Roleplay / Project Lawful

Pictured from left to right: Eulàlia Avaricia de Seguer, Ione Sala, Pilar Pineda, Asmodia, Keltham, Carissa Sevar, Elias Abarco, Abrogail Thrune II, Ferrer Maillol, and Aspexia Rugatonn.

Keltham: Sounds like your universe is nothing like my universe. We don't have places-people-go-when-they-are-dead. We don't have translation 'spells'. And you don't have explicit math about inexploitable equilibria, which implies a vast amount of other missing knowledge. If you've never previously seen people like me showing up, I'd say a glitch has occurred, and that is exactly the kind of situation where you might be able to feast on an exponentially vast buffet of profitable strategies that nobody else has tried before because they couldn't take advantage of the glitch.
Carissa: - well. We have not seen dead people showing up before, except if someone raises them as a zombie, or resurrects them, and the thing you described doesn't really sound like either of those things. It does seem important to, uh, get Asmodeus in touch with your world, so that we can collect the souls of your people when they die, instead of them ceasing to exist.
Keltham: Yeah! Like that! That is exactly what I am talking about!

Project Lawful—also known as planecrash—is a Pathfinder Glowfic primarily cowritten by Eliezer Yudkowsky (under the pseudonym Iarwain) and Lintamande, with smaller appearances by a variety of other authors.

Keltham is an aspiring mad investor from the utopian planet of dath ilan, where the methods of rationality are a universally-taught and basic subject of education. His dreams in life are to become rich through his investments, marry about two dozen women and have about a hundred and forty-four children, and thereby prove a philosophical point to the Civilization in which he was raised about the value of selfishness. In the aftermath what should have been a fatal plane crash, he finds himself on an alien planet, where his knowledge of rationality techniques and decision theory—as well as of various locally-unknown chemical and industrial processes—makes him an exceptionally valuable trading partner for the locals. With the help of a local guide by the name of Carissa Sevar, he sets out to engage in as much mutually-beneficial trade as he can, to uplift the world while turning a vast personal profit in the process.

Carissa Sevar is a wizard from the devil-worshipping country of Cheliax, helping the Chelish army hold back the endless waves of demons at the Worldwound. She hopes to live an unremarkable life in which she fails to attract the attention of anyone important—as is good survival practice, in Cheliax—and then, eventually, to die, go to Hell, and be 'perfected' into a devil herself. However, after meeting an alien by the name of Keltham, she finds herself swept up as a key player in a grand conspiracy to extract all of his otherworldly knowledge in the service of Cheliax's conquest of the world, all while concealing from him the part where Cheliax and Hell are actually hurting people.

Project Lawful's first book, mad investor chaos and the woman of asmodeus, can be read here. Alternatively, for those unfamiliar with the glowfic format, a primer on how to read it can be found here.

Project Lawful contains examples of:

• all lowercase letters: Dath ilan's name, in Baseline, lacks the agency marker that would be placed on the name of a person, representing Civilization's collective decision to refrain from turning into a hivemind. When the name is rendered in English, this is represented by leaving it uncapitalized, 'dath ilan' rather than 'Dath Ilan', in the manner of a common noun rather than a proper one.
• Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: As per Pathfinder canon, touching the Starstone will cause a mortal to become a god. This is usually an extremely unwise thing to attempt to do, because:
  • One: The Starstone is inside of a fortress filled with defenses designed to keep people out. The purpose of this fortress is not to protect the Starstone - it's to protect mortals from what happens to people who might actually succeed at reaching it.
  • Two: After making it through the fortress, the last obstacle that stands between a would-be god and the Starstone is the invulnerable godlike being Achaekek, which exists in order to prevent mortals from trying to usurp the power of the gods. If you are deliberately trying to become a god and actually manage to reach the Starstone, Achaekek will Gate in from Abbadon and kill you and there is literally nothing anyone can do about it. (Achaekek won't intervene to prevent someone from accidentally becoming a god, though.)
  • Three: Even if you do manage to touch the Starstone and become a god, you now have to deal with the fact that Golarion already has a lot of gods, they generally don't want new gods around to mess up the existing balance of power, and unless one or more of them has a good reason to defend you, your new existence as a deity will be very, very brief.
