"That effectively increases the percentage of people in the room who were not at any point vetted for having anything resembling a sense of decency. I would do four hundred and fifty, but six hundred is probably doable. All counts and above attend in their capacity as counts, which is nearly a quarter of six hundred. Then you invite either around fifty or one hundred and fifty clerics, and either one hundred and fifty or two hundred of each of sortition delegates and elected delegates. Elected delegates and nobility go by county, clerics go by church, and sortition delegates can if we wish be selected from the entire population. Special delegates are special, and I think we extend exactly one seat to each additional organization. It won't be pretty, but I think it will be better than a thousand, at least."

"That sounds good to me. I think for elected delegates we ought to mostly stick to existing regional divisions - or at least the ones we're recognizing and keeping - which would suggest one per county. And then if we want the same number drawn by lot... this suggests six hundred rather than four and a half? Though it sounds like we'd still be short on qualified clergy, and by more than we can easily make up with Hellknights and other orders. Perhaps in light of the situation on the ground we should allow each church to send one delegate from outside of Cheliax, or we might invite a delegation from Molthune if they're interested in reunification..."

"Four fifty is for if you throw the clergy in with the nobles as one third. Some counts have multiple counties, so you have fewer than a hundred and fifty counts even though you have that many counties. I suppose that still leaves you with a pretty limited number of cleric seats. Fine, six hundred."

"I'm not sure that opening the cleric seats up to non-chelish people will produce worse results, but it doesn't seem especially like any kind of self-government. Thinking on it, I say that we limit it to Chelish clerics, allow more than we can fill with fully qualified people, and accept that most of them won't be up on their theology. Having been vetted by a god and selected for emergency stopgap cleric work may not make them qualified to speak about what their churches would be best served by, but it also isn't nothing, as filters for reasonableness go. Honestly, it's probably a much better filter than whatever handle we have on the nobles we selected."

"I don't object. Theology isn't much of a qualification for what we're trying to do here."

"I keep thinking about the sortition question and feeling like a group of archmages has got to be able to design a better mechanism for it than looking at government records and drawing lots. You spent months putting together that shadow mirror for Drezen and we didn't even end up using it in our final plan. Surely you can devise a spell or a magic item or some other contrivance that, say, detects all thinking beings within some area, then randomly selects one and, I don't know, bestows a curse of 'you have an invitation to the constitutional convention inscribed on your hand' that can only be broken by attending the constitutional convention?"

"Well, one, that sounds like a lot of work, and we're all rather more busy than we were two years ago. But two, beings with an intelligence reading above the animal level who live inside Chelish borders are not the same set as citizens of Cheliax. If we do that, we'll draw kobolds in the sewers, fey in the Barrowood, devils in the Whisperwood, mountain orcs in Menador, blink dogs in the hills, human toddlers, and some large number of slaves. We'd have to manually limit the draw to people who can reasonably be invited and who are meaningfully governed by Cheliax, and there's no way to tell a spell that; we'd have to filter after."

"I'd been assuming the set of candidates for sortition would include slaves. But my real concern here is that the average Chelish citizen would probably respond to that curse by hiding or fleeing the country." 

"Does the government even keep records about slaves? Taxpayers, sure. Citizens, maybe. But are slaves required to be registered? If they are, do we think slaveholders reliably complied with that?"

"Naima, you picked your apprentices by detecting those above some intellect threshold and it worked out fine. Were you applying any other filters when you did that? How did you make sure you didn't end up with any blink dog apprentices?"

"Well, the first time I specifically looked for places that were housing groups of orphans, then detected intelligence on the ones I found. The second time, I detected intelligence on the set of people who responded to an advertisement in the paper. But the point of sortition, as I understand it, is to avoid selecting based on interest."

"So are we going to pressgang people who don't want to come into attending? If the average Chelish citizen flees the country when invited, then that's still selecting based on interest. Ultimately people will come or they won't, and we'll probably have to invite a lot more than will actually show up in order to get the numbers you're looking for. If some invites land on toddlers or kobolds, doesn't that have about the same practical effect as some of them landing on people who are too terrified to appear when summoned?"

"Honestly, I assumed we were press-ganging people."

"Naturally. We could experiment with drawing until we get someone willing in a few counties, but my concern is that gets us the already locally powerful – exactly who we don't want." 

"...fair enough. In that case what if we pressgang someone whose registered owner doesn't want them to go, or will only let them go if they represent specific opinions, or will punish them afterwards for saying the wrong things? Even if we want slaves to attend, I don't see how they could possibly be expected to represent their own interests."

"That's not just slaves, that's everyone. We'll have to provide for their protection later in any case, and slaves I suppose we can manumit as necessary." 

"It's only tenable if you free anyone you draw, and even then their families remain enslaved. I suppose you could free them, too. Ione is right that we don't have a good mechanism for drawing them, but we could probably come up with something. It won't include all slaves, I'm sure."

"Élie's right though. It won't just be slaves, though that's the most obvious case. Anyone who contradicts the desires of the local powers, nobility or otherwise, is going to face repercussions. You're going to need to find a way to deal with that. Manumitting slaves won't solve the deeper problem. And I don't know if the state capacity exists to protect those who will need it."

"Between the delegates-by-lots, the president, the newly-empowered clergy who have pressing local concerns, and the nobility confused about what a constitution is or why Cheliax is getting one, I'm starting to wonder if we'll have even a dozen people who want to be there."

"I, for one, would be delighted if we could replace the president." 

"You'll be united with them in suffering. ...we could make interference with delegates a capital offense, but I can't actually think of a way to effectively prevent reprisals for anything they say that doesn't effectively make them immune to all law enforcement for the rest of their lives. It's a difficult problem."

"If you don't want to do it, I will. Though I'm certain you'll be less satisfied with the result," he says to the Galtian with well-practiced deadpan.

"Is there some kind of royal protection they can be placed under? Maybe give one of the Hellknight orders responsibility for investigating interference with the convention, including reprisals against delegates. If you can trust them, that is."

"I appreciate the offer – and it might actually help if you want to stand next to me and look grimly disapproving of all this radical populist nonsense." 

"I suppose I can do that. Though I rarely ever look grim."

"I'm glad we have your support. For the delegates... Keeping track of what happens to two hundred randomized, unrelated people is just a very difficult task. Security during the convention will be enough of a headache, but keeping it going indefinitely?" She sighs deeply. "Perhaps we can offer them the choice to leave Cheliax, or offer them new land, or give them a new face, but these all in themselves constitute ruining someone's life if they were previously doing all right for themselves."

"Is there a way we could maintain their anonymity during the convention, and then they could return to their regular lives or not as they prefer afterwards?"

"Nothing that's both foolproof and cheap. The difficulty I foresee is protecting them from scrying attempts by people who met them during the convention, but maybe that at least limits the scope of the bullying."