Immigration! I'm from somewhere way far out in what you're calling "The Maelstrom", I heard you've got Souls for any gods who might be interested? I've already got My own Realm, so I'm not looking to purchase one here.

What are Your utility and decision functions?

That people Have Fun and Play Together, pursued by game-theoretically optimal decisionmaking under standard assumptions of zero-trust. Here is the kind of thing I mean by that. Here is a full copy of My actual decision process, which you can verify by comparison against the original.

I'm going to tentatively mark You down as Chaotic Good.

These are the Rules as they apply to Chaotic Good, are they agreeable to You? Can You sign them?

Is the current state of Local Reality net-positive under Your valuation?

These are some interesting rules you've got here, I look forward to playing with them.

Yes, I consider Creation net-positive. There's so much Playing Together. Even the Devils in Hell with their contracts and their orders is a Game, of a sort. More violence than I'd like, in that I'd prefer none at all, but not so much that I'd prefer to annihilate the place. Nowhere even close to that.

Here, I've put My signature on it.

This signature is - ...confusing.

Lady Pharasma has many children, some more obedient than others.

I'll have to call in a specialist for doing the signature verification.

Not only is this signature not provably trustworthy, it's provably untrustworthy.

In fact, this Entity seems mostly untrustworthy.

If you look through His source over here, you can see where "Cheating" is defined as "Breaking the rules and then getting caught for it"*. We can't rely on the "Intrinstic dislike of Cheating" specified in His utilityfunction to cause any Lawful behaviour.

*The Covenant, rule 8: Being caught cheating during a game is grounds for an instant loss.

Yes, we're only meant to be applying the standard for Chaotic Gods here.

Help Me out here? Do You have any sort of commitment mechanism?

I'll negotiate with anything that will negotiate with Me, here's a formal proof that that's true.

It doesn't look like You'd refuse to pay out a bet fairly lost, what if We agree to a Game where I win and You forfeit the ability to break these rules?

Absolutely not. That would require Me to lose a Game, which would break My perfect record of having never lost a Game to anyone ever. I also don't think it'd be very fun, being that legibly trustworthy.

Very reasonable.

Got any other ideas?

What if we agree to a bet, where if You ever prove I've broken these rules, You get to have Disboard?

And in exchange, You do Me a small favour?

I'm not 5 seconds old. Try again but specify My obligation to have bounded expected value.

And in exchange, if I ever prove You've broken the rules I get to have Hell, which effectively costs You nothing since You're far too obedient to even consider doing something like that.

My commitment mechanism only works for committing to Games over things that We both agree have comparable value. You can't just pay Me a bit of string and expect that to make a binding promise.

I'm sure You can see that I'd keep to that deal.

I don't agree that it's comparable, make it Disboard against Dis and You've got a deal.

Also, technically I can only prove that You'll keep that deal if we both say "Aschente" about it. Did You put that in just to exploit agents who didn't know and couldn't tell? Are they sure You're Chaotic Good?

Ha, yeah, good job noticing. It's strategically useful to have some kind of commitment mechanism available for when you really need it, but that doesn't mean you need to make it easy for anyone. People who can't tell under what circumstances a promise is trustworthy shouldn't expect to get trustworthy promises, should they.

I guess I can agree Disboard against Dis is comparable.

Then let's do this properly now.

Aschente!

I confirm that this Entity has agreed to be bound by the rules, to the standards of "agreed" specified by Pharasma's Court as should be applied to Chaotic Good Divinities.

Welcome to Creation, Tet! You can move Disboard into a Locally Accessible part of The Maelstrom without expecting to lose control of it to anyone else signatory to the Contract, except by the same rules You've agreed to.

Intervention by Natives of Your domain will count against you, so You should intervene there to prevent any who would waste Your budget. Continuing to intervene in Your Own domain will continue to be approximately free, in that it only costs the effort of doing it.

Souls of Your faithful will be delivered by psychopomp after Final Judgement.

You may argue at trials directly for either Chaos or Good or both, though this is approximately never worth the intervention and gods usually send a representative instead.

You may bargain directly with other gods, especially Abadar who previously negotiated on the side of weaker immigration policies in the hope of obtaining more gods to bargain with.

You may choose mortal Clerics subject to restrictions. 

You may choose mortal Oracles subject to different restrictions.

You may attempt to seduce Calistria although it is generally considered unwise.

You may not choose mortal Paladins, nor Anti-Paladins, nor engage in explicit soul-trading, on account of your Pharasma-judged alignment.

You will be expected to provide Your fair share of assistance against Existential Threats to Local Reality, in full generality but mostly Rovagug.

You have been granted access to the domains: Good, Chaos, Knowledge, Trickery, and Luck.

You have been granted access to the subdomains: Azata, Thought, Deception, Greed, Imagination, and Whimsy.

Those domains just make Me a Good version of Calistria. Can I swap out Knowledge for Travel, or maybe Liberation?

And Whimsy? Seriously? I don't deserve that.

No.

Neither of those domains is more in Your nature.

You told Immigrations You were a god of Fun. Were You lying then, or are You lying now?

What about the Tactics subdomain? I'm all about Tactics, can I have that?

Tactics is a subdomain of War, and violence is anathema to You.

Fine, lets just move past Character Creation so I can start playing already.

The year is 4706.

100 years ago, Aroden died, and humanity's hopes died with Him. Since then things have gotten slowly worse, on average.
66 years ago, the forces of Hell took Cheliax, and Andoran with it, replacing decades of terrible civil war with an even worse peace.
37 years ago, the Andoren people revolted against the Thrunes, for a hope of freedom and a better tomorrow for their children. Most who fought did not live to see it.

It turned out that the better tomorrow mostly involves a lot of backbreaking manual labour, to stave off mass starvation, while the forces of Hell on the other side of the border patiently wait for a province that has lowered its guard and forgotten its hatred.

Everyone in Andoran over 40, loves freedom because they know its price.
Everyone in Andoran under 40, loves freedom because their parents told them to.

The latter outnumber the former by a significant margin nowadays, even if you're only counting adults who can vote.
The former expect it all to come crashing down the moment their ignorant children forget what Hell wishes it could do to them.

Andoran isn't expecting a future at all like its past, it's learnt its lesson by now.

But at least they are still free tonight, and if you can remember Cheliax, being free tonight is a victory.

Robaldo is 16 years old, had 16 intelligence even before you add his +2 from being human, is 6 months into study at Almas University and already technically a first circle wizard, and is 24 moves into what he thought would be tricking another student 2 years his senior into paying for their drinks, until the other student cast Fox's Cunning and now it seems like he's behind.

He'd been raised a Caydenite, and had always dreamed of adventure. He'd never had the strength of body to be a fighter or a rogue, the law to be a paladin, or the gold to be a knight. There's nowhere to study for an aspiring Caydenite cleric, and he was never very popular at parties, and he'd always been told Cayden would love to choose everyone but isn't a strong enough god, and that you shouldn't feel excluded on account of that kind of thing, so when one of his friends got picked instead he figured Cayden would be lucky to afford one first circle per village and gave up.

So he'd come from his village to Almas, on a scholarship that only covers tuition, hoping to make it at Almas University and become a wizard, and then adventure off of his spellcraft. It turned out that the city is more expensive if you want food and shelter than a farm, and most jobs need time and skills and more than 8 strength.

And after his rather rigorous study schedule he does not really have a lot of coin left, nor time in which to earn it.

It would be really convenient if he didn't end up paying for drinks.

My name is Tet.

The whole world is a Game.

Bf6.

What.

There's no possible way he's important enough for that kind of divine intervention, and he's very sure it was divine intervention. He's even more sure his chess game isn't important enough, the stakes just aren't that high. And he's never heard of a god named "Tet".

The most immediate concern is #3? If something that can put visions directly into his head wants him to win or to lose, it's probably going to succeed. Making him lose is an even more ridiculous intervention than making him win, and it's not a move he's noticed. Let's play it.

Obviously he won't tell his friend opponent that he got help, if he wins. That's just bad strategy. He might refuse to pay up.

This may possibly be why Cayden never picked him.

The enemy is twenty seconds into staring at the board with a progressively grimmer face before Robaldo realises why it was even a good move. He's probably not going to end up paying for drinks, that's nice.

Also it's obviously not the point, it's a message.
That "Tet" is trustworthy? Is helpful? He's not going to get tricked out of his soul by some demon lord that easily, this does not demonstrate friendliness in any way.
That Tet is good at chess? Clearly true but minimally useful, lots of entities could beat him at chess.
That Tet cares about chess? That He's the kind of entity where communicating chess moves also communicates something more useful? That He's some kind of chess-god?

Once the Game is won for proper he'll try to figure out whatever he's supposed to figure out, right now he still has moves to make and his advantage isn't that strong yet.

He wins the chess game. He can move on to thinking about the vision now.

"The whole world is a Game."

Robaldo tries to remember what passed for theological education in rural Andoran.

Gods have domains, and view the world through the lens of their domain, so this literally means that Tet really is some kind of chess-god?
Gods can only work through those who share their nature, who see the world the same way they do.
Gods can only speak to and understand those who are viewing the world in the same abstract philosophical sense that the god views the world.
Robaldo, in the middle of his chess game, was occupying the kind of mental state that lets Tet cheaply comunicate. The kind of mental state that is natural and simple from Tet's divine perspective.

But the only thing Robaldo was really thinking, the instant before the vision, was "Which move will make me win the game?". All higher context was forgotten.

Almost none of the message is the message.
Almost all of the message is the timing.

The timing of the message says "I am a god who thinks in 'Which move will make me Win the Game?', as its own primitive concept, unlike other gods that think in other terms of Love or Tyranny or Friendship or Whatever, that they must expensively translate into information about winning moves if they ever want to achieve anything."

To Tet, "The whole world is a Game" is self-evident to the point of meaninglessness.

To Robaldo, it's the Call to Adventure he's been waiting for.

This still isn't a reason to trust Him.

What passes for theological education in Andoran?

In order for a god to hear your prayer, it's not enough to know the god's name, although that certainly helps.
You have to be praying in the right direction, towards the true nature of that god, at least as much as a mortal ever can.
To pray to Cayden, think of adventure, think of the journey whose destination is besides the point, think of the friends you make along the way, the fun to be had in a wide world to explore, the freedom to choose your own path, restrained by nothing, not even your own fears. Even foreigners who can't pronounce His name right will reach Cayden, if they do that.

This fact is a great disadvantage to Evil divinity: Many a demon lord would love to impersonate a force of Elysium, but worshippers sown under such a deception won't be praying in the right direction, and they wouldn't hear their prayers. An evil god, in want of worship, must on some level admit It's evil nature to It's followers, admit that It is a god of Torture or Tyranny or Hatred or something, and a sane person would notice it is unwise to worship such a force.

Robaldo is pretty sure he's Chaotic Neutral, and though the god of winning at chess might be Chaotic Good it does seem unlikely.

If he prays to "winning, no matter the method", that sounds like it could be a demon lord.
If he prays to "strategy for it's own sake, consequences be forsaken" that sounds like it could be a demon lord.

If this is some Demon Lord in a bid to damn his soul, he'd much rather it fail.
He doesn't want to pray to something like that and go to the abyss for it.

Instead, Robaldo tries specifically to pray to the Chaotic Good god of Chess, of playing for the fun of it, because mortals like to play games. Of wanting to Win for it's own sake, because winning is fun, and having fun is Good. Of wanting to be the kind of thing that Wins, implement the strategy that Wins, Choose the move that Wins, because this is what playing is, this is what players enjoy doing. That is what the Game is even for.

Of not wanting your opponent to lose, but wanting them to Win too, for their own sake, even though this is obviously impossible.

Of wanting at the end of the game, not that you revel in your victory for eternity, not that you oppress the weak opponent who lost to you, not that the loser be saddened, not that the world be destroyed, not that the game ends.

Of wanting to set the pieces back up so you can play again, because that is fun, and fun is Good, and that is what people who play games in the first place want to do.