  • By the end of the story, Keltham, Carissa Sevar, and Pilar Pineda all use the Starstone to ascend to divinity.
• Became Their Own Antithesis: If we assume Dou-Bral became Zon-Kuthon, rather than having been replaced by him, he certainly fits the bill. Originally a god of beauty, love, and the arts, he returned from the Dark Tapestry as a god of mutilation, misery, and torture; and proceeded to lash out at his sister and torture his father. He is described as literally having had his utility function inverted, such that Zon-Kuthon hates everything Dou-Bral loved and loves everything he hated.
• Benevolent Boss: By Cheliax standards, Carissa Sevar is one.
• Chunky Salsa Rule: Regardless of how much HP you have or how good your armor class and saving throws are, if you're caught in a big enough explosion, you die.
  A half-ton of explosive going off in the same room isn't a combat attack, it's just you being dead.
• Deal with the Devil: Asmodeus is the god of these; devils that serve him will always honor the Exact Words of contracts they sign, and only the Exact Words. It's common practice in Cheliax for people who believe that they're going to Hell anyway to sell their soul to specific devils in exchange for various benefits; most of the Project Lawful researchers are coerced into selling their soul for permanent Arcane Sight.
• Death Is Cheap: Well, sort of. As in Pathfinder, resurrection spells do require expensive spell components and a high-level caster, but any organization powerful or wealthy enough to employ high-level casters (such as governments and churches) can easily afford them when necessary.
• Demon of Human Origin: Some of the people who end up in Hell after their death are eventually—after centuries of torture—turned into devils. People who end up in the Abyss, meanwhile, are known to turn into demons, although the story provides less in the way of details there.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?:
  • After fully taking control of her oracle powers, Pilar Pineda travels to Elysium and punches Cayden Cailean in the face. For his part, Cayden Cailean admits that he is well aware of how annoying he can be and maintains a human body specifically so that people like Pilar have something to punch when he deserves it.
  • Achaekek cannot actually be harmed by mortals - even an antimatter bomb won't scratch him. But a big enough explosion can still move him, and touching the Starstone is one of the few things that can kill a god...
• Do Wrong, Right: Abrogail is very unhappy with how torture is usually done in Cheliax. Not because she's against torture, but because in her estimation no one in the country but her knows how to do it properly. She more fully describes her frustration in this sandbox thread:
  Abrogail: I'd be more INFURIATED at how incompetent you are at hurting people, except for how EVERYBODY IN THIS COUNTRY EXCEPT ME is terrible at it. … Torture is not a magic wand that makes people better at things when you apply it. It works great as a magic wand for producing terror and regret, but for that to IMPROVE PERFORMANCE there has to be some kind of AQUEDUCT going from the FEAR LAKE to the RESULTS FARM. … People need to know, see, feel, that doing one thing leads to more pain, and doing something else leads to less pain. They need to know how to achieve their goal of hurting less. … If you ask mortals why they hurt people, they talk about things that ALREADY HAPPENED, while if you ask devils why they hurt people, they talk about things THEY WANTED TO MAKE HAPPEN IN THE FUTURE. Which makes sense, see, because you CAN'T CHANGE THE PAST, so if you were trying to use torture to actually DO ANYTHING PURPOSEFUL it would be something having to do with the FUTURE. … What are you doing, Slappy? You're getting angry at your boy's lack of performance and you're hurting him and you feel like that ought to make him better and he doesn't get better so you feel frustrated and you act that out by hurting him more. Do you know what that makes you? It doesn't make you good at Asmodeanism, it makes you BAD AT TORTURE.
  • She's even written copious notes about how to torture people properly. However, "Nobody's ever understood them and the Queen has given up on trying to explain to anybody."
  • After Subirachs punishes Carissa by having Elias Abarco rape her, Abrogail is absolutely furious and wants the same done to them. Not because she's against the act itself, or because she thinks Carissa didn't deserve it, but because that specific punishment's effects on Carissa could have endangered their deception of Keltham in multiple different ways. By that metric it was perhaps the most ill-advised punishment they possibly could have chosen.
