"Profitably supply the impetus"? This is all rather abstract.

Trade services for services, or services for money for services, or do violence to the mortal whenever they annoy you so as to instill a dread of punishment, or make threats, or suck a dick, or declare your undying love, or cast an enchantment or get someone you know to cast an enchantment, or go through one of their friends or family or employers or employees or masters or servants who offers you more levers for manipulation, or take advantage of human social structures by suborning a king or slaver or patriarch and gaining some measure of influence with all of their minions, or position yourself as an authority: Asmodeus is the god of religion - of ritual and and incense and scooping tithes and favors out of the god-shaped hole in human hearts - if anything to a greater extent than Asmodeus is the god of royals in their gold and purple. Or do all of the above, or make a promise to do one or more of these things but renege on the promise. This list is not exhaustive.   

Every capability that Creation has developed is a capability that you possess; everything in the world belongs to you, if you reach out your hand and take it.

Uh. Wow. Okay. This is kind of a lot to take in.

Because, like, I was an Asmodean? I prayed and sang with the rest of congregation in the dark and smoky room. I paid tithing. And now you're basically saying that the Asmodeus views everyone who pays tithing as a sucker. This is shaking my faith. 

Welcome to the inner circle.

Archbishop, did you know any of this? 

I didn't understand well enough to explain it.

If I (now) understand Asmodeanism properly, the question I have - and the question I should have - is, "what's in Asmodeanism for me?" 

This is the first step along the path to understanding!

There's nothing in it for you. You're going to do it anyway because you dread punishment. 

And if I don't?

You take the express route to the Pit and we replace you with a different cleric. There are over a hundred of them out there. You're in a great position to acquire specialization and a negotiating position, but you don't have either yet. 

oh

So, the rule of thumb for dealing with mortals is this: if they're sufficiently feeble in comparison to you, and are the sort of person who either will give in to noncredible threats or who is perceived by you and/or onlookers as belonging to a group who as a general rule will give in to noncredible threats as long as you have a reputation for carrying out any threat you make (such that the threats you make are credible because you'd have to make and carry them out regardless of whether they worked in this specific case, purely for the benefits from maintaining a reputation for making and carrying out threats against people who belong to this class), 

If you have a reputation for carrying out your threats, aren't your threats ipso facto credible?

A 'non-credible threat' as the term is used in game theory is a threat which you're only making in order to coerce behavior. If a rational agent wouldn't follow through with the threat against someone to whom they hadn't had the chance to make the threat in the first place, it's a non-credible threat in this sense. 

Or you can think of it this way: if Asmodeus told the Weaver "I don't want to hurt You, but if You steal My gaolhouse ring of keys You will not find My most expedient ways of retrieving them pleasant to endure," that wouldn't be a threat, but if He said "I don't want to hurt You, but if you steal from Me, I will acquire that desire," that would be a non-credible threat (even if it were true (which it would be in the event, or rather, which it was in the event - I would not want to be one of the Larcenist's forks right now (if She's even forkable (most non-ascended gods aren't, or at least, not trivially (but whether you're forkable or not, you can't give in to non-credible threats or you'll just encourage people to make them at you (like, the Accidental God is plenty forkable, but afaik Hell doesn't even bother anymore, because We've got so many tens of thousands of Mr. Caileans suffering bespoke tortures already that Asmodeus has plumb saturated that aspect of His utility function))) - 

(Which is a shame, since it was a great scam while it lasted.)

- but that's a longer discussion and involves, like, fireball sneezing birds and things). 

...Fireball sneezing birds?

Anyway, the rule of thumb is that if you're dealing with mortals who are sufficiently feeble compared to you or replaceable compared to each other that you don't lose much from trying to threaten them or train them with operant conditioning even if it doesn't work and they get fighty about it, you should rule through fear, but if you're dealing with mortals who are powerful enough or individually useful enough that you really don't want to fight them, you should do something that won't fail catastrophically if it fails. If you think in these terms while wearing the phylactery, Asmodeus should have a reasonably easy time telling you whether you'd be making a mistake to deal with a particular person a particular way.

Now, undead. There's a sense in which undead are simpler to deal with mortals, both because command undead is second-circle for wizards and lasts days per level or clerics can learn to co-opt them with channeled negative energy and because most thinking undead are made by taking a mortal and carving large parts off of them or fixing moving parts in place (which doesn't necessarily make them simpler - a symmetrical snowflake is easier to describe than one that's had holes punched in it, even if it contains more atoms, and a working transit - uh, a working highway system is simpler to understand than one where some of the roads are blocked and you've got to route around - but which tends to make for a simpler mind). Mortals like calling undead crazy, which is a bit of a pot and a kettle situation, but there's something to it: animal emotions aren't rational but at least approximate rationality, because traits are heritable and Golarion culls the egregiously incompetent; start ripping random bits and bobs and tracts out of an animal's mind and who knows what it'll do.

(Not that becoming undead is purely subtractive - most intelligent undead gain mental stats and many of them gain bonus feats. Becoming undead adds predatory instincts, and useful combat instincts, and new social instincts, and might improve processing speed and memory, and of course it tends to add hunger and malice.)

