as an adventurer was high enough that he could have accomplished more by hiring less powerful adventurers, reserving his own limited and high-value time for situations where only he had the right skills to succeed. 

Aroden understands why Cayden didn't do this as a human! Human Cayden was, uh, not especially high on Wisdom, and not a spectacularly good judge of character, and probably received a lot of conflicting advice on how he could do more good in the world if he listened to the advice-giver and, for example, gave them the powerful magic item to use as they saw fit. Aroden understands why human!Cayden chose a strategy that made himself less of a target for manipulation by actors who wanted to use his skill and wealth for their own ends. 

However, if Cayden had been someone who could trust himself to make the right calls when doing that kind of reasoning, by Aroden and Abadar's calculation he could have made some different resource allocations, and over his lifetime saved about 200 additional lives and prevented 50+ mortals from ending up in Hell. 

And Cayden is no longer that human. Cayden can check if His trading partners are manipulating him, by asking Them to make Themselves legible. Cayden has a god-sized amount of attention and reasoning ability and the-god-equivalent-of-Wisdom, and it's certainly going to be a learning curve but Aroden has now presented His case for why He thinks it's in Cayden's interests to pursue it.  

No, no, that's not right--

Cayden pulls up a concept out of his human memories. An adventuring party. When you have a long-term adventuring party and you're dividing the loot, you don't say "well, I was the most useful, so I should get the most" or "I'll give you the Staff of Tricks but only if you give me the Rod of Thunderous Force" or even "there's five of us, let's split it five ways evenly." You give the loot to the person who will make the best use of it, and that's almost never an even split. If the loot is two Pearls of Power and a Ring of Sustenance, you give all of them to your wizard. At Cayden's level, most fighters are walking around with far more magic items than most wizards, because the fighters need that to keep up. 

You might go "that's not fair" (and in Cayden's experience a bunch of Abadarans did). But it's just smart. If your wizard needs fewer hours of sleep to prep spells, then they'll be more likely to have their spells prepped if you're ambushed, so it benefits you if your wizard has the Ring of Sustenance. All of you are on the same team; all of you want the same things, fighting Evil and finding artifacts from lost Azlant and staying alive. So it benefits you if everyone in your party is as strong as possible, even if it means that you have less than other people.

Good, as far as Cayden Cailean sees it, is like an adventuring party. Everyone on the side of Good wants everyone to be happy and strong and free. But Goodness is a very complicated concept, and even gods can't wrap their heads around all of it. Cayden Cailean has one piece of it, and Desna has one piece of it, and Sarenrae has one piece of it, and Shelyn has one piece of it, and Erastil has one piece of it, and there are lots of pieces that no one has so everyone has to put their heads together to try to figure out what goes there. They specialize, the way that a cleric specializes one way and a rogue specializes another and Cayden specialized a third.

And it would be weird, right, if Cayden's intervention budget exactly matched the amount of attention the adventuring party that was Good ought to direct to Cayden's areas of concern. He might need to give his intervention budget to Sarenrae or Erastil, if it turned out that alcohol wasn't very important. Or he might need to ask for extra intervention budget from them, because he is a very small god, and he kind of thinks he has the best angle on the important "hit Evil people with swords until they stop, while not being a dwarf" intervention. 

You can't actually do cooperation perfectly if you're part of an adventuring party. Adventuring parties don't actually have all the same goals, people want different things in the long term even if in the short term they are all trying to unravel an Urgathoa cult. People-- even trustworthy, reliable people-- will lie to you about what they need so that they can get more cool stuff; sometimes they aren't even consciously aware of it. Most adventuring parties break up at some point, and you'll be fucked over if you allotted all your loot in the best way and didn't make provisions for your next group or for your retirement. 

But everyone on the side of Good has the same goals, that's what Good is. (A side thought about wanting to consult with Desna about how to figure out how much of his intervention budget he can fairly allocate towards selfish desires without being a freerider, he is not really the kind of entity who is willing to spend zero on his own wellbeing but it's not fair if Erastil is being purely altruistic and Cayden is spending a bit of his budget on taking care of his kids.) And they can check that Cayden Cailean isn't lying. And you can't retire from being a god unless you're Shizuru. 

So Cayden thinks that he's going to share with the other Good gods, and not trade, because there is no world in which he benefits if Erastil doesn't have information about vineyards, and therefore it would be weird to accept payment. 

He thinks that maybe this line of thought not making sense is why Aroden is Lawful Neutral and Cayden is Chaotic Good. 

Meanwhile--

Cayden doesn't want to be celibate!

Hey, Desna, so has any god... uh... figured out the birds and the bees...?