    Abrogail: Let Subirachs inflict whatever worse punishment on Sevar she likes so long as it is not a sexual one! How about a pit of venomous spiders? Many people fear being thrown into a pit of venomous spiders! Even the ones who don't fear it the first time oft fear it more the second time around! Has anybody even tried throwing Sevar into a pit of venomous spiders? No! And why not? I DON'T KNOW. WHY RAPE.
  • At one point, another Project Lawful member compares Pilar Pineda's devotion to Asmodeus to the way paladins unselfishly follow Good gods, and tells her she needs to learn to be more selfish if she wants to be properly Evil. (See Minion with an F in Evil, below.)
• Dramatic Irony:
  • Much of the story is built on this. The reader, if they don't already know going in, finds out pretty quickly that Cheliax is a breathtakingly Evil country that runs on tyranny and slavery and torture and literal thought policing. The Project Lawful staff are doing a very painstaking job of hiding this from Keltham. While he has the occasional nagging doubt that there's some kind of Conspiracy at play to hoodwink him about the nature of his surroundings, he makes only half-hearted or half-baked attempts to uncover this Conspiracy, and doesn't discover the true depths of Cheliax's Evil — including the actual definition of what "Evil" even means — until the end of the sixth thread, "what the truth can destroy".
  • The reason Keltham wants to have two dozen wives and 144 children, is that he knows Civilization doesn't think someone with his psychological profile is worth much to them, and he wants to prove otherwise. What makes having that many children a particularly forceful argument is that he knows Civilization won't subsidize him to have children, as they would if they thought his neurotype was worth replicating. By succeeding far beyond anyone's wildest expectations in spite of that, he'd be proving they were not just mistaken about how valuable selfishness is, but so mistaken that they need to drastically reevaluate what they thought they knew about the world, because obviously several things were wrong if it led them to such a terrible prediction. But later, under his first-ever Owl's Wisdom, one of the first revelations to come to him is:
    He knows … that in dath ilan he would never have had his 144 children. He would have tried to be special and failed and been sad and then maybe gotten an ordinary +0.8sd job and either paid for a child out of that or decided he was too strange and unhappy to have one.
    • But then, much later in the story, we find out what Keltham doesn't know:
      Here's another not-so-little irony of Keltham's life, one that he'll probably never have a chance to learn now: When Keltham reached age 20, and Civilization first revealed to him the subsidy it would pay to him to have kids -
      …
      - Civilization would have told Keltham that they did, in fact, want more of him. He's shifted honorably-selfish away from altruistic, yes, and that's a little weird; he's noticeably less reflective than the average dath ilani, and that's bad; but he also experiences emotions more strongly, has stronger drive, than the average dath ilani, and that matters a lot. This organism is made happy more easily; he's happier than you'd expect for a self-conceived misfit. It would have outweighed his selfishness, in the eyes of what Civilization had voted on as its future targets; and the possibility would not have been lost on Civilization that maybe that higher-selfishness business was correlated with the happiness part.
      It's definitely the sort of interesting mindstate where, if nothing else, you'd like him to have four kids out of sheer curiosity, to find out if the traits stay correlated in his children.
• Dungeon Bypass: You know that fortress housing the Starstone? Turns out it wasn't strong enough to withstand antimatter bombs.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: During Keltham and Carissa's first conversation, Carissa makes an offhand comment that she doesn't know that Asmodeus would want a billion dollars, despite neither Golarion nor dath ilan using dollars as a unit of currency. (The post has since been amended so that it now says "a billion gold".)
• Equal-Opportunity Evil: Cheliax has set itself apart from many other countries, both Evil and otherwise, by letting women get an education, join the military, etc. This is one of the few areas where they actually look more forward-thinking and virtuous than most alternatives. It probably helps that they've spent at least the last couple decades being ruled by a Queen, and even more so that she's extremely formidable and terrifying.
• Even Evil Has Standards: For all that Befutig Safiza Uj-alet is evil, he's far less purely so than the forces of Hell, and on that basis he pleads for Pilar to stay with him rather than going to Hell as she plans.
  O Pilar, O Pilar, why would she foresake the cruelty of the Efreet for the cruelty of Hell? She was made to be a slave, but let her choose a more appreciative master than Asmodeus!