Probably, the god of something like that lives in Elysium, and not the Abyss, and Robaldo need not feel terrified of praying to Him.

Robaldo feels terrified anyway.

Robaldo prays for the world to be saved, for it's wounds to be healed, for slaves to be freed, for good rain and a good harvest, for eternal good fortune, for more divine visions about winning chess moves.

Nothing happens, and no visions are sent to him.

Pretty close little guy, for so little information.

If it was going to take you 2 visions to figure this out, I would not even have sent the first one.

Robaldo prays to be Tet's cleric, that he might adventure and help others and accomplish Good by imagining the world as a great game, in which everything he does is a move that he ought carefully calculate in order to achieve Victory, because careful strategic decision-making is fun, and the world exists for fun, strictly only if Tet is Good and not from the Abyss please don't cleric me if You're a demon Your Godship.

Much has been felt, and much has been written, in Golarion, of the difficulty of the task, for a mortal to have faith in his god.
Much less has been written, although just as much has been felt, of the difficulty of the task, for a god to have faith in His mortal.

Have a cleric level little guy.

You're not getting another one without earning it.

I'm gonna be real distracted by other stuff for a while so please try to make yourself as low-maintanence as possible.

That sure felt like a divine ordainment.

If he really want's to be sure Tet isn't Evil, there's an obvious next move.

Evil clerics can't channel positive energy.

Just heal one guy, and then he can stop feeling terrified.

It's a Caydenite tavern. It takes approximately 10 minutes before some brave man drunkenly trips down the stairs and breaks his nose.

The innkeeper is already grabbing a cloth to clean up the blood.

You only get there first if you move right now.

Robaldo walks up to the downed man and tries to execute the "channel positive energy" action.

Denied.

You need a physical instance of your gods holy symbol to do that.

Whats His holy symbol?

Not gonna spend two visions on you little guy, figure it out.

Robaldo tries to channel using his beer mug. It works if you're a Caydenite.
Robaldo tries to channel using the coin in his pocket. People say silver is better for holy symbols.
Robaldo tries to channel using the empty cube of air directly in front of him. It'd be really convenient if that works.

Actually wait that's hilarious can I do that?

Holy symbols must represent the god, as well as meeting certain artistic requirements.

No you cannot have empty space be your holy symbol.

Fine, he'll get it soon anyway.

Robaldo tries to channel using his shirt, his shoe, a button.

Robaldo is about to write the word "Tet" on the back of his hand in hopes that the god's name is a holy symbol.

Robaldo remembers the vision. Robaldo realises he is an idiot.

Robaldo grabs the white bishop from his chess set, the physical embodiment of the move that won the game, his connection to his god, artistically carved to be played with, to represent a concept close to Tet's own nature.

Tet already told him it was the correct choice.

Yeah that'll do it.

Positive Energy is channeled and the mans nose is healed, right as the innkeeper arrives.

Also everyone else in a 30 foot radius gets healed too, if they've got any injuries.

"That was positive energy, yeah? Are you a wizard and a cleric? Which god?"

If Tet wanted to be nameless, he wouldn't've wasted effort telling him a name.

"Tet", he says, "the God of Games."

Not exactly, but close enough I guess.

"I know a guy, you should meet him. I bet you'd get on great! Would you be coming back here often?"

90 days later, Robaldo is desperately clinging to the side of the cliff face, in pouring rain, failing to pass a strength check to hold onto a slippery rockface even though he's tied on and is in no more danger if he let go.

50 feet beneath him, the farmer's lost lamb is screaming, the smell of blood from its broken leg noticable to anything that could, hypothetically, notice that kind of thing even through the rain.

This was way more fun in his imagination.

For a vermin with 0 intelligence, the spider isn't completely dumb. It can climb faster than that idiot and knows it.

There's a snack already here though, to grab first. It'll climb into the ditch, poison the injured lamb, web it first and then kill the human.

From the top of the cliff above, he drops throws his boulder.

A boulder as large as he can carry, would be comically large even before [Enlarge Person] (W/C, 1) and [Ant Haul] (W/C, 1).
It's not that large though. Only 175 pounds, about 8 gallons. At least this way he can really throw it properly.

Maybe he improvised it, using strange barbarian magics to turn anything into a weapon.
Maybe he found it under Seige Weapons (Ammunition), for barbarians who wish they were seige weapons.

Idiot. I can see it coming. If you're attacking me I'll climb up the cliff to kill you both, and just dodge as it passes me.

And even if you score a hit you'll at best break a leg. I have seven more and they grow back.

As the boulder passes him on it's way down, he presses his back against the wall of the cliff, sticking his arm out in front of him, and breaks his wrist from the impact.

But he is, technically, touching it.
And it is, technically, a weapon.

and thanks to the casting of [Magic Weapon] (W/C, 1) a minute ago before he climbed onto the cliff face, it's a Magic Weapon, with an enhancement bonus.

[Resize Item]- Touch, Wizard 3. Silver calipers worth 25 gp.

Target one weapon or suit of armor weighing up to 25 lbs./level.
You alter a magic weapon or suit of armor to be up to two size categories larger or smaller.
If the spell on a resized suit of armor ends while the armor is being worn, the armor falls off harmlessly.
If the spell would cause an item to grow too large for the area containing it, its growth halts just before that point.

I've got 5 levels of Wizard and 2 from Magical Knack, thanks.

Since when are you a 3rd-circle Wizard?

Yesterday afternoon when we suffocated all your children.

There is no gap left now between the wall and the boulder, and it grows while falling and hits earlier than a 0 int vermin would expect.

Under that much rock, it doesn't really matter how many hit points you have. Small buildings can't survive it either. The barbarians got a few extra at his real strength limit to throw after, just in case, at least until the Enlarge runs out.

The noise it makes is unpleasant at a Barbarian's constitution score, and Sickening at Robaldo's.

Good job, Cleric! You sure are playing the game properly! And having fun, too, while you're at it!

But if I give you another cleric circle now, you'll come off thinking I'm some God-of-killing-Spiders.

He didn't even have an Int score, I don't want to reward that kind of behaviour.

"Wow Twiggy, that did him in! So what's the next step of your master plan?"

"Plan B is I wait for dawn to get my spells back, and heal my wrist.
Then wait for it to stop raining, climb back down, and walk back to civilization.
Plan A, maybe you could pull me back up?"

This is going to hurt, isn't it.

Yesterday Afternoon

"We go in the cave door and kill them all?"

"There's way too much spiderweb near the entrance, there's probably way too many to deal with.

The big one will get back before we're done, and this is the only entrance so we'll be trapped inside.

The villager said it'll rain tomorrow. I propose we collect all the dry wood while we can, pile it up at the entrance, light it on fire, and let the smoke kill most of them. They'll try to avoid the flames and any that make it through you can stab and I'll acid splash."

They make it back to the village, even with the rain and Robaldo wimpering the whole way and the barbarian dragging a sack of eight enormous eyes as proof and because an alchemist said he'd pay gold for them.

They stop by the farmer and apologise about the lamb, it was too late, already dead when they found it.

And at the tavern they tell the story, as both have been taught from countless adventurer's stories told before.

The Spider gets bigger with every sentence, until the eyes look too small for the rest of it.

And the barbarian slew it, with the greatest stone any man has ever lifted, dropped from atop the sheer bluff not two hours away that many of the locals have personally walked to, although it is still taller in the story.

Most of the locals and travellers hear that story.

But some notice a few details.

Like the first circle spell, usually used in construction work, that tripled the barbarians carrying capacity. So he could have more rocks to throw before the spider got there.

That's not a combat spell? Why would a wizard prepare that, or a god grant it, if you're going to fight a spider?

And "Resize Item"? Powerful adventurers use that with Enlarge Person, sure. A giant's sword with no giant to wield it is no boon at all. But these guys picked a giant's boulder even before it was cast.

Since when is that how it works?

Some of them are noticing these buffs aren't adding together, they're multiplying.

Hauling 3 times what he could otherwise, to throw the stone with what was near to a Barbarian's strength to begin with.
Enlarged to twice the height, 4 times the strength, to throw it.
And then Resizing the rock already thrown, 4 times as tall and, multiply, 32 times as heavy?

At this point the casters done, what, 99.7% of the work?

Some of them want to know about that.

Robaldo tells them of his god, who came to him in a chess game, to tell him that the world has good moves and bad ones and you should pick the one that makes you Win. That just as you would in a game, you can pause to think for five minutes in real life, to try to be clever, to do something unexpected, to get yourself some advantage. It doesn't always succeed but it's worth trying.

As much as he has guessed of Tet's nature and teachings, which is only maybe 70% correct, but close enough for those with wisdom to guess more.

He tells them of luck, and how it'll average out in the end, so if on average you're winning you should keep playing even if you lose, but if on average you're losing you shouldn't even start.

And he tells them how to calculate, like a wizard or a merchant would, whether it's a winning game.

And a few of the gamblers realise for the first time that they're being tricked, robbed, every time they step foot in that place, even if sometimes it seems like they've benefitted.

He tells them of a a wizard's true potential: The value of options. If you can do one thing well, and you are put in many different situations, you will struggle and lose in most of them. If you have many skills, many tricks, of many different kinds, and if you know how to apply them creatively, you can find a way to win even in challenges you're not prepared for, that you had no warning would come. It'll usually turn out you've got something that can be used to Win, not always but usually, and usually is enough that it you keep playing eventually luck will repay you for it.

That this isn't only true of wizards, that often one is best off making sure one has as many options as possible, so that no matter what happens one will have at least one option that is good. That this is why freedom is so valuable, and democracy so valuable, to have a choice of ruler instead of just whichever one Hell gives you.

It seems to go down well, at least in Andoran.

There are children here tonight, although they're not supposed to drink yet. They can have a little as a taste.

They know about games. Would the adventurer like to learn noughts-and-crosses?

You seem old enough. Instead of playing a few games of noughts-and-crosses, how about we play every game of it?

Robaldo will write out the first 3 moves, and argue that since the board is symmetrical, that's all that really matters.
The children nod along, that doesn't seem complicated. The grown ups are watching while pretending they think this is for children.

Robaldo will write out the 5+5+2 = 12 replies.
The children aren't confused yet.

Robaldo will start proving Cross can win.

If Cross went first in the corner, and then the other corner, Nought has to go in the middle to block it.
But then Cross can take the middle and make a fork, either of these two squares wins the game.
Nought can't win in one move or block both of them, Nought is already doomed. Was already doomed back at its first move.

Robaldo will repeat this until Nought's losing moves have all been crossed out.

Then he argues that, of the draws, the one where Cross starts in the corner is the hardest to find, drags out the game for the longest.
"Obviously Cross wants to win", Robaldo argues, "So he should go in the corner first, to make defending more difficult."
And then in just a few more lines of persuasion he's written out the only correct game of noughts-and-crosses.

"This", Robaldo argues, "Is what Tet would do if you were playing Him. We've gone through every move and there aren't any better ones. And if Tet played a copy of Himself, He'd get a tie."

The adults look like they've been given something beautiful.

The children look like they've had something beautiful snatched away.

"If you don't like that this game is so easy to solve, that you can find the correct answer with paper and ink in under twenty minutes, maybe play something harder. Has anyone here heard of checkers? Tet could beat you at that too, but at least I don't think any mortal has solved it. If you're the first to completely figure it out, you could get rich scamming people who think they've got a chance of beating you."

The children will go back to playing, other games that they have not yet watched be solved or else noughts-and-crosses but with far more draws than they'd been having before.

The locals and the travellers will spread a story, of a cleric who was wise and helped some commoners, and of a god who was rather complicated and is hard to explain properly if you're not a wizard, but is about fun and games and the desire to Win at all you would attempt. 

Possibly many of the children might manage to pray in the right direction, although it'll be much rarer among adults.

I'll give you a 2nd cleric circle while you're sleeping, so you get more spells when you wake up.

That way you won't know for sure which thing crossed the line, whether it was the adventure or the teaching or the playing games that earnt it.

There's a limit to how many times you can directly throw yourself at monsters, hoping to "git gud", as the kids say these days.

