"I'll go hunt her up then."

"Kybele! How have you been finding settling into your new role? I've heard good things from everyone I've talked to, but that sometimes doesn't do a good job catching what it's like for the person in question."

"I'm keeping quite busy, but I like busy. I expect I will like the war part of the war much less but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. I wanted to run by you an idea - the officers are pretty green, but we could perhaps send some quicker units to rout a cultist den, get them a little live fire experience before they run facefirst into demons. Gaunther's game but I wanted your opinion."

"Well, let's see. The usual reasons not to do that are because it risks a defeat in detail if you're careless, and because every fast cavalry unit you send out running down isolated enemy attachments is one that's not scouting for the army, which slows things down and can increase casualties. In exchange we remove an enemy at our backs, bloody the troops some, and get an early victory to spread around and boost everyone's morale... as long as we send a large enough force that we don't risk losing it because there were more cultists than intelligence suspected - or perhaps with enough consumables to turn an ambush around on whoever tries it - the risk seems minimal, and this is likely the best time in the campaign for it. If you're just looking for a sanity check you've got it and the plan sounds reasonable, but if you want more operational advice I'd need a better sense of what exactly you have in mind."

"I'd love operational advice. I'd be one of the officers in need of battlefield experience, and if I query myself for how to go rout a cultist den, what I've got is that someone should tell me where they are and I should go stab them with a sword, which, while probably not far wrong, is not detailed."

"Hmm. The most important thing to keep in mind if you're planning a raid is to know it's never going to go exactly as planned. Once you've done enough to get a feel for it your predictions will get pretty good, but - people who are surprised and terrified can react unpredictably, and it's really hard to be sure one of the cultists isn't secretly a demon or a wizard or a cleric or just plain more skilled than you expected. Half the time these differences are to your advantage, but the more individuals your plan relies on to respond a specific way the more you should consider a different plan. The other things I'd recommend are to never lose situational awareness and to try and stay aware of where you are relative to your allies. The only way to get yourself killed faster than losing track of one of your enemies is by getting cut off and separated. If you keep your cool, keep your men from panicking, and make sure you have a healer on hand, you'll keep casualties to a minimum.

"As for more strategic advice... outside of the obvious like not getting surrounded, the thing I always want to know about an enemy base or camp is how my opponents expect to escape. In the best case scenario you can cut this off without them knowing and take them down as they rout, but even if it's not something you can do anything about it's important to know if they think they can break and run for it or if they're stuck fighting to the death."

"Okay. I should... give everyone paper tags, in case visibility cuts out, that'll take me a minute so it's good it's not occurring to me only in the heat. Do we in fact know the architecture of anyplace we'd be hitting or does that want scouting?"

"Reports inside the wound proper are always spotty, you'll want scouting if you can manage it. You might be able to learn details of some of them ahead of time without it, by divinations or interrogating captured cultists, but we don't have detailed intelligence on most of the hidey holes they use or we'd have tried to send a patrol in to clear them out before now."

"Can you tell me about how magic affects interrogations?"

"If you learn really important information and have to confirm it Abadar has a spell for preventing lies that's really hard to trick, even for succubi, but that doesn't help with learning it in the first place. For that part... well, inquisitors are ideal, since they're really good at spotting lies and some of the strong ones can read people's thoughts, but without them the main thing to do is get a prisoner talking and put up a zone of truth once you're getting somewhere."

In another country they might use charm person, but Iomedae doesn't give that out to her clerics and Mendev has nowhere near the number of wizards required to make it common procedure.

"I assume a principled objection to mindreading is not remotely practical?"

"I don't expect you'd have much trouble banning it for the army, clerics and paladins don't get it and there's always other spells in demand from the wizards at second circle. But I think the inquisition might object to not being able to use it to find cultists."

"Well, I don't command the inquisition, and am unclear on the scope of its authority."

"I'm not entirely clear either when it comes to the army. They needed to listen to the knight commander before, of course, but I don't know if that was just because she was the queen; they definitely need her approval to go after nobles, and are supposed to inform the army when they make arrests of soldiers. They've also usually come to me about problems in the Eagle's Watch but I don't know if that's because I'm a paladin or standard policy."

"And I'm no paladin and no noble, to say nothing of people whose welfare I'm taking on."

Irabeth nods. She doesn't really have much good advice here; she doesn't much care for the inquisition's methods at times, but it's hard to imagine how you could keep Mendev from falling to cultists without them.

"Do they as a matter of habit warn people they're doing this or like, sneak up on them."

"I think they prefer not to tell anyone, since it's easier to catch people making mistakes when they don't know they're being observed, but during an interrogation they might order a cultist to fail their save. It's will defended and takes about a third of a minute to start getting thoughts, but a good wall will also stop it and they have to be decently close."

"Are there less invasive effects that feel the same way about wall quality?"

"Detect Magic, Detect Evil... it's not all divinations but it's a lot of the short range ones. The general rule is you need an inch of metal or a foot of stone, but not all metals and rocks are equally good at it. Stronger casters might also be able to get through a bit more material, but if so it grows a lot more slowly than everything else they do, and thinner walls can still make it harder to determine exact details or reduce how far past it you can see."

"I'd like to check if I can make paper proof against this kind of thing."

She nods again.

"Nobody with sense will object to you wanting to defend yourself from it, at least, though if it blocks alignment detection they might want to keep a closer eye out for people pretending to be you. Succubi can read minds as much as they would like, and I've heard the Prelate grumble about the impossibility of festooning everyone important with gear to stop them due to the price."

"I don't mind standing in front of paladins to be alignment-checked on a routine basis! But it would be a convenient check for whether I can block mindreading." She tightens up her armor. "Check me?"

"...I can't myself, paladins can only see evil and you're not even even when you aren't hiding."

"Oh, I thought maybe a nonevil person still looked different from, like, a rock. I'll ask somebody with Detect Magic, I guess."