  • Carissa is genuinely selfish about most things, and typically is not bothered about the fates of people she doesn't specifically care about, which is part of why she sorts as Evil. She draws the line at the prospect of anyone's soul being permanently destroyed, rather than going to an afterlife or being resurrected. She certainly has an intense horror of this fate for herself first and foremost, but she considers such a fate so uniquely and objectively horrible that she can't stand the thought of it happening to anyone else either. She hates and fears Abaddon for eating souls, regardless of her own soul being safe. In non-planecrash threads where she isekais to worlds without afterlives and resurrection, learning that those people just stop existing upon death utterly horrifies her; and in cases where it seems remediable she will throw all of her resources at remedying it.
• The Evils of Free Will:
  • Asmodeus is known to strongly disapprove of mortals' acquisition of free will, and removal-of-free-will is among the things done to people in the process of turning them into devils.
  • The first time Carissa reads Keltham's mind, she interprets the orderliness of his thoughts as indicative of what it might be like to be less free-willed, and it makes her far more impatient to go to Hell and lose her own free will than she'd previously been.
• Fantastic Nuke: When Keltham learns about Wish spells (and that they often leave disasters behind) he reasons that they could probably be used to create enough antimatter to destroy large areas of a country. At one point, before setting out to do something that might be extremely dangerous, he gives a paladin of Iomedae a list of Wish wordings that can be used as weapons of mass destruction of different strengths. He eventually does use antimatter explosions to gain access to the Starstone and as part of a plan to kill Achaekek.
• Go Mad from the Revelation: Much of Keltham's teachings involve how to recognize and prevent self-deception. This doesn't mix well with education in Cheliax, with its dedication to eliminating heresy and its ability to read thoughts - finding out that you don't actually believe in Asmodeanism and can no longer pretend to yourself otherwise can have strange effects someone who's built their entire identity around that facade.
• Harem Seeker: Keltham's primary goals in life, as of the start of the story, include marrying about two dozen women. (And having about a hundred and forty-four children with them.)
• Hell Seeker:
  • Carissa very strongly wants to go to Hell—ideally to be perfected into a devil, but, if not that, then at least as a preferable alternative over Cessation of Existence—and finds the superiority of existence-while-being-tortured-forever over nonexistence self-apparent to the point of near-incomprehension of the reasons why Asmodia might prefer the latter over the former.
  • Pilar is sufficiently loyal to Asmodeus that she even goes so far as to refuse to stay in Elysium when she has the opportunity, instead accepting resurrection with the intention of eventually ending up in Hell instead.
• Human Popsicle: Civilization goes very far out of its way to cryopreserve everyone it possibly can, rather than allow anyone to suffer True Death.
• Informed Attractiveness: When a character is said to be extremely attractive, further details usually aren't forthcoming and we just have to take their word for it. This isn't so bad in Carissa's case, since her avatar model is literally a model, so you can see how pretty she is. Unfortunately Abrogail doesn't have that going for her; the face shown in her avatar isn't ugly, but it doesn't corroborate her alleged beauty either. It isn't until very late into the story that we're shown a couple of examples◊ of how we're really supposed to see her.
  • Where this really hits Carissa is whenever she gets a magical beauty treatment. We're told she's noticeably prettier, and we're shown other people noticing this — eventually, to the point where strangers are intimidated by her on the basis of her looks alone — but we do not get to see a significantly prettier Carissa. At best, her most attractive avatar photos are used a bit more often.
• Instructional Dialogue: The story includes Keltham's lectures on (real-world) mathematics and Bayesian probability theory, as well as descriptions of how Civilization on dath ilan functions. (A few potshots at how Earth is Doing It Wrong by, among other things, using frequentist rather than Bayesian statistics in science papers, are also included.) The math is indeed correct, but Keltham is a teenager, not an experienced math teacher, so the lectures themselves can be awkward and not necessarily easy for the reader to learn from.
• Kill the God: Killing a Golarion god is extremely difficult, but there have been gods that died. There are two ways this has happened:
  • Gods can kill other gods, but it's difficult even for them. Gods can divide themselves into (metaphorical) pieces and spread themselves and their influence over larger regions of space, and to truly kill a god requires the destruction of every last piece. On the other hand, although being fragmented makes a god safer, it also makes it less powerful and less intelligent.
  • Physically touching The Starstone will kill a god.