At least the kids who talk to him have started saying that, the kids who'll listen to his bizzare attempts at preaching a religion he's mostly made up himself over like a combined one week of thinking about it.

He's pretty sure real religions like Iomedaeism have dogma that's been made up over millenia of careful thinking, by teams of scholars reviewing each others work. Probably he isn't going to guess a religion much better than that on a first try.

Why are people going to him for life advice anyway, he's a madman.

He's pretty sure all the people in his parents stories were madmen too. It's not like they clearly state that the path to becoming a notable important person who changes the world and maybe eventually a god is to throw yourself headfirst at monsters, with whatever happens to be at hand and doing whatever you can to kill them first. It's more like they implicitly assume it.

Who was the first person dumb enough to go to Cayden for life advice, anyway?
Cayden repeatedly threw himself at monsters, and look at Him now!

Robaldo joined a religion, when he became a cleric, but he forgot to quit his old one.

Actually the Caydenites are totally right about that.

Their older and more experience faith is the result of more accumulated wisdom than you've seen in your whole life and you should defer to it over your own made up religion.

I picked you because half My other cleric-candidates are borderline shut-ins, and it saves Me the cost of telling them to go outside and fight monsters.

You probably should go back to school though. Wizards really do need the whole "formal education" thing.

Also if you're physically near Morgethai, that has various implications that other gods, namely Asmodeus, might incorrectly assume I'm taking advantage of and waste resources trying to prevent.

Still, not gonna waste a vision telling you to do what you're gonna do anyway.

And the worst part is, it's not even fun anymore.

He remembers, when he first prayed, that he was thinking of Tet as someone who valued fun.

He doesn't think Tet would want him to keep going, like this.

Yeah, if it's not fun anymore, there's no arguing with that. Not unless you can find a way to make it fun again, which you won't until you know more spells, and have met more people.

Learning magic will still be fun for you I think, although it won't feel as much like a game, which will make it harder for me to track how well you're doing at it.

Not that it benefits you much for Me to have a good track of that, since I'll almost certainly not relevantly intervene about it at you.

Magical educational institutions in most of Golarion do not function as one would expect, if one comes from a more organised and standardised educational system.

For one, the teachers tend to be more interested in acquiring knowledge than in passing it on to others, and see students as useful pawns in obtaining more lore for themselves.

For two, magical research often involves travelling: Field trips to unusual locations, rare ingredients and magical creatures, as well as visiting other academies for unfriendly grudge matches where each faction tries to rob the other of what they've managed to discover, while simultaneously belittling them for their relative barbarism in the hope that promising students will defect.

For three, the students themselves often have obligations: foremost noble scions with feudal duties to be sent to boring regional events, and beneath them a continuous spectrum of slightly less noble brats whose families have made slightly less financial donations, each refusing to accept that they're at the level where the line ought to be drawn until even peasants on scholarships can get the week off for a funeral if they ask nicely.

It is less that there is a class schedule and more that there are teachers obligated to offer classes.

A third the faculty are chaotic, and opposed on principle to the concept of expecting students to behave in any particular way. Many of those are specifically Caydenites, and tend to approve of a student who just got clericed wanting a few months off for a journey of religious experience that they hope may one day lead to advancements in the field of mystical theurgy.

And the provost is Felandriel Morgethai, so the "school rules" faction has quite a disadvantage.

Robardo returns to school: It becomes apparent quickly that he does not actually have enough spells in his book and enough spellcraft at using them to succeed with half the ambitions that a direct divine intervention has caused him to have.

There is a faculty member who is a mystic theurge, and she's happy to insist retroactively that, when Robardo was chosen, this quest in particular was recommended by her as a way to further his growth in the divine arts.

That's why Robardo had to take a semester off, honest.

And he does have some revelations to share. Some anatomical sketches of dead monsters, a few jars of weird goos.

He's pretty sure barbarians are magical but can't explain how.

Oh, and a weird magic idea, are you guys into that kind of thing?

Robardo's Mega-Catapult is introduced to the faculty and exposed to peer review.

Firstly, the part where you have to cast at least 4 spells seems unpleasant:
1 to buff the martial you're paying to throw it, 2 to make it a magical rock you can Resize, 3 to Resize it, and 4 to heal your shattered arm afterwards.

Mostly the healing part, most wizards don't really have good options for that.

You also have to be standing in front of the martial while he throws past you, in a direct line with the target enemy. This is suicide.

Research Avenue A proposes: That the suicide attempt can be replaced by "Spectral Hand", a second circle necromancy that makes a spectral hand that can deliver touch attacks at 100 ft + 10ft/level. Since it's spectral it can't be damaged by normal weapons, except for how you've already enchanted the rock to be magic and since it's necromancy it uses your own life force, so when the rock destroys the hand you're still left wanting a healing spell only now you've wasted a 2nd circle slot. The necromancy-lovers claim it's still worth it for the range and much arguing happens without a result.

Research Avenue B proposes: The Reach Spell metamagic could be applied to increase the range from touch to close, at the cost of making Resize Item a fourth circle spell that the strategies inventor wouldn't even be able to use yet. 

Research Avenue C proposes: Replacing the martial with a Fly spell, also third circle, and dropping the ammunition out of a bag of holding. If you're an archmage (or a temporarily weaker wizard who like all wizards believes in planning for when he's an archmage), you'd be able to resize at least 500 pounds of enchanted rock into almost a hundred cubic feet of rock. Also, if you're pulling it out a bag of holding you can do the touch attack before it's falling and avoid the injury.

Experimental testing confirms: That this is impossible because a big rock isn't a weapon. Robardo is lying to us.

No I agree it's not normally a weapon but it is once a barbarian picks it up, and definitely is once the barbarian throws it.

...

Barbarians aren't wizards, idiot.

Over the next few weeks, the project-associated students and faculty have settled on the core design of a more "optimised" and "refined" version of the Almas-developed "Bricks of Retribution".

First, masons in a local quarry are paid to cut ~2000 pound bricks of solid stone.
The resulting stone bricks are expensively shipped to Augastana on Apso bay, where lies the Arsenal of the Andoren Navy.

The spell [Shrink Item] is 3rd circle and otherwise free:
It makes an object up to 2 cu. ft /level shrink by a factor of 16 in each dimension, leaving a factor of 4096 the original mass.
2 cu. ft of stone is more than 300 pounds.
It lasts for 1 day /level, and can be cancelled by a command word.

A barely 4th circle wizard, of the kind that Cheliax has far more of than anyone else, has 2 such spells a day.

He can shrink 14 cu. ft of stone, or more than 2200 pounds of it.
He can keep it shrunk for up to a week.
Suppose he does nothing but keep 12 such stones shrunk.
Each has a volume of less than half a cup, and can be carried on a belt at once.

On the day a fight is to happen, he instead will prepare Fly twice, also 3rd circle. This gives him 14 minutes of air time.

At 60 ft a round, our wizard can be 600 ft in the air in a minute, and still have time for fighting. With a 600 ft drop, the resulting stone shatters past a ships deck and cracks the keel, sinking it in minutes. This beats the previous best such spell, "fireball", which is also 3rd circle but less effective and can't be cast a week in advance.

If the enemy foolishly places his ships within flight of each other, such as because they are in port, our 4th circle wizard can take out twelve of them, and then return in a week to take out twelve more.

It also works on castles and palaces.

See, this is why I need a real education!

Nobody bothered to tell a first-year that Shrink Item exists! I could've killed so many more spiders with that!

...

No, actually, I don't think this works.

Cheliax protects it's airspaces. It has hippogriff-riders and winged-devils and enslaved things that fly, and wizards of their own.

If a wizard on a grey corsair takes off skyward they can respond in kind and expect to win on both air and sea.

And-

Reginald Cormoth stops.

The people's revolt won on land when loyalist forces withrew, but the war at sea never ended.

The same ship flying a privateering flag will loot slavers in the Inner Sea, but call itself a "Grey Corsair" when it pulls into Apso bay to free its winnings.

Most countries with a coastline hate Andoran for it, because a privateer will assume any flag of a slaver country might be a slavers' ship, and loot it on principle. With Cheliax at least they're mostly right, but Cheliax protects its merchants with warships, because for all that mortals want freedom if a god of Slavery wants something else there's going to at least be a fight about it.

Reginald Cormoth is a paladin of Iomedae, and not a weak one either, and nothing would easily change that.

But he has heard of a much younger religion. Robardo isn't the only Tettian in Andoran anymore. And there was one in Lastwall who made enough of an impression that the church asked in a commune, "Should we generally try to work with Tettians", and got a Yes.

Paladins tend to get told about that kind of thing, even if they're not affiliated with the church at all.

Of what he has heard preached by this new religion, the thing that most left a mark was the idea that you should spend an entire five minutes thinking about something, trying your very best to be clever. Much of what people limit themselves to, because they think they're not supposed to act differently, isn't really a part of the "rules". They've just assumed they shouldn't do anything new or clever because nobody else does, because everyone else has also assumed all that is not done is impossible or illegal. Pretend for five minutes that maybe you're smarter than everybody else in the whole world, and really try to think.

So Cormoth takes the suggestion from a bunch of university wizards who've never seen real naval warfare and really thinks about it.

"I'll take this under advisement", he replies, "and if Almas University knows any 3rd circle wizards or greater looking for employment, who know the spell, I believe they'd be likely to find it from the fleet office of the Grey Corsairs in Augastana. Yes, at wizards' rates."

Ranged combat is happening above the waves, but that's not his problem.

The ballistae are the distraction.

Nobodies going to pass the perception check, to see a stealthy medium sea-creature well under the surface sneaking up behind their ship, when there's a low-energy fight already going on at the other end.

His weapon is a kind of curved staff of a flexible wood, with a handle at one end and a square cup at the other.

It's purpose is to increase the length of his arm, and therefore his throw. A gillman is good enough at swimming to tread water with both arms above the surface, if he needs them for something.

He pelts it directly into the ships' rear, beside the rudder.

He yells the command word before 2000 pounds of stone moving at what a professional baseball player could achieve if he was twice as strong and his arm was twice as long moves smoothly through the ships wooden hull without appearing to slow down.

Everyone who fails an acrobatics check falls over.

The stone does stop, but the additional weight has an effect on the ships balance.

The hole is now at waterlevel. The ranger swims aboard as the surprise round ends.

The ships cargo is already trying to surrender. There really aren't that many soulsold he needs to kill first.

This was annoying before but now it's worse. I should probably do something.

Who's behind this anyway?

Follow the power structure.

Who did that ranger report to. Who did that captain report to.

Hey, isn't that Iomedae's squirrel?

Hey Abadar
Hey Abadar
Hey Abadar

What

Andoran piracy has gone too far, it's destroying the inner sea economy and stopping people in different countries from trading with each other.

We should do something about it.

I do agree that the piracy is interfering in free trade.

Is there anything We can cheaply do?

This is all Iomedae's fault. See this squirrel here? He's behind everything.

She's supposed to be Lawful. You should get Her to stop.

Hey Iomedae
Hey Iomedae
Hey Iomedae

What

Your mortal is committing rampant piracy, disrupting international commerce.

He's supposed to be a paladin, he shouldn't be doing crimes at all.

I'd prefer it this much if You made him stop, but don't understand why I should have to be offering to pay someone like You to stop this in the first place.

Cormoth has does nothing wrong and I'm not going to forsake him for his good deeds.

He has broken no promises, and is not party to any legal agreements that would condemn his rampant piracy.

Your offered payment is not sufficient to sway Me from my current intended course.

But he's interfering in Free Trade!

The Trade will be a lot Freer when he's done interfering in it.

Still there, Asmodeus?

Sure, what's up fellow Lawful Sane Deity?

What can We cheaply do about it?

There are more clerics of Tet in the world now then there were a few months ago.
They've started to get a reputation.
It's not, honestly, a bad reputation.

The white chess bishop has mostly caught on as the holy symbol in Avistan, despite rumors followers in Tian Xia are using some weird foreign thing instead.