The general rule for a limited mind like you or I trying to take advantage of an undead is not to be subtle unless you have a very confident model of the undead you're dealing with. Don't try and conduct an undead monster like a somnambulist by delicate or imaginary strings. Either put the mind-whammy on your zombie or figure out what the undead wants and arrange the universe such that doing what you want is overwhelmingly obviously the way to get that thing, and never put yourself in a situation where the undead could kill you if something unexpectedly sets it off.

However, you've got a phylactery of faithfulness and can bounce your ideas off of Asmodeus, and the advice is very different if you do have a confident model of an undead creature's psychology - necropsychology's bugginess makes a ripe field for exploits. Some of the more common exploits include that undead tend to have extremely low empathy, which, if they're not under the control of a progenitor undead, means that they can be easier than mortals to turn against each other or divide and conquer. The dumber sapient undead are usually extremely food-motivated, unless they have a different obsession; most undead have an obsession or three. Undead often have problems with extreme and inflexible beliefs or emotions - for instance, an undead might be either systematically overconfident, or pathologically pessimistic, and if an undead doesn't have a hair-trigger temper it might not feel anger at all. If the undead doesn't have incredible Int and/or excellent Wis and makes decisions based on how it's feeling in the moment, once you've identified a fixed emotion you can get predictable behavior - undead are sometimes possible to trap in loops doing the same thing with little variation (especially but not exclusively undead which lean depressive rather than manic), until something changes their situation or random fluctuations in the thoughts they think causes them to evaporate at room temperature (uh, where "evaporate" is a term which here means "decide to do something different") or a subtle change that's been incrementally building because an activation barrier spills over the top and catalyzes a rapid transformation. 

(These generalizations apply even to the more mentally complete undead like liches and vampires (if less so) and to some extent apply to outsiders and deities derived from ex-mortal undead even if they no longer run on negative energy (this describes a larger fraction of the demon lords and evil gods than you might think), but don't apply very well to undead which were never mortal, so, like, if you meet a grim reaper, you should throw out everything I told you and begin from first principles.)

While we're talking about undead, two of the shadows in the vault - one enthralled last night by channeled negative energy and the other either so enthralled or thrall to one so enthralled - were selected as empowered priests of Asmodeus and I'm curious what you think I should do with them, especially if the answer to this question proves to have been in the vision our god gave you.

These are new clerics, not Asmodean priests who were killed and enshadowfied?

Hm. If the shadows are under the direct control of a wizard or a cleric, I think it's safe to set them free - Asmodeus wouldn't have risked his selections being interpreted that way if it weren't safe to interpret them that way - but it's probably not necessary to do so. I have guesses about the shadows might be like as people, based on the overlap of how shadows tend to be and the kinds of undead Asmodeus tends to choose as clerics. 

Reebs is interested in hearing these, since it gives something he can check in order to evaluate the accuracy of Rachovii's guesses. 

Off the top of your head, do you know whether the number of clerics as a percentage of the population is higher among humans or among elves?

I haven't heard that there's any great difference, but I think humans have more, whereas elves have more wizards and druids?

What does it have to do with anything?

A human lives for seventy years, a goblin lives for forty, an elf lives for hundreds. If it costs a god to make a cleric, why would they ever choose a human or a goblin and get a mortal agent for a couple decades instead of picking an elf or undead or outsider who pretty much lives until killed? I can't get into the details, but it's mostly because a living cleric ties up some part of a god's power, and when the cleric dies and their god accepts their soul the god gets a little refund. The way the math works out, it doesn't make more sense to empower long-lived creatures like elves than it does shorter-lived ones who won't tie up your money for as long. 

So empowering an undead - who might get stuck in a loop and do nothing of note for years or centuries, or get buried in a land slide and get fossilized - is Abyssally risky. From this, I guess that the shadows that Asmodeus chose lean more manic than they do depressive. They'll be the kind of go-getters who realistically are not long for this world.

It's possible that they'll be more capable of changing their mind and incorporating new information than the average shadow, either because of luck in how being turned into an undead affected them or because of where they started from prior to undeath's changes - when Asmodeus chooses undead as His clerics, he often likes undead who can level as clerics, and being able to gain levels is correlated with being able to incorporate new information - but in this specific situation I'd sooner guess that he picked especially inflexible undead, who are unlikely to level but who have other uses. 

Another guess I can make is that the shadows will probably have been Asmodeans in life, accustomed to viewing Asmodean priests as authorities and as moral authorities, and that as undead they've fixated on that, or that they have some other strong reason to throw in with Asmodeus and do what we say, like being more afraid of dying in the Abyss than they are afraid of torment in Hell. Whatever their motive, though, I bet it's a fixed point in their psychology and would be incredibly hard to sway them from. 

In terms of personality and priorities, I can only make one confident guess. Asmodeus takes all kinds, but since a new-minted shadow is unlikely to be Lawful, they'll need to be dispositionally or intellectually Asmodean in other ways. Taking the Venn diagram of shadows and the kinds of undead that Asmodeus likes to choose as clerics, I bet they're sadistic, vengeful egomaniacs. 

They might have other Asmodean traits or views or priorities in addition to this or instead.

This is... encouraging, actually.

Reebs is definitely not chomping at the bit to loose the manic, inflexible, sadistic, vengeful, narcissistic shadows, but, hey, apparently if he does, at least they're expected to obey him. He'll talk to the shadows later and learn why they're loyal, and give them orders for if they find themselves suddenly free.