• Language Barrier: The only language Keltham understands, when not under the effect of translation magic, is Baseline; whenever the translation magic he's using happens to wear off, this leads to temporary communication difficulties until more can be cast.
• Language Equals Thought: Asmodia can't figure out why she's so happy about having Korva around, because:
  The Chelish dialect of Taldane does have a word for 'friend'. It just doesn't use it for anything.
• Magitek: Keltham finds many ways to use Golarion magic to jump-start technological development; in particular, experimenting with the spell Prestidigitation leads him to discover ways to use it in industrial chemistry, taking the place of resources and technologies that Golarion does not yet have easy access to. Later, he mass-produces diamonds, which are not only valuable because of their scarcity, but also because they are material components for high-level spells.
• Minion with an F in Evil: Pilar Pineda is honestly dedicated to the cause of Asmodeus, willingly follows Evil orders even when she doesn't enjoy it, and willingly submits to torture and other punishments when her superiors order them. She's not very good at the "being selfish" part of Evil, though, and when she says that she doesn't really have any plans for her share of Project Lawful's income and might donate it to the Church of Asmodeus, one of the other members mockingly compares her to a paladin. Cayden Cailean eventually tells her that her problem was that her "selfish" side likes being nice and having friends, and she had been in denial about it.
• Not So Stoic: Abadar and Irori, who generally radiate a stately calm, both have their moments.
  Abadar: "KHEMET I NEED HELP UNDERSTANDING MORTALS"
  • Irori's is mixed with a heavy dose of O.O.C. Is Serious Business:
    Immense pride, that she's come this far, to cast Irori free and proceed on her own unhindered.
    An apology, that He ever thought that Carissa Sevar needed His meddling aid.
    His last benediction that she be about her own Way of Carissa Sevar, now.
    ALSO IF CARISSA SEVAR FAILS IN HER TASK CAN SHE PLEASE VOLUNTARILY PRAY ABOUT THAT IMPORTANT FACT TO IOMEDAE OR ERECURA OR NORGORBER OR LITERALLY ANY OTHER GOD WHO MIGHT HEAR AND UNDERSTAND HER BECAUSE IT IS SUPER NOT IRORI'S NATURE TO TAKE UP HER TASK IF SHE FAILS AND THIS IS AN UNUSUALLY INCONVENIENT TIME FOR THAT FACT TO BE TRUE
    (this last message is not going to come across at all clearly, given how much it contradicts Irori's domain, but He is TRYING REALLY HARD TO CONVEY IT ANYWAYS)
• Omnicidal Maniac: A common type of villain in dath ilani fiction is someone who believes in negative utilitarianism and has concluded that, since the badness of the suffering in the universe far exceeds the goodness of everything else, the universe should be destroyed so nobody will have to suffer again. When Keltham learns the truth about Hell, he ends up deciding that he actually would rather destroy Pharasma's Creation completely rather than allow the Evil afterlives to continue as they are - and starts planning ways to actually destroy it.
• One-Man Industrial Revolution: In addition to having the standard dath ilani education in science, mathematics, and economics, Keltham has read a lot of dath ilani fiction describing exactly how to do this, including technical details on how to start mass producing important industrial chemicals, such as sulfuric acid, from raw materials.
• Outside-Context Problem: Keltham's knowledge from another world makes him one for Golarion, and not even the gods (with the possible exception of Nethys) really understand just what it is they're dealing with.
• Pragmatic Pansexuality: Among the Project Lawful girls, not all are genuinely attracted to Keltham; this being Cheliax, neither they nor their bosses even consider the idea that this might preclude their having sex with Keltham, aside from through the practical frame of whether their acting skills are good enough to prevent him from noticing their disinterest.
• Pragmatic Villainy: Abrogail's tortures often end up being more humane and more selective than average, purely by dint of the fact that she understands the difference between torturing for fun or fear or emotional release, and torturing for improved performance. When she wants the latter, she is not seeking to break the victim or leave them worse off in the long run, because that will make them less useful. She's perfectly fine with torture that breaks people if that's the goal — terror and tyranny also serve Asmodeus — but she gets very frustrated about people who use that kind of torture no matter what the goal is (which as far as she's concerned is literally everyone else in the country). She also understands that no amount of torture will improve performance if the victim doesn't know how to improve.