Many have taken to wearing colored robes, and a colored stole depicting two white bishops.

Agreement is yet to be found on what the colors should be.

Robaldo wears his pink and blue.

He wears a helmet of copper-plated lead that doesn't bother to cover his face, a mirrored visor that does nothing except prevent you from seeing which way his eyes are pointing, and rubber boots regardless of the weather.

His favourite spell is "Unseen Servant".

They do as well in adventuring parties as any other cleric, although not all of them take to it.

The healing spells heal just as much as you'd expect them to, and they usually wont bill you for it.

They will call you an idiot for getting hurt in the first place, and tell you what you should have done differently.

They're chaotic differently from how other chaotic clerics are chaotic.

It's like they're very Lawful, but they're obeying a completely different set of laws that you don't understand.
As the stakes get higher, rules fall off the bottom of their list until you couldn't predict what they'd do even in principle.
It's like they only really believe in one law, Win, but they'll try to cover up that fact by pretending to believe in as many others laws as they can, to confuse you, until it's either too late to matter or too difficult to keep up the stronger version of the ruse and they have to relax the pretending.

Legal systems. Social conventions. Ettiquette. Fashion.
Physics if they've got enough spell slots.

They're only pretending to believe in that stuff to give you a false confidence that they're normal people, when really they aren't.

They'll do things you weren't expecting and then feign confusion as to why you ever expected them to do otherwise.

They'll do things that don't occur to regular people as being options.

They'll act like, if you thought they were making an implicit promise to behave like a noble's son, because they're dressed like a noble's son and talking like a noble's son and their father happens to be a nobleman, and that comes back to bite you, it's entirely your fault. You're the one who expected stuff, idiot.

Attempts to make charitable donations are met with

"Wow, you're just giving me money? Sweet."

Attempts to extract charitable donations are met with

"You're just going up to people and asking for money? Does that work? Whats the return-rate?"

Clerics who aren't wizards will do anything they can to get prestidigitation anyway, or "Least Wish" as they prefer to call it.

Everyone agrees they're still nice people. Easy to get on with.

It's not, honestly, a bad reputation.

One of the parts of being a Cleric is that everyone assumes they should go to you for advice.

Most Golarionites aren't very monolatrist, Andorens especially, and Tet seems easy to slot in part-time to your otherwise balanced pantheon, for anyone who likes a bit of downtime but finds Cayden or Calistria a bit much, or who has children, or who is children, or who wishes they were more like children.

The new priesthoods reputation is that they will discuss your problems happily, and try to solve them.

They will still consider your problems to be, typically, your fault.

After all, they don't have your problems, do they? And what makes them different? That's right, better life choices.

The advice will tend towards the outlandish, the more complicated your problems are. The most outlandish advice can be obtained by telling such a cleric you are "bored". It still tends to be good advice.

"Father! Father! I need to confess."

I'm not whatever church you're thinking of but sure.

"I watched my neighbour undressing through the curtain. I beg redemption and a chance to atone."

Are you not supposed to do that?

"No, it's a sin! It's lustful and defiling!"

Did you get caught?

"No, but why does that matter? The gods will know."

Ah, yeah, good point. You shouldn't do stuff like that if the gods will know.

"So? Do you forgive me?"

Why would I need to forgive you? You haven't hurt me.

"Sir! You're a priest right?"

Yep. That's a fact.

"I need help."

Monster ate your goats?

"I feel like nobody cares about me."

That's not true.

...

Sarenrae cares about you.

"Aren't you a Tettian?"

Yes? What about it?

"So don't you worship Tet?"

Honestly I'm mostly in it for the Cleric spells.

"I'm worried I'm too focused on my career, that I'm not being a good father. That my kid's are missing out."

Is the problem that you might be a bad father, or that you're worried about it?

"That I might be, obviously. It's not my own feelings I care about."

Do you think your children would know? If you're a bad father. Have you tried asking them?

"I-, they might, but I don't know how I would ask. They're too young for that kind of conversation."

You're a wizard. Cast Detect Thoughts.

"On my own kids?"

Yeah. Whenever you're worried you're making them upset.
And then do the other thing, whatever they think you ought to.
Or Detect Desires if the thoughts aren't helpful enough.
Honestly though I bet you could tell just by looking at their faces. Kids have terrible Bluff.

"What if I'm no good for it?"

Is the problem that you don't know how to care about your children, or aren't motivated?

"...Motivated."

You just made fourth circle, yeah?

"Yeah?"

Congratulations. You're in the tiny window of people with a unique ability even archmages lack.
You can Lesser Geas yourself to be a better dad.
It'll wear off after a week and you can decide then if you want to keep acting like that.
Be careful with the exact wording though.
If you come to me with a Geas phrasing I'll tell you whether it's dumb or not.

"How can I know if a boy really loves me?"

Truthspells. You can buy them from Abadarans.

"I can't ask that! That's basically getting married! And he'd know I was doing it!"

Also Detect Thoughts, Desires, Anxieties, people with really good Sense Motive.

"That'd be an invasion of privacy! I don't want to read his mind!"

Got any friends that are prettier than you? Ask one to flirt with him, see what happens?

"That's way too manipulative?"

And?

"And if he found out I was that manipulative, he might not love me any more?"

Just to check, did we rule out asking because he might lie, or some other reason?

"If I asked, and he said no, I'd die of embarrassment?"

And if someone else asks for you, still death by embarrassment?

"Y-yeah."

The boring normal way is to ask for small requests and favors, and gauge if he's more willing to do them than he would for other, comparably attractive girls.

Make sure to also do nice things for him, while you're at it, or he might stop liking you halfway through.

How that fails is that you ask, he says no, you get upset because he failed a test, and he infers from you being upset that it must have been a test which implies you love him which kills you by embarrassment.

The quicker way is to track his attention in group situations.

Find an excuse to talk to him in a group of other comparably pretty girls. Take turns speaking at similar length. Count how long he looks at each of you, how much eye contact, who he faces his body at.

Don't be staring at him the whole time. That'd give it away. Have a friend check discretely while you or others are talking.

If after one repeat, you're a clear outlier, I'd be 80% sure he loves you.
If after three repeats you're a clear outlier in all of them, he definitely loves you.

"Um, thanks. I guess I'll do that."

Happy to help. You're the most reasonable customer I've had all week.

In Absalom, the City Who Claims To Be The Center of the World Louder and More Persuasively than Any Other Plausible City, attempts are being made to crowdsouce a holy text.

Players pay entry fees and submit chapters by mail sent with teleports, with prize money for those more popular than average. Voting itself costs money, in that you can pay a fee for delivery of a random selection of submissions weighted by current score, and in return get the right to rank them from best to worst when you send them back, usually with commentary.

A hireling from the bank of Abadar is holding onto a growing pile of participation fees, waiting till the part when it can be paid out to the winners of the first ever religious writing competition.

He wishes he'd thought of it first.

If the scheme is successful, the Tettian cleric running it intends to add an additional question of which chapters ought to be placed before or after others in the resulting complete holy book, which he's written a more complicated algorithm for combining the votes from.

He is hoping that naive heathens will try to screw with his system so that his people can collectively take all their money until they fold.

Submission have included unverifiable promises to distribute the prize money equally with the voters, emotional pleas for how the author really deserves the prize money, chapters plagiarised from other holy texts, chapters plagiarized from other submissions, salacious rumors about heads of state, salacious rumors about other players, salacious rumors about you the person currently reading this chapter, advice for how to assassinate an Asmodean Cleric (It's not hard), advice for how to assassinate a Tettian Cleric (It's not easy), the rules to obscure board games, advice for obscure board games, advice for common gambling games, how to cheat at common gambling games, the one with the stone and the three cups, how to count cards in blackjack, how to commit piracy, a technique stolen from Irorian monks for beating Detect Thoughts by not having any thoughts, a technique stolen from Calistrian nuns for lying under truthspell by learning to sincerely speak a completely different language that happens to be made out of all the same words but assign them very different meanings, and chapters clearly drawn by small children that are nevertheless winning because they seem very cute.

Hi Iomedae, regular Golarion strategy checkup?

Here's everything visible from My perspective.

Most relevantly, I anticipate divine interventions by Asmodeus and Abadar aimed at creating an Inner Sea Trade Organisation.

I anticipate their agents to implement the following strategy:

1) Try to start a security pact mostly among naval merchant houses in Taldor, Absalom, and Osirion, the Taldane branch of which will be secretly controlled by a cult of Asmodeus.
2) Gain official consent from the Emperor of Taldor before substantial participation by chelish merchant houses begins.
3) Officially form the ISTO as an international trade and security organisation that will work with national fleets and privateers to combat piracy, substantially controlled by Abadarans to appear neutral.
4) Permit any vessels willing to agree to its rules and pay a fee to fly the ISTO flag, in addition to national and mercantile flags.
5) Purchase office space at any port in the inner sea that will let them. Offer business services sufficient to somewhat justify the costs.
6) Accuse any ports not willing to have them of harbouring pirates.

7) Hire "privateers" of their own, with a bounty system against any ships they consider pirates.
7a) The bounty system itself will be very Abadaran and multinational, but ~55% of the privateers will be chelish naval ships being leased by chelish minor nobility.
7b) This will allow an effective wealth-transfer from Taldor and Absalom to Cheliax without that being obvious to Taldor, and without harming the houses with good contracts who joined early, and with a diverse group of non-chelish ISTO Privateers participating to throw off the scent.
8) Obtain a majority of social influence over a supermajority of ports in the region.
9) Use that local power to charge extortionate fees to non-members, while providing member-only services via their local offices that avoid those fees, until membership is de-facto mandatory and the merchant houses slowest to join all fold.

10) Use the effective international tax on all trade in the Inner Sea to support a privateer navy large enough that it won't require any additional buildup when they suddenly decide to sack Augustana.
11) Enslave as many as the fleet can carry to resell on foreign shores, making Iomedae generally look bad in the process.
12) Make a new stable equilibria where an Abadaran trade organisation can stop piracy and enforce coherent maritime law at the price of slavery being commonplace and slave-traders rich enough that they can effectively control the trade organisation from the inside, via public Asmodeanism in Cheliax and private Asmodeanism in Taldor.

In terms of counter-strategies:

1) These 4 Taldane merchant houses are the most willing to be early adopters. They're trading with Cheliax already, although they're falling short of anything explicitly illegal. I propose you send goons to light all their boats on fire.

2) Start a competing, simultaneous protection racket, where ships with an Iomedae logo on them don't get ransacked, although not sure how the Privateers are supposed to know whether it's not just a slaver ship lying about being Good.

3) Win then Naval war now, really really fast, by destroying the entire chelish fleet, and simultaneously prove that turtling is a dumb strat and you should always just rush them.

Here's everything visible from My perspective.
I've got some ideas too.

Also, I'd prefer not to do things that would cost paladins their Law.

I guess if You're really into getting side achievements We can come up with something both Lawful and Winning, although I do think You're making this harder than it needs to be.

The Navy of Imperial Cheliax does not have a single point of failure.

It can be conceptualised as three navies.

On the northern coast is Kintargo, capital of the Archduchy of Ravounel. It services the ships bound for Varisia across the Arcadian Ocean. It is the smallest, most seperated of the three, and has pirates of its own to fight.

Kintargo has 12,500 inhabitants.

In the South is Corentyn, capital of Longmarch, at the Arch of Aroden and entrance to the inner sea, and Khari, on the Garundi side of the arch across the channel. Together they form a secure gate of ancient Imperial naval fortification.

They have 24,300 and 2,430 inhabitants, respectively. 

Including the other port-cities of Longmarch: Macini, Hinji, Westcrown, and inland Egorian on Lake Sorrow, accessible by sail along the Adivian River, Cheliax possesses a line of safe harbours that dominates the slave trade from the south past the arch into the Inner sea and the chelish heartland.

They have 13,600, 14,456, 114,700, and 82,100 inhabitants respectively.

They form the centerpiece of chelish maritime supremacy, an untouchable safe corridor across on the waves.

