Iomedae

We just didn’t like Paizo’s Iomedae that much and so rewrote her as a different character we find more interesting.

Concretely: Iomedae was born earlier and participated in the Shining Crusade for longer; she ascended at the age of 60, not at the age of 30, and while ‘Joan of Arc but high fantasy setting with magic’ is a fine gloss on her acts in her early 20s, she grew to become a savvy politician, tactical genius of a Crusade commander, and major reformer in Aroden’s Church, ultimately establishing Lastwall and arranging it significant political independence from Oppara as part of an effort to build non-feudal, non-oligarchic, merit-based political institutions.

She was politically ambitious, decided pretty young that she wanted to be a god, and wrote her holy book and set up Her church before She ascended. She was also obsessed with ways that mortals could leverage divine intervention farther on the Material and did a lot of research into how to Commune more efficiently, the lowest-budget ways to request an intervention from Heaven, etc.

She also had a lifelong It’s Complicated relationship with her ex-girlfriend, an evil archmage who is still around in the world today, quietly working against House Thrune under an assumed identity.

When She ascended, one of Her priorities was impartiality, not being biased towards the concerns and peoples that She happened to know in life, becoming the same god She’d be if She’d been born into a different country or different species. She no longer loves her friends, (with whom she was as a mortal very very close) any more than any other person, and they’re all varying degrees of pained or bitter about this.

Her followers identify her primarily as the Lawful Good goddess of triage and tradeoffs, or the Lawful Good god of pursuing the destruction of the Evil afterlives. Her primary concern is marshalling Heaven’s resources in the most effective manner, subject to the duties and obligations which Heaven has willingly agreed to because of the usefulness of being known to have made these commitments.

The paladins of different gods have different emphases; Iomedae picks the most paladins of any Inner Sea god. Her paladins aren’t Lawful Stupid, though ones without a good theological education are often on fairly precarious ground, because she was working from a pretty sophisticated conception of what Law is. Her paladins adhere to extremely high standards of honorable conduct in war, including always conducting negotiations not just in a truthful manner but in a straightforwardly truthful one, no ‘technically I only said…’. They don’t torture prisoners, and interrogations under mind control require special certification; they don’t start fights or kill people without adequate cause; they are generally part of a chain of command, rather than roaming adventurers.

One quirk of Iomedaens is that, because of their emphasis on Heaven’s resources being expended as efficiently as possible, they tend to react to their own god’s miraculous interventions with moderate consternation. Lastwall runs a failure analysis every time they get a vision from their goddess, to determine whether they could have figured out what they needed to do without help and saved Her the intervention. They also obsess over optimizing Commune questions to avoid duplicate questions, group questions the answers to which will be highly correlated, maximize the informativeness of questions, etc. The result is in one sense a fine-tuned machine for interacting with their goddess in far more precision and depth than other churches are capable of, and in another sense a forbidding and inaccessible system where average fifth-circle priests of Iomedae will be incredibly reluctant to do a Commune if they’re not certified and the church is under an unusual degree of centralized control.