He's started to think trusting major life choices to the advice of chaotic gods might be a bad idea, that he has some kind of obligation to those who would put their trust in him, and that he should refrain from lying to his own friends in ways that he has now observed are liable to get them all killed because that's wrong in itself separate to whether it has bad strategic consequences.

...

I anticipate this having bad strategic consequences, because it makes it harder for Me to use him as a way to destroy Asmodeus's assets, if Asmodeus is liable to pridefully hurt everyone around whoever I'm using to do that and he prefers that not happen.

It sounds like actually your preferences just aren't very aligned, and he cares too much about other Andorens to sacrifice them all for Your concept of a greater good.

Personally, I get around this problem by only choosing paladins who don't particularly mind getting themselves and everyone around them killed for the greater good, and then having them be very honest about that fact so that nobody gets the wrong idea.

Otherwise, there's this system You might have heard of for facilitating mutually beneficial interactions between people with only partial values overlap, called Law.

Yes, but it would end up getting Me less Utility if I did that.

I can't trick him Myself because there aren't any short messages I can send that he'll trust enough to be persuaded by, so I need an outside middleman who I can pretend isn't just Me in a different hat.

I'd like Your help with getting him to stay on the narrow path of Chaos. Otherwise I'll go with my second best option, Norgorber.

Well this is a new ethical dilemma I'm not sure anyone's placed Me in before.

Have you considered possibly asking Cayden instead, or maybe Desna?

... .

So what You need to do is let him Plane Shift to Your domain, and then make Yourself a physical form so that he can punch You in the face.

He's not going to be able to feel better until he's done that.

Don't listen to Cayden, He's being weird.

I've got a cleric nearby I can nudge in the right direction, at not too much cost.

Word reaches Almas, starting through secretive anti-slavery networks with spies deep in enemy territory and spreading to people who can cast scry and verify it themselves, that Egorian was also destroyed on the first night of the war, even worse than Almas was.

They manage to get sight on the Midnight Temple and it's been completely burnt to the ground. The palace is still standing, but only mostly. The lowest classes of the city, as is typical, were hit by far the hardest. There's far more dead there than here, and far more property damage.

It makes more sense, knowing that. It doesn't make Robaldo feel any better. No doubt most of everyone killed there were people Robaldo could've been friends with in another life, mostly not that evil, and probably mostly damned to Hell upon death anyway.

Still, it suggests that whoever's really running this war has something ressembling a plan, probably, and is making efforts to solve the whole Cheliax problem quickly and efficiently, even if there's a lot of powerful combatants on the other side making it difficult. He'll diligently sort it away as small evidence that he's not a horrible monster.

Yeah, sure. That was on purpose.
Totally planned that.

He's still not sure he's been making good life choices.

"Hey, you look pretty down, wanna talk?"

Crap, he forgot to not have meaningful facial expressions, Consia taught him better than that. Or maybe the pain in his head is just making him useless in all dimensions. He's not sure if he could succeed at a lie, yet.

"Re-evaluating all my life choices," he offers.

"What sort of life choices?"

See now he has to lie again. Maybe he can change the topic in a way that doesn't sound like changing the topic.

"Do you think this whole war is a good idea?"

"No, I think it was an Evil idea, and Asmodeus shouldn't have had it."

"Suppose I told you that Andoran started this, actually."

"If some other guy draws a line in the sand, and says to cross it starts a war, but it's an unreasonable line - maybe all the food or all the water or something is on the other side - you don't have to feel like you're starting the war by crossing it. They already started the war when they drew the line."

"Suppose Cheliax had drawn a reasonable line, and Andoran had crossed it anyway."

"Who's to say what lines are reasonable or not? Any line Andoran won't keep to is a line that starts a war, and if Asmodeus draws such a line He's starting a war by doing it."

"By that standard, everyone can avoid blame for everything. I can call your claim to own the clothes you wear an unreasonable line, and take them, and you can call my claim to a right to your clothes unreasonable and fight back, and I can call your fighting back unreasonable and we've got a war now.

If a bad outcome is happening, someone must have done the wrong thing at some point, and one should consider the possibility it was them."

"It's not like you personally decided to antagonise Cheliax, not by enough to justify this."

How's he supposed to answer that?

"Most of us voted for Codwin, and it's not like he was dishonest about what he wanted to do when he won. We could reasonably have seen this coming."

"It's not like he won by only one vote. You couldn't have changed the outcome."