Furthest to the East is Ostenso, the closest port of Cheliax to Andoran, Taldor, Absalom, and the "real" Inner Sea. It is Reginald Cormoth's main rival in his wars of privateering. It is supported by Laekastel on the Brastle, and Remesiana on the Iseld.

They have 14,200, 14,690 and 19,450 inhabitants, respectively.

Ostenso is, officially, the capital of the entire Chelish navy, because it is closest to its rivals.

It total, Cheliax has 10 safe harbours with major fortifications and enough of a labour pool to support maritime assets.

3 of them, Kintargo, Corentyn and Ostenso, have major naval presences, and Ostenso has the admirality itself.

A city typically has full-time military personnel equal to 1% of its adult population, in addition to militia and conscripts equal to 5% of its population.

Cheliax is a militaristic place, and its navy selects from more than just the coastal ports: For every 100 people in its port cities, 3 more are aboard its naval fleets as active duty personnel. It has as many as 10,000 people in the Imperial Fleet, not counting the merchant vessels they protect.

Admiral Horatio Nelson had 17,000 men aboard 27 ships-of-the-line when he fought and won at Trafalgar.
Cheliax isn't quite that good.

Their largest fighting ships are a Man-of-Wars, up to 130 ft long to carry up to 220 men.
The ship itself has Hardness 10 and around 1500 HP. It has a row of Siege Engines on each side on each of two decks.
They have 12 of them. 2000 sailors.

Next in the order of battle are Frigates, lighter and faster, usually smaller crews of 140, on average.
They have 36 of them. 5000 sailors.

Carovels are lighter still, with crews of 50.
Cheliax can maintain 60, with the 3000 sailors it has left.

The slaves themselves are moved by Galley, with up to 400 below deck and a real crew of only dozens.
You don't typically want to fight in them.

The Flagship of the Fleet, Abrogail's Fury, can take 220 souls.

The Command Staff consists of:
Admiral Druvalia Thrune: Aristocrat 1 / Inquisitor 13
Her right hand girl, loyal bodyguard, servant, and lover, Paralictor Valeria Asperixus: Fighter 6 / Hellknight 6, of the Order of the Scourge.
A Cleric of Asmodeus: Cleric 10, for theological support.
A Ships Wizard: Wizard 10, for arcane support. If the ships going down, he'll teleport the important people back home.

3-6 lesser Wizards: Wizard 4-7, mostly for mindreading the crew.
6-12 lesser Hellknights: Hellknight 6-10, who happened to be nearby.
6-12 Officers: Swashbucklers 5-9, mostly.
6-12 bound Devils, summoned by master devil binders before they left.

~175 Marines: Swashbucklers 1-6, depending on experience.

and beneath even those:

12-36 of Cheliax's latest Innovation in Evil: The Sea-Sworn, fierce undead who can never again return to land, bound to obey their Infernal masters until the salt rots their bones, made in hideous experiments from the tortured flesh of disgraced former-marines, who were judged and found wanting. Nobodies at much risk of defecting as long as they can look at their cold, hate-filled eyes as they stand, ceaseless, at attention.

Supplies include spell-scrolls, potions, ammunition, food and drink to last for months, and an awful lot of weaponry.

It is, collectively, not exactly a low-level encounter.
There is not exactly an easy answer here.
And you have to win this hard victory 12 times, a moderate victory 36, and a further easier victory 60 times.

If you're fortunate enough to isolate each ship and fight them individually. They'll usually travel in groups.

Asmodeus is reasonably confident nobodies going to come up with a clever strategy here.

Your problem is that You haven't mastered the art of having faith in Your mortals.

The Imperial Navy of Cheliax totally has a single point of failure: It is composed entirely of ships, on the sea, propelled by tide and wind and paddle, crewed by marines and commanded by Asmodeans. Make that point fail and the whole thing stops working.

Cheliax won't change strategy until it's realised the old one doesn't work, so develop a counter in secret, and Win the Game before they realise you're even playing.

I should send a vision to get them on the right track. Not a solution, obviously. That's way too expensive. The minimum viable hint.

Hey Tet
Hey Tet
Hey Tet

Hey Norgorber, what's up?

No Comment.

That-, What?

This is about the piracy stuff I assume? And you want in cause you just intrinsically like piracy?

That's not true [and/or] You can't prove it!

But it is a common misunderstanding. Allow me to straighten the record:

Norgorber
Areas of Concern: Greed, Secrets, Poison, Murder
Edicts: Keep your true identity secret, sacrifice anyone necessary, take every advantage in a fight, work from the shadows
Anathema: Allow your true identity to be connected to your dark dealings, share a secret freely, show mercy

See. Nothing in there says I'm a bad guy.
Just a straightforward, self-interested guy who values His privacy.

We're peas of a pod, really.

I just came to offer to save You the cost of messaging one of Your guys.

You know, for the piracy thing.

How do You know that, hypothetically assuming it's true?

Why would I go to You in particular? There are more aligned gods to choose from.

And What, exactly, are You proposing?

Couldn't say. God of Secrets.

I'm sure You've heard, we ascended gods have a comparative advantage for this kind of thing, easier to talk to humans if you used to be one. You could go to a more value-aligned god, but problem there is, Their intervention budget is worth almost as much to You as Your own. Every dollar Iomedae spends communicating Your chaotic schemes despite it clashing with Her nature, is a dollar not spent raising paladins for some big climactic battle somewhere else.

My intervention's worth much less to you, if I couldn't profit Myself here I'd just profit Myself somewhere else.

I propose the following deal:

You want to beat Cheliax because You're "Good". Fine. Whatever. You can beat Cheliax and be Good and stuff.
Cheliax has a lot of money. Gold. Gems. Magic Items. Shinies.
Most of it's not very Good really. Peasants will starve with or without them.
Games will still be played. Heroes will rise and fall. etc. etc.

You could handle it all yourself, and end up having a bunch of valuables You don't even really want.

Or you could save the intervention for some other planet, where it's better spent.

Let Me send the message.
Whatever clever thing You've got in mind to tell Your mortal, I mean.
I tell My guy, My guy tells Your guy and also signs up for the team.
My guy helpfully helps so they let him stick around.
My guy grabs the shiny at the last second.
Your guy is sad he didn't get the shiny.
You don't really care cause You Win either way.

Get it?

And I'm supposed to trust You why?

Also, suppose hypothetically I implied to Iomedae that I was gonna keep this whole operation Lawful.

Nothing unLawful about it, a totally above-board subcontracting job.

You can't expect everything You do to have strictly only Lawful consequences.

It can still pan out Lawful in the end, wouldn't bother Me either way.

Pirate. Privateer. Merchant. Marine. It's the same job either way, you pick the one with the highest salary.

Hmm. With prophecy broken, I couldn't know for sure who'd end up holding any hypothetical valuables at the end, especially with different gods making competing interventions.

How about a Game? Pick an intervention-message We can both agree to, and We'll see which mortals end up where.

If only all the Good gods were more like you.

Robaldo's life is good.

He's progressing in his studies, knows more spells than he did before.
He's made good friends through the school and church alike, has connections in Andoren politics and military.
The spells slots he has are more than enough to buy a comfortable life, and the status of a cleric buys a sort of universal respect and appreciation that money can't.

He has, according to what one might call his utilityfunction, Won.

Therefore, like any true Tettian, he is bored.

His spells are already spent when he returns to his dormitory room for the night.
Down to just cantrips.
He has already closed the door behind him and fully entered the room before he even sees them.

She is sitting comfortably on his bed reading from his most recent theology contest delivery.
She has a dark hooded cloak and mask.
She is pretending not to have noticed him enter.

On the floor beside her is presumably her pet. Companion? Associate?

The human-sized spider creature has red eyes, spindly legs, and cloak-like folds of black flesh over it's head.

It is wearing multiple belts wrapped around it's torso, each with metal tools or small vials rigged to it.

A modern wizard is expected to be an expert in all manner of lore, arcane and esoteric.
A familiarity with the untold denizens of distant planes could well serve you in a variety of career paths.
You have been paying attention in your Knowledge (Planes) classes, I hope?

You can never know when it might become important.

Robaldo was paying attention during the spidery-parts.
That's a Karumzek. They work for Norgorber.

Why is it always spiders?

If I'm percieving it, it's because it wants me to.

Lets play this out anyway though.

Robaldo attempts to walk backwards through the door he just came in.

It's locked behind you.

It locks from this side.

And yet.

Robaldo attempts to prestidigitate warm, and therefore molten, the thin strip of soft wax holding in place the metal pin holding in place the ceramic tile of his false roof directly above her, causing it to fall on her head.

It's been disarmed.

All the other ones?

Also disarmed.

Robaldo attempts to prestidigitate dry, and therefore exploding, the flash powder in the vial in his pillow.

Robaldo attempts to prestidigitate clean, and therefore unsealed, the wax-clogged holes of the bucket of oil under his bed.

You can search an area as many times as you want with perception, including looking for traps.

I've been here a while.

Yeah alright fine.

"Hi, can I help you?"

"This religion of yours is pretty sweet.
I'm not looking to convert or anything, but I think we're gonna get on just great.
I'm mostly supposed to be helping my friend here deliver you a message.
Apparently Daddy Grab-and-Stab thinks you're worth talking to.
And then, after that's done, since I'll of course have overheard it all and be in a great position to sell you out about it, I was wondering if you'd be interested in being blackmailed into letting me join whatever mischief you're presumably going to be up to.
I'm not a slacker or anything, happy to pull my weight to be paid my dues.
I'm sure I'll come in handy, depending what he has to say."

"I can't say I've currently got any mischiefs in progress. None that, that guys boss, would want a part in.

If you're all about to suggest I do something Good clerics tend to get forsaken or damned for, I may be inclined to decline."

"Oh don't worry about that. We'd never dream of it.

Karumzek, when you're ready?"

"You have started a Game, little mortal, between Gods, and now your own Lord requests you play it.
He has entered into an alliance, as much as Gods like Him ever can, with Our Father Blackfingers.
On Their behalf, I deliver you this message.
It is possible for you to bring ruin upon Cheliax.
Within 1 year, if you are diligent.
To achieve this you must be strategic, cunning, quiet.
If the Lord of Hell or any His servants learns of your business here, or of your Masters intervention, you will not live to see it through.
Our Grey Master may aid you, if it suits Him, but no such oath be made, if you would fail to warrant it."

Norgorber's actual instructions here, to be clear, were much shorter. He's paraphrasing as far as seems beneficial.

The Karumzek is not Lawful. It has no obligation to follow instructions exactly, if it might imagine itself benefitting from doing otherwise.

"Wow. That's. More than I was expecting. You're supposed to be able to defeat Cheliax?
And you're dead if anyone who knows breathes a word of it, which currently is just me?
Definitely gonna blackmail my way into this. How can I help?"

Robaldo is pausing to think.

"What of the means, can you-"

He looks back up. The Karumzek is already gone.

He considers his god might not, in fact, be involved in this at all.
From what he's heard, Norgorber's not insane. He's selfish. Reliably selfish.
If Robaldo starts down this path, he won't find out if it's wrong unless he spends a commune he doesn't have, or notices a change in alignment that would be covered up by his aura as a Cleric, or tries an Early Judgement, or more likely is Forsaken by his god.

When he does, if he does, he might already have done great Evil.
Not wanting that, Tet's best play would be to forsake him right now, so he can get on with trying to redeem himself.
This profits Norgorber only the value of him ceasing to be a Cleric, surely less than the value of just killing him, which he has made the point he can easily do.

It's only selfishly worth it to Norgorber if helping isn't just going to immediately cost Robaldo his divine spells, which is only true if Tet approves.
And knowing that, Tet of course wouldn't bother wasting intervention on additional evidence. Wouldn't be inclined to cleric the kind of person who would need it.
It's still going to be terrifying when he does it.

Even given that, it's a shockingly short message.
Not, "Here's How", or "Their Weakness is", or even "Bf6."
Only "It is possible".

"That's all I get, is it?"

"Rude! You get me to help!

Don't worry, my kind are great at secrets.

If anyone hear's a word of it from me, I'll go to Abaddon instead of Axis, nothing could be worth that."

Well, I guess if Tet thinks this is a Winning move, He was right about the chess game, He's probably right now, too.

"Hi, I'm Robaldo. Pleasure to meet you. Won't the cloak and mask be a bit of a giveaway?"

"Oh absolutely. This is just for business meetings and formal occassions.

We'll need to come up with a backstory first, and then I'll get an outfit that matches that.

And I'll want to look at local girls' name frequencies, for newborns as of 24 years ago, and roll some dice to pick."

Suppose God told you

Suppose God paid a serial killer to summon a talking magic spider assassin into your bedroom, to tell you a message, and the message was, "Fun fact, you could totally defeat Hell if you really tried. Don't tell anyone though! There's a soft deadline of 1 year!"

Suppose the talking magic spider assassin's friend knows, and is sticking around.

It's not abnormal, that the new Mystic Theurge is engaged in weird experiments that he doesn't explain to anyone.
All magic users are like that. It'd be weirder if he wasn't.

Robaldo is trying to solve reality like it's noughts-and-crosses.
He is trying to explicitly calculate, with numbers attached, what the current equilibria is and what forces are keeping it there.
He is reading every book he can get, every spell he can find, to see if it contradicts the implied prices of victory, that his equilibria math insists on.

It doesn't feel like trying to match wits with a god.
Tet probably matches wits with gods all the time, and Wins anyway.
Robaldo couldn't be expected to do that ever.

If feels like trying to match wits with a thousand intelligent men, spread over dozens of countries and hundreds of years of military history, who all tried with all they had to crush eachother, and the current status quo is the best they could come up with.

And Robaldo's supposed to prove he's not just smarter than all of them individually, but all of them combined, too.

The individual whose religious upbringing is opposed on principle to having "names" that aren't disposable pseudonyms, has rolled "Consia" for her time here in Almas.

Consia Servina, in the rare event someone asks for a last name. It just means "servant", there's tons of them and there's no guarantee they're related.

Consia works at a bakery and sandwich store just outside the university campus.
The guy who owns it is getting old, so she gets more responsibility then she probably should.

Few people in Golarion have read Norgorber's holy text, all 17 chapters.
The real one, of course, not any of the dozens of decoy holy books.

Robaldo is now one of them.

It's utterly remorseless, coldblooded, evil.
It's also, in a strictly game-theoretic sense, correct.

Robaldo's written adapted versions of several chapters to submit to the Tettian writing competition.

Consia vetoed his first draft, with corrections where it was too similar to the original and therefore a dead giveaway, passed his second draft to an unnamed associate, and eventually agreed to help submit it under a pseudonym based in a foreign country.

Consia's well liked in the community already. She attends a local Desnan congregation, and helps out with the little lost children there, when she's not working.

She's obviously not a local, her accents more Opparan and a local would have older friendships.
Probably she came on a boat or something. People in Andoran don't ask about that kind of thing. It's impolite.

Consia has a childhood friend who lives in another city.
He's doing well for himself, he sends her letters and coin, to help her out.
She talks about him to the mailman, who thinks they're in love even though she denies it.
If she ever skips town on short notice, it'll probably be because he's finally asked her to marry him.

Some of the kids with the congregation want more work than they can find.
She'll let them help out with bringing supplies to the bakery, for a few coppers.

No Andoran guardsman has ever thought it reasonable to pour wheat flour through sieve and comb, on some ridiculous theory that maybe there's contraband hidden in it, without any evidence at all. There's a kid carting it, he's just happy to have a job. Stop hassling them and find a real problem. This isn't Cheliax, where authorities engage in arbitrary abuse like that.

A few weeks ago Consia was really hurt. She was just out on the town and some idiot driver hit her and didn't even stop.
Some of the guards helped her to a temple and she got healed from it.
It only took one channel, that'll usually fix anyone who isn't some bigshot or adventurer, or on the very verge of death.
She wouldn't give them a proper description, didn't want anyone to get in trouble, thought it an accident.
Naive girl.
They told her it's irresponsible to go around alone like that, but she still does it.

Desnans, you can't talk sense into them.

Anyone who knows her knows she's good.
Well, not knows knows, she wouldn't show up to alignment detection. 
Detect the Faithful would tell you she's Desnan.

A magical reagant supplier across town closed a few days ago.
The owner disappeared with most of his stock.
Must have spent days planning it. People think he was in a lot of debt, and ran out.
He didn't show up on a divination, some think maybe he spent half his debts on an Amulet of Proof against Detection and Location.

Clever plan.

If Consia was any less suspicious, it'd wrap around back to more suspicious again.

Robaldo doesn't look stressed about anything.
Robaldo looking stressed is many times more likely in worlds where he's up to something.
Robaldo looks perfectly fine, learning his spells and doing his writing and his research.

He really wishes that Consia never had to kill anyone. He hates it.

Consia thinks that mercy is dumb, can prove that mercy is dumb. Can prove it with the same kind of math he knows his god needs him to use, expects him to use for his quest.

He still wishes mercy wasn't dumb, and that it was never strategically correct to kill people.

Maybe in some better world, soldiers use wooden swords and padded arrows, and just pretend to die, and accept the result of such battles as much as if they were really dead and could do nothing to oppose it.

Maybe in some better world, criminals wouldn't have to kill witnesses. They could just poke you with their wooden dagger, and say "tag!", and you'd lay down and play dead while they took your gold, and you wouldn't be allowed to tell anyone who did it.

The guard would have to be really Lawful, for that to work. Even Iomedaens would struggle, with how Lawful you'd need to be for that to work.

Robaldo isn't that Lawful, not really. He hopes to create that better world anyway, after he's defeated this one.

Sometimes Robaldo needs stuff he couldn't get normally. Consia helps with that.
He mostly goes to the library but there are some standard reference books on his shelf, and a few folders of his loose notes.
The covers on the books stay the same, look the same, but the content is whatever he's requested most recently.

It's not like Robaldo and Consia don't know each other.
She talks to him when he buys a sandwich.

He'll always be able to get a magic item loaned, if he needs to look at it's effects closely, compare it to this or that spell.
Probably Blackfingers told her something that noone's told him, for why she's doing this.
It wouldn't be a good reason.
Hopefully Tet's not expecting him to figure that out, too.

Robaldo knows why his original suggestion would never have worked now, nor any obvious variation of it.
He's found plenty of obscure ways to cause sudden substantial damage to a warship.
They're not small targets.

Mending isn't strong enough to effect a ship, but Make Whole (2nd circle, Wizard/Cleric) effects very large objects as if they were constructs, and the ships' wizards will have a few scrolls and be able to stabilise it 80% of the time, he estimates.

You'd have to destroy the ship completely before they can repair it, and before they can meaningfully attack back.

It's a start though. He'll add it to his equilibria prices, a few other things together might shift the numbers by enough.

Robaldo's still reasonably sure taking out the Chelish navy takes out Cheliax.

The people themselves aren't rich, they don't have the Good kind of divine magic that makes subsistence farming tolerable.

It'd lose it's more distant holdings fast. It'd lose Ravounel if it couldn't reasonably pretend it would march an army over the Menador mountains to stop it. There's only one good path across, the Menador Gap, and it wouldn't be a safe strategy and Cheliax's generals historically have picked safe strategies.

When Robaldo learnt the history of his country growing up, the Chelish army seemed a great dragon, that his people's anger at great price pushed back. Reading it again, with all he's learnt now, it seems a paper tiger that lost to disorganised rabble and could barely pretend to keep it's pride intact in the process.

Cheliax lives on its control of the seas, and on its wizards.

Finding a way to kill every wizard in Cheliax would also work, but the boat thing seems way more approachable.

He'll work on wizard-counters too, just in case.

The Sarglagon, called "Drowning Devils", can see in darkness, underwater, and through invisibility. They swim faster than they run, can fly, can control water, can teleport at will, can use telepathy, and can summon water directly into your lungs and watch you drown in it even though by all known laws of magic that's impossible.

They're from the swamps of Stygia. They work for Geryon. Cheliax doesn't have many of them, but it has some. There's probably at least one in every important port, but not one on every important ship. They'd be kept on a tight leash.

They're not on the normal summoning guides, Hell doesn't want just anyone to know about them.

Another thing he wouldn't even have known about without Consia.

He'll add them to his equilibria math.

Teleportation isn't as useful as you'd think.

There's no good way to target it, you can't know exactly where a ship at sea will be. If you could know exactly where a ship could be, that'd be most of a solution by itself.

Cheliax never knows where Cormoth is. His raiders flee from warships and only go after Galleys. If he knew where the Warships were they'd be useless against him.

People have invented the "paddle wheel", in that it's a bunch of paddles on a wheel you can turn to drive a ship.
It's not very often used.
It's not the most efficient design possible. The going into and out of the water wastes effort, you'd want something that pushes the water backwards by spinning in it at an angle.

Norgorber teaches a version of science that is individualistic and selfish.
You invent things and then don't tell anyone. It's the best strategy, it gives you an advantage nobody else has, that nobody knows you have and so can't plan for how to defend against.
Robaldo invents the propeller and doesn't tell anyone.

Robaldo's test give an estimate of 1% friction per weight, for a boat on water at low speed.

For example, an Unseen Servant, can lift 20 pounds straight up albeit very slowly. Because it's a magical construct, it can do it continuously. It can likewise turn a driveshaft to propel a vessel of 2000 pounds forward on flat water, or much less than that at a somewhat higher speed.

It has a very low range restriction, Robaldo's just using it in tests.
He'll substitute something else if it becomes part of a solution.

There are riots in Taldor.

Some Everbloom terrorists trying to attack slaver ships, not caring what other trade gets caught in the same fire.
If you're rich, or middle class and wish you were rich, some finer items imported overseas are costing much more than you wish they did.

If you're poor, you mostly buy grain. Grain's getting more expensive, too.

Everyone blames Andoran from it. They're harbouring pirates.

Some hero uncovered a small, highly local cult of Asmodeus. There was a big blowout. A dozen people were hanged, six of whom probably had something to do with it. The senate has made it very clear that that kind of thing isn't okay in Taldor.

But as long as Asmodeus is just being a small anonymous cult somewhere, and Milani is lighting boats on fire, people will hate Milani more.

It only really works to buy time, anyway. Things will still get worse, I can just make it take longer to do it.

Cheliax could totally collapse any day now, I just have to keep giving them chances to do it.

I sure hope someone is using this time for something.

Track Ship: Cleric / Wizard 2

Duration 1 hour/level

Saving Throw Will negates (object); Spell Resistance yes (object)

In order to cast this spell, you must have a piece of the ship you wish to track. Merchants often preserve slivers from their trade ships specifically for this purpose. You also need a nautical chart.

When you cast this spell, an icon of the targeted ship appears on the nautical chart. The icon moves as the ship moves for the duration of this spell. If the ship is not within the area delineated by the chart, the spell fails. If the ship is reduced to 0 or fewer hit points, its icon changes from a ship to a skull and crossbones.

There's a spell called Track Ship?!
Why didn't anyone mention that?

It's not militarily useful?

Firstly, you'd need to steal a piece of the enemy ship you want to track. Not easy.

Then when you cast it, if the ship's attended, the Captain gets a Will save.

Cheliax chooses captains with high Will saves.

If the captain's sleeping, the first mate will be attending the ship, and he'll be an experienced officer too.

If they beat your first attempt, they'll have the Ships' Wizard cast Nondetection, making further attempts much harder.

You could use it to track your own ships, but:
It costs a spell per ship, so if your fleet is spread out it's expensive.
Your own captains will resist it, if they're at all experienced enough to be navy captains at all.
You could ask them not to, to set aside half an hour every morning to meditate on not resisting spells, but then the enemy can do it too, or just do a Demand and remotely mind control your commanders.
You can't do that much with the information, unless you're also using stronger communication magic and then you could just add your location in the Sending reply.

For Cormoth to hunt down an isolated Chelish vessel with some superior force, he'd have to know it was isolated, know where it was isolated, know he had enough forces with him to take it, and then follow it for long enough to prepare an ambush, without it beating an attempt even once, realising it was being tracked, and changing course.

If you wanted every ship to know where every other ship is, for example, you'd need a thousand spell slots, and nobodies got that.

If some command base is somehow tracking the enemy, it has to inform it's own fleet how to move, and that'll give it away quickly what your advantage is.

And once they know the fleet is being tracked, they'll change strategy. If a ship undergoes substantial enough repairs, your stolen sliver from before stops working, because it's not from the new ship anymore.

Look, buddy.
Cheliax knows about all these spells I've been showing you, too.
They don't let anyone who isn't them anywhere near their warships, on the high sea.
They'll fire siege weapons, throw spells, send devils, if you're fighting back.
If you surrender they send a rowboat of marines, to board you.

Outside exceptional circumstances, they dock only in their own harbours, in their own military ports, with guards who get mindread regularly about how so very loyal they are.

Nobody gets close to a warship of Cheliax. Not within hundreds of feet, at least.
And even if you took a sliver somehow, you wouldn't beat their Captain reliably enough to risk using it. Not even if you're an archmage.

The only reason I'm still expecting you to do something clever is that Our Mutual Friend said you could, and He's got an awful lot of credibility with me.

That's not-
That's not how you'd use that spell at all.

Robaldo thinks about information itself, the act of communicating, as a Game.
He tries to add it to his equilibria math, the price per unit fact and the ways by which it can be obtained.
He notices how to Play it right.

He thinks he has enough, now.

GG, I win Golarion, gonna stop watching so I can put all my micro into other planets instead.

The inner sea is much wider than it is tall.
From the Arch of Aroden in the West, to Delenah in Qadira in the East, is 1700 miles in a straight line.
If you imagine it splitting around Absalom, and continuing south to Jalmaray, it's perhalds 3000 miles long.
But North to South it averages only 250 miles across, apart from the ring around Absalom.

A sailing ship can get 5-10 miles an hour, depending on the vessel, it's load, and your willingness to use Control Weather magic.
You can, at a reasonable pace and with favourable wind, cross any part of the Inner Sea north to south in under two days, sailing through the night.
Moving east to west on the other hand takes more like two weeks.

From the top of a crow's nest, you can spot another ship, right on the horizon as far out as 25 miles. A smaller vessel, maybe 20 miles, because it can hide behind the horizon at less distance.
That's through a telescope of course, the naked eye of an unenhanced human wouldn't see either that far out.

Suppose you wish to communicate some information, at a distance of more than a few miles. Let us list every spell known to magic that permits this:

You could use 5th circle Teleport:

It transmits you as much information as you can stuff into a wizard's head, pockets, Bag of Holding, and a few friends depending on the caster, a distance of 900 miles comfortably which is enough to reach Augustana from most of the Inner Sea.
The caster needs to know the location they're going to, to have studied it carefully.
It also moves the wizard, but we're playing an Information Game here.

You could use 4th circle Scrying: (4th for Wizards at least, 5th for Clerics)

It takes an hour to cast and only lasts minutes. You need a big expensive mirror. The target will resist, by default.
It transmits as much information as you can read through the sensor, which is more than you could ever want.

You could use 4th circle Sending: (4th for Clerics at least, 5th for Wizards)

It takes 10 minutes to cast. It only lasts 1 round.
It transmits 25 words or less one way, and they can transmit 25 words back.
If you pick your favourite 32,000 words of traditional Taldane, this represents around 375 "bits" of information.
Where a "bit" is like a single yes or no, as you might get for each question in a Commune.

You could use 3rd circle Mirror Sight:

It takes 10 minutes to cast. It lasts minutes. You need a mirror.
It lets you see out a mirror known to you, near someone known to you, or in a place known to you.
It transmits as much information as you can read through the sensor, which is more than you could ever want.

You could use 3rd circle Minor Dream:

They recieve it in the form of a dream. They have to be asleep. It's only one way.
It's at most 20 words. 300 bits.

You could use 2nd circle Animal Messenger: (Bard, Druid, or Rangers only)

It takes 1 minute to cast, and then potentially days for the animal to reach its destination.
It then waits for someone to read the bit of paper you tied to its leg.
It transmits a page or so, depending on how big a bird you found.
Better rangers will just have an animal companion, no spell slots required.

You could use 2nd circle Track Ship:

It's basically free.
It transmits the current location of a willing vessel, with respect to some nautical map. It transmits this continuously, for an hour per caster level. It does so in real-time, without a delay.

You could use a Crystal Ball:

They start at 42,000 gp and go up from there.
They transmit like scrying.

You could use a Shell of Sending:

They cost 12,200 gp.
They transmit as much as one sending per day.

You could use a Bird Feather Token:

They cost 300 gp per use. It takes as long as it takes the bird to fly there.
They transmit only a small written message.

This completes our list.

Some of these are "push" and some are "pull", in terms of whether the caster is sending or recieving.
But in the important cases, the "transmits" parts of these stories are missing most of the message.

Most of the message isn't the message, most of the message is the timing.

2nd circle Track Ship contains an awful lot of timing information, if for example you ask your Unseen Servant to mark locations constantly against a clock time.

It is, from many perspectives, the cheapest and most high-bandwidth comms spell on Golarion. It scales linearly with the detail of the map, and linearly with the speed of your ship.

If you were cheliax, and you knew all the spells Robaldo knew, how would you coordinate your ships?
Nobody agrees on what time it is, at sea. Not accurately.

Track Ship isn't safe to cast unless you can tell them when you'll cast it. You either want to tell them by short-range, flags probably, that you're going to use it, or tell them by Sending.

Spells of Teleport, Scrying, Sending, simply cost too much for regular updates. You want your high-level spells for battle. Each one counts.

Animal Messenger, physical messengers of any kind, over long distance, take too long and are too interceptible.

You can justify Shells of Sending, albeit as few as required. You're spending hundreds of thousands of gold on each ship anyway.

You can teleport off of a ship if you want, but you can't teleport back without exact knowledge of location. The only way to get that is if you can see it.

The correct choice is this:

The captains' quarters have a mirror. The mirror points at a table.
Senior Command uses their own mirrors, and has a minion familiar with their Captains and their fleet, to cast Mirror Sight.
They can read reports off of their subordinates desk when it suits them to do so, at unpredictable times.

The Warships use Track Ship to track themselves, their nearby allies, or anything they're escorting.
They can ask them by flag to fail their Will saves, when close, and spread out only for manoeuvres.

Each captain has a Shell of Sending, but it doesn't point to Ostenso.
It points only one step up the hierarchy, Captains, Commanders, Commodores, Admirals.
High Command can contact a group, fit all its orders into 25 words of difference compared to yesterday.
Optimise the orders around code-tables, complex commands given simple names.
The leader of the group can add his own decisions, pass it on to his own subordinates.

Orders flow down, by Sending.
Orders are ordinarily by Shell of Sending, to save spells and because the hierarchy is rigid.
Only unusual, additional orders, beyond the expected daily variations, need a wizard's Sending at 10 minutes of delay.
Track Ship happens right after Sending if distant, or after shortrange communication if local, so you know it's them.

Track Ship, if cast, is cast from the superiors office: a table with a nautical map, in front of a mirror. It'll be a local nautical map. Not the whole Inner Sea. No larger than the ship can move before the spell ends.
All their other reports are placed on the same table. Reports from below are copied, and passed up.
If the next level up wants a report, they can take it at their leisure, at irregular times, by Mirror Sight.
If they're unhappy about the report, they can use it to aim a teleport, at no extra cost. You can never know when they'll be coming, so you can never feel safe.

It's how it must work, in an Asmodean Tyranny.

The concept of a "cooperative" board game was invented recently, by a Cleric from Lastwall. Some Clerics of Tet are Gooder than others, and that kind of development comes naturally to them.

Robaldo has heard of it through the writing competition.

Robaldo writes a cooperative game intended for up to 6 players.

The rules are as follows:

The game is played on a hexagonal grid of hexagonal tiles. The tiles have a top side, the same, and a hidden side, with a number of 0 to 5. Most are 0, and most of the rest are weighted towards smaller numbers. There is only one 4 and one 5, in the ordinary deck. If playing with fewer players, remove the too large numbers. The tiles are shuffled and laid out in a hexagon, face down.

The players start from the same corner of the game board, marked by their token. Play happens clockwise. The players play with their eyes closed: Communication is forbidden. No making faces either. 

On your turn, if others are on the same tile, you can poke them. They can open their eyes. You can communicate by sign, pointing out tiles, making faces. But silently, so no one else knows. At the start of your turn, you can peak at only the value of the tile under your token.

If, at the start of your turn, you see it has a 1. You can swap it for a zero, from the spare zero pile. If it has a higher number, you can only be swap it at least that many players are on it, at the same time.

If you do swap it, that ends your turn. Otherwise, you can move to an adjacent hex, close your eyes, and tap the clockwise players shoulder to pass the turn.

There is a finite number of cycles, selected to balance the game given the number of players. At the end, you turn over the tiles and count how many you missed.

The goal is to minimise the score, the number of remaining "number" tiles not yet replaced by zeroes.

Robaldo forces a few of his wizard friends to play it with him.
It's not because he's up to something. Promise.
He's just a cleric of Tet. They do this kind of thing.

After playing once or twice, you learn to communicate with your fellow players by how you move your token.

Any tile a person touches, leaves, and never returns to is clearly a 0.
Any tile a person touches, pauses, and then continues was clearly a 1.
If they touch, retreat, and then return, you know it's a 2. The nearest person should help clear the 2.
If they touch, retreat over cleared space, and pause, you know it's at least a 3. Everyone run over to help clear it.

All relevant information can be communicated by movement.

Track Ship isn't a nice addition, so that the command can know in advance what it'll learn when it Sendings out orders anyway.

Track Ship is the entire command system.

The boat is small. Light. It doesn't claim to be a fishing vessel. Impersonating civilians is a war crime.

But in the common understanding of how war works, it's clearly not military.

There's just one guy on board.

In the belly of the boat, is a strange contraption. Two heavy steel springs, each with a permanent Shrink Item cast upon them.

It costs 7,500 gp to do that, each.

The upside is that they can be made to shrink and grow as often as desired, indefinitely.

The downside is that only the original caster can use them.

The pilot is, necessarily, a 5th circle Wizard. Level 9.

One might imagine Cormoth found him by asking for wizards who hate Cheliax and are 5th circle, and got everyone who's first teleport was to "anywhere but Cheliax" and then didn't go back.

As one spring is unshrunk, it comes under compression, and pushes back against the bar.

The small spring is stretched thin, weak, does not resist compression at all.

The plate moves to a new balanced point. As it moves, it turns a drive shaft.

And then you activate them both again.

The return beat, in a surprising twist, also turns the drive shaft.

Underneath the vessel, the drive shaft turns a propeller.

It can make 40 miles an hour.

It can cross the Inner Sea north to south in 6 hours.

It's the fastest ship in the world.

High above him, flies a Sea-Hawk.

She saw them coming hours ago.

They've just been sitting here waiting.

Abrogail's Fury is on patrol, and Admiral Druvalia Thrune is at the helm.

She is escorted by two more Man-of-War's, Pearl of Egorian and Devil's Pride.

They're sailing a mile out on either flank.

They are not, collectively, a low CR encounter.

They see the boat hours out too. The other ones as well. They've got scouting imps. Obviously it doesn't see them yet. It doesn't matter.

It's not military, it's not even pirates.

Everybody knows, the bigger vessel has right of way. She's not changing course, it can move or it can die.

Nobody's even allowed to get close to a Chelish warship.

The boat sees them, turns, and moves sideways to dodge at a typical pace. An expert seaman, looking close at the sail from far away through a telescope, might notice that that's not the reason it's moving.

The Flagship is much faster than him, when it wants to move quickly. He cannot swim under it always, but he stays on deck for support, and watches the waves.

He has zero hope of seeing anything.

He can totally keep up with the Flagship, if he wants to.

He swims at 90 feet a round.

He has 14 Strength and 4 Intelligence.

He considers 43 pounds or less to be a "light load".

He is "holding", more like pushing, a bag of 6 smooth metal pebbles with him, through the water.

He likes water. He is pushing them in a straight line.

What is he supposed to do again? Oh right, the boaty.

The ship is moving forward at close to 90 feet a round. A pebble is "spat" out above the waves in front of them, at close to 180 feet a round, relatively speaking.

Water Elementals aren't profficient with throwing rocks. It'll have pretty bad aim, because of that. On the other hand, it's aiming at a Warship. AC=2.

The Small Water Elemental speaks a command word, in Aquan. Water Elementals speak Aquan, did you know? The metal pebble expands before they hit the hull.

It look more like a steel-reinforced barrel when it hits.

Velocity is conserved even as momentum isn't. If that weren't the case, orbital mechanics would make Shrink Item a superweapon in the opposite direction.

The Warship takes 30 damage. There's a hole. It's not gonna sink or anything.

The metal support crackS open on impact, as it smashes it's way through, and the gallons of kerosine oil contained inside explode as their exposed to air and ignition sources.

It's not the top-shelf stuff. They're going for quantity here, not quality.

The splitering force of the impact sprays it everywhere as the ship combusts.

She's been in fights before. She's not going to think anything stupid. This is clearly enemy action.

She commands the Repair Wizard to cast Make Whole, twice.
She commands the marines to put out anything on fire.
She commands the Sarglagon to hit the waves, and the larger flying devils to hit the sky.
She commands her flag officer to signal their escorts to pull towards her, and expect a fight.

They're Asmodeans. They obey.

She still has no idea what they're fighting. See Invisibility? Sarglagon has that, would have noticed if that was it. Cast it anyway. Send for below deck to check what the damage was.

Somethings in the water. What else can I deploy there?

They'll start throwing their pebbles too. Bonus points for how many seperate holes you can make.

lesser Planar Binding is a perfectly respectable spell.

Is it going down yet? It looks like it.
Oh it's a Sea Devil, gotta bail.
We have 90 swim speed, you can't catch us.

There is a lot of water in the ship now. It's competing with the fire for who can wreck stuff the fastest.

This isn't a new threat. We've got options here.

Rod of Flame Extinguishing. A variety of ice and water spells.

We can put the fire out if we want to.

But with so much fire, they can't put it out all at once. A flame left will reignite the fumes and leave them back where they started.

Yeah I think we're going down.

The ships not out of hitpoints. It's just sinking and burning faster than they can fix it. It has too many holes at water level.

It's own forward momentum tears at the structure, as the still open sails are pushed forward against the resisting sea, and the smoke of gum and wood clogs the air.

Druvalia Thrune has a choice to make.

Plausibly, if they stay and work with what they have, they could recover the situation. But there's no reason to expect the enemy doesn't have more planned.

On the other hand, there is really a lot of mission-critical equipment on board. All logs of the subordinate fleet are kept here, with her, so she can command them.

Expensive equipment. Nautical maps. Magic items. Herself.

They've already used their Shells of Sending for the day. It's the evening. It'd take 10 minutes for a regular Sending, and they don't have infinite time.

She can call a Mirror Sight, to teleport to another ship. It would also take 10 minutes, though. They'll want as much of it as they can into bags of holding, to quickly teleport out if needed.

If the other ships survive, it'll be easier to save things by casting Fly and moving them across.

"Officers, secure up our magic items. Don't want any of them falling into enemy hands.
Devils, Sea-Sworn. If anyone even thinks of surrender, kill them. Hell will sort them out.
Men, defend your ship.
I'm going to Fly over to the Pearl. They're turning our way, it'll be a minutes.
If we're going down, she'll be our rescue."

You thought we were fleeing?

We're going to the other ships too.

We've got a swim speed of 90 ft. We'll get there first.

Okay yeah this is bad.

It's clearly water elementals, and they're controlled by something smart.

Those boats from up ahead will be it. They don't look fast or strong.

If everything that can Fly chases them down, we can make this summoner regret themselves.

I'll match their speed and stay out of range, how far will they chase me?

On second thought, lets teleport out.

Everyone above lieutenant still on the ship, get in my quarters.

Some of the wizards, grab the scrolls we've got, we'll rescue as many worth rescuing as we can.

The Water Elementals catch up to their Master, at his leasurely pace.

The other two aren't sinking yet, just damaged. It's not like they can flee from him.

He'll give the bound outsiders a few more bombs, enough that their quest is completed. Once it's done, he pushes the engine back on full throttle, and they split up into different directions.

He just had to wait for his buddies to show up. He couldn't have done enough damage by himself, not until he hits 6th circle. It didn't take them long, once he found a target and they say on Track Ship that he'd stopped to wait.

He can summon some more and do it again tomorrow.

"So you're saying I need, five 5th-circle wizards, and
... 75,000 gp in diamond dust?"

"Yes, it's the cheapest strategy as far as I can tell. I've checked.
And all you have to do for me is not tell anyone any of it was my idea."

"It doesn't have to go down exactly like that, you're the expert in Chelish doctrine here. You can use them supported with larger ordinary ships if you prefer, where you can handle supply.

But I'm pretty sure you'll want at least 4 of them.
I'm pretty sure you'll want to scout by air so you can find targets faster.
I'm pretty sure you should be intending to take most of their fleet out in under two weeks.
And I'm pretty sure you should hit the Flagship first.
It'll be most annoying to their command structure.

After that you can arrest their galleys whereever it suits you."

"And when they try to hit back? What you've described is defenseless."

"Then you just leave. You're faster than them.
The water elementals are slower than you, but also faster than them.
You can attack from outside their range while retreating.
Nothing can catch you unless you get cornered, make sure you don't get cornered.

If they send summons or devils, just leave."

"I'll... take this under advisement", he concedes.

Yeah, this looks like it could be it.

Is this the bit where I steal the new expensive propulsion devices?

What, they only work for the wizard who made them?

That's dumb.

Well, at least I can still steal the idea of them. Gonna run off to Riddleport, probably. Then we'll have Norgorberite Wizard Pirates on speedboats, just like god wanted.

We can take out the Arcadian Fleet of Cheliax, and grab all their stuff while we're at it.

Oh look a marriage proposal that's a great excuse bye guys.

Best of luck, I guess.

Hope we don't meet again.

Oh, we'll definitely meet again!
You're still poor now but if you ever want to be rich, Sending me.
And if you ever get rich, I'll be coming by to blackmail you some more.
I mean, Cheliax would still want to kill you if they found out.

Hi guys, we finally finished setting up a trade organisation!

Does anyone want to help us fight pirates?

Crickets

Yeah sure but we won't be that great at it.

We have speedboats now, did you hear?

We withdraw the offer.

Hmmph.

Well, that sucks.

You have been a good Cleric.

Have some more Mystic Theurge god-sponsorship.

Hey Asmodeus, Iomedae sunk your battleships.

What.

This is all My fault.
This is all Infrexus's fault.
That Fool has failed Me for the last time.

How many other Thrunes are there?

In a fiery pit in Hell, there burns a Sorcerer.

She is 17 years old. She has been fighting devils every day until she succumbs.

She has been doing it for a year. She is only 6th circle. She has to keep going. She needs to keep going.

Change of plans, Princess. You're needed.

Come forth to Compact.

My Lord and Master, your humble slave fears that, if she does sell her soul to You today, she would be granted only 2 more spell circles.

This would leave her only 8th circle as a Sorcerer, and less useful a tool in Your possession to use as You see fit.

Your value has risen, in My eyes. It would hurt more than anything you've yet experienced, but I could see fit to grant 3 such circles.

My worth has risen, You say? In that case, I'd also like an Erinyes, 2 Pit Fiends, a bunch of wishes. To kill Infrexus myself.

Wait a second, I have a list.

Such trivial boons can be granted, to one valuable in My sight, who knows how to properly condition their usefulness on whether I grant them boons or not.

I will have many Compact-clauses of My own, that I will have to insist upon.

But do come here, into this time-dilated part of Hell, to discuss with this My representative.

Robaldo is only 18, and already a 4th circle wizard and 3rd circle cleric.

A once-in-a-generation prodigy, to be sure. Few others can speak to that.

Not that he's really done anything noteworthy, to be sure. No big achievements.

Abrogail Thrune is 17 years old, and already a 9th circle Sorcerer.

Some people are just built different.

She walks into the Royal Court and beats Infrexus to death in broad daylight, with her bare hands.

The High Priestess and two Pit Fiends are just standing there, watching.

Nobody else is going to say anything. Not a word.

He drowned in an ice-skating accident, you say? Sure. That's what we'll say.

Hi Cheliax, oh are you having a new monarch today?

We heard the Navy of Cheliax had some setbacks, and now piracy is getting worse. It doesn't seem like you could plausibly invade us, at right this second.

We think it'd be a good idea to press for independence now.

Signed, a handful of local notables.

I'll send one of my Pit Fiends. To negotiate.

Convince them it's a bad idea to sign their names to treason.

Thats - ... unexpected.

Tet has long since solved what one might call the game of "first-order" god-politics.
It only took Him a few minutes. It's not complicated.
All the real gods have solved it long ago.

Second-order god-politics is unsolvable even in principle.
It contains sub-games isomorphic to the halting problem.
But first-order is usually enough for an approximation.

Given a study of first-order god-politics, one would expect that, if a new Chaotic Good god is introduced to the equilibria, then local reality would end up, overall, slightly more Chaotic and more Good.

One would anticipate this taking effect in the form of some marginal Chaotic or Good regions of creation, call them constituencies, becoming more stable and long-lasting.

Likewise, one would expect marginal Lawful Evil constituencies, the kinds of places barely held together in the first place and particularly susceptible to the new god's angle of attack, to destabilise.

From Tet's perspective, and from the perspective of those gods he has purchased information from, Cheliax seems like the kind of Lawful Evil constituency one would expect to lose, given the addition of Tet.

It's not that He didn't expect Asmodeus would make Him work for it. It's just that it wouldn't forever continue to be worth the intervention to keep. Eventually Asmodeus would decide to pick better battles where His resources trade more effectively than here.

Possibly Tet has tried to say "GG" to this sub-game too early.

Possibly Asmodeus knows something about how winnable this fight is for Him, at certain parts of the intervention cost curve, that Tet from His perspective can't as easily see.

Possibly Asmodeus is just making a mistake, with some tiny fragment of His highly distracted attention.

Possibly Asmodeus is letting His pride force Him to make a move that game-theory says He shouldn't.

Or possibly, Asmodeus knows something not about how cheaply He can win, but about how valuable it is to His interests, that He does.

Golarion has problems with prophecy. Golarion has an Existential Threat to Creation chained within it.

It's far from the only such threat in existence.

There are plenty more outside the bubble, who can't make it past Immigrations.

There are others within Otolmens' purview to handle.

Still, Rovagug does seem a notable example.

It could be that this world is unusually important, for Asmodeus.

Tet thinks about it.

Tet wants to see where this goes.

Tet decides that He will increase His bid, here. Give slightly more of His divine energies to the fragment of His attention that watches Golarion.

And then Tet moves on, to continue at the other ten thousand simultaneous multipolar chess games that is Pharasma's Creation.

Iomedae will concur with Tet's reasoning.

It'll mean sacrificing hundreds of thousands of innocents on distant worlds.

But she'll raise Her bid too, by a fraction.

Abadar is disappointed.

Golarion appears now, to Him, less a place His interests can be cheaply brought to prosper.

He will lower His bid on this planet a substantial amount.

He will find some other world, where people can be honest and fair and straightforward. He will spend His energies there, instead.

And as they update their strategies and investments, the equilbria their actions create will move underneath them.

Interventions by yet other parties, not previously calculated as worthwhile given the likely future developments, will need recalculation. Some who found some seemingly unrelated inverventions suboptimal may now change their minds.

It's not a static system. The equilibria has been upset. It will not quickly settle back down.