  Abrogail: I can't take a sixth-circle wizard and tell them that if they don't close the Worldwound in a year, I'll make an artistic production of their suffering such that when they get to Hell their owner will feel impressed and competitive about it, and have them actually close the Worldwound. I tried that just to see if that might work, if maybe all the wizards were just being lazy and unmotivated about actually getting the Worldwound fixed, but no, they actually don't know how to do it, and don't know how to figure out how to do it, no matter how desperate they are. … You can, by means of pain selectively applied, cause your boy to keep trying to write, to keep his hand moving on the paper. If he doesn't know how to write then you can only solve this by teaching him how to write.
  • In general, Lawful Evil thinks of itself this way, and usually considers Chaotic Evil to be Stupid Evil because it's a lot more obviously self-destructive. Part of Carissa Sevar's character arc consists of wondering if Asmodeus and Hell actually are as pragmatic as they claim to be, or if, like Zon-Kuthon, they torture people for their own amusement even when it works against their other interests.
• Reincarnate in Another World: The series starts with Keltham dying in a plane crash, sufficiently violently that he can't be cryonically frozen before his brain deteriorates irrecoverably, and waking up near the Worldwound in Golarion.
• Religion of Evil: Asmodeanism is not a religion whose influence tends to produce good lives, either for its followers or for those victimized by its followers. (A pair of groups, it should be noted, which overlap heavily.) Between mind-reading-enforced thought-policing, torture as an ordinary and unremarkable component in daily life, strong pressure for its followers to behave in a manner which will send them to Hell after death, extensive slavery, and all the other ways in which Asmodeus prefers to have society shaped, both short-term and long-term quality of life for the vast majority of Asmodeans and others in Asmodean-run territories is substantially lowered by the religion's influence.
• Safe, Sane, and Consensual: Cheliax, being Evil, does not follow this. One of their standard corruption techniques is to get someone used to willing partners that feign reluctance to have sex and then trick them into committing an actual rape. In particular, they're hoping to use Keltham's sexual sadism to get him to jump off the slippery slope into actual rape and abuse.
• Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!: Invoked by Cayden Cailean with regards to his Thanatos Gambit:
  Cayden Cailean: Long ago I was shown a treaty and told that I'd die if I didn't look like I was predictably going to abide by it, so I abided by it. The fun thing about that arrangement is that, given the right prompt from a planet of shattered prophecy, you can suddenly decide you're willing to die, and say, "Fuck that treaty, I'm doing what's right."
• Shadow Archetype: Cayden Cailean based "Snack Service" on the parts of Pilar Pineda's personality that she'd been repressing.
• Shapeshifting Seducer: Meritxell sometimes changes her appearance using the spell Alter Self before having sex with Keltham so she can look like and pretend to be another person, such as the inhumanly beautiful Abrogail Thrune. Sometimes it's not actually Meritxell that Keltham is having sex with. Abrogail Thrune arranges for him to impregnate several women, including herself, without his knowledge.
• Shout-Out:
  • During the initial plane ride in dath ilan, prior to the part where the plane crashes, Thellim reads a book in the Reckless Investor Miyalsvor series, while Keltham reads Three to Infinity by Petheriel.
  • Later on, there are also occasional allusions to another dath ilani literary protagonist named Science Maniac Verrez.
• Stuff Blowing Up: The god Nethys likes explosions. Keltham knows about a lot of things that cause them, including chemical reactions, nuclear reactions, and antimatter - and Golarion magic turns out to be able to make bomb-making much easier.
• Taken for Granite: Abrogail is in the habit of petrifying people and then storing the statues in hard-to-retrieve locations, when she wants to kill them without immediately landing them in Hell. This lets her make meaningfully-intimidating death threats against Hell Seekers who might otherwise be difficult to threaten. And also serves as a convenient way of keeping embarrassing information about her life out of Hell's rumor mills.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Korva gives a very long and detailed one to Keltham, after he finally realizes the truth about Cheliax, laying out exactly how many mistakes he'd made over the course of the last several months, and spelling out explicitly for him what Evil actually involves.
• Too Kinky to Torture: There are many masochists in Cheliax, but Pilar Pineda takes it a lot further than most, to the point where she is even able to weaponize it: she seduces the leadership of rival Evil nations by appearing to be the perfