Deopolitics

Some of this is maybe implicit in Paizo and other D&D settings, some of it we made up, I don’t remember which is which. Gods are bound by treaty regarding their interventions in the Material Plane. Interventions are costly for gods; if your god has to send a miracle to stop a hundred thousand people from dying, there’s probably something only a little less valuable than that which your god is unable to do because they were forced to make that expenditure here. This tends to make well-educated Good PCs reluctant to impose on their gods unless the need is very great, which I love as a GM, and it makes divine interventions a bittersweet moment: salvation always comes at a great and unknowable price to other people. By the same token, making an Evil god intervene to oppose you is a humanitarian act!

Empowering priests and paladins has some cost to a god, and only the most powerful gods can have ninth-circle priests, and generally only one. Most of the listed ultra-powerful priests of minor gods in the wiki are much less powerful. Pharasma, Abadar, Asmodeus, Sarenrae, Gozreh, and Nethys have ninth-circle priests; that’s it.

Lawful Gods possess tendencies consistent over time which are legible to other gods; not only do they (for example) not lie, but the fact they don’t lie is something like mathematically verifiable; imagine they can show their source code to another god which can then see that for all inputs, this god does not lie. Chaotic gods don’t necessarily lie or cheat or steal, but they don’t have source code that other gods can verify; there is no way to look at them and know (even if you’re a god yourself) that they will never lie, cheat, steal, etc. Mortals tend to have a profoundly confused understanding of the distinction between Law and Chaos because of course no mortal can show their source code to anyone, and they don’t even tend to know it themselves.

The gods vary enormously in how accurately their concerns can be summarized in human terms. Claims that gods are lovers or are sister/brother/etc are generally just confused human approximations, if that. Erastil and his wife Jaidi are gods obsessed with the experience of mortals who tried on purpose to have mortal-like experiences such as love and sex, so those claims are more meaningful about them.

We kept the envisioning of Shelyn where she is not a god of sex and not herself the kind of being that has any interest in romance and sex. If you want to conceive of some gods as in some sufficiently conceptual sense fucking, Desna and Cayden and Calistria are up to something; Shelyn isn’t. Sarenrae also isn’t.

The gods that were participants in the war to bind Rovagug all took on responsibility for various monitoring of and countering of Rovagug’s influence on the Material. The end of prophecy made all of these obligations much much more expensive to fulfill and the gods have mostly taken expensive and disruptive steps towards securing countries on Golarion they can direct to do this work for them.

People generally have continuity of identity in the afterlives, and personality alteration in the Good afterlives is generally voluntary and on an informed-consent basis. Petitioners who don’t have resurrections scheduled are sorted ~immediately, at least since the breaking of prophecy; everyone who hasn’t sold their soul or such receives a trial about their life, presided over by a psychopomp; Nirvana sends an advocate to every trial to argue even very evil people deserve paradise while other afterlives send people if they're likely to win/it’s worth it for a long shot/anyone feels like it (Chaotic).

lintamande: (Why? Well, otherwise to my own sensibilities all of the afterlives were an ongoing atrocity, and I’m honestly more interested in stories where Good is Good than where Good is Evil in a different coat of paint. There are still, it turns out, a lot of hard problems in the world where Good is Good, trying quite hard, and genuinely quite admirable. See also the section on Iomedae.)