At some point a man in chainmail pants and no shirt turned up. He has a huge sword glowing a soft orange color and a big tankard, and stops drinking briefly to answer.

"Birth control technology was lost in Earthfall."

“…what control technology? Do you, what, spawn eggs at random? And then, what, leave them there for everyone else to deal with?”

"We raise them, they wouldn't survive alone! But we have children when we have sex. Sometimes, anyway. And sex's too good to give up for responsible family planning, so we have lots of children."

“…if they wouldn’t survive on their own, then it really seems like this problem solves itself. What am I missing?”

"Some places people leave extra children out to starve, but most people try hard to avoid it, because it feels really bad to let your child die."

"The other reason is that dead children go to the Boneyard, where they're really miserable, and then they mostly go to the Abyss which is even worse. And parents who let their children die also go to the Abyss. People in the Abyss are gnawed by demonic locusts. So people who don't want to be judged Evil try to raise all their children."

“…what the fuck.”

“Boneyard, Abyss? Afterlives? With carnivorous locusts? And doing one’s duty is Evil, and gets you eaten by said locusts?”

"I told you what the fuck! The fuck makes children!"

"Doing one's duty is Lawful. The Judge says one's duty is to care for their children. The Judge does not have mammals' best interests at heart."

"Not doing one's duty is Chaotic, and killing or abandoning your dependents is Evil, and the Chaotic Evil afterlife is the Abyss. The locusts are not a strictly necessary part of the Judgement, they just live there and no-one has been able to get rid of them."

“Wait, are we talking about children or dependents, now?”

"Anyone who has to depend on you to live. Children count. The Judge says we're responsible if we conceive and bear them, even though it's not a separate voluntary act."

“…Is this Judge at all vulnerable to getting stabbed, set on fire, or falling down large distances?”

"The Judge is a god and isn't vulnerable to anything except a coalition of all the other gods. Where do you go when you die?"

“Well, I was reasonably confident of my guess of ‘nowhere’ before the last five minutes, but I really couldn’t tell you.”

"Can't you be resurrected if you die? Or do you just not remember anything that happened while you were dead?"

“…I don’t think so? Wait, yeah, technically? Only within, uh, a minute of death or so, though. And I think they don’t remember it like people don’t remember being unconscious?”

"If you could die for more than ten minutes, I could send a message to your soul while you were dead and see if you got anywhere."

"Or I could try scrying someone you know who's dead. I'd need a picture or something they owned or ideally a piece of their body. And they could try to resist me and might succeed. And it takes an hour to cast, and I can't talk while I'm casting, so it'd be really boring."

“I could probably get my hands on a corpse, sure. How much of the corpse would you need? I mean, I could read a book to you or something, if that’d make it less boring. Wait, why can’t you try messaging the soul of someone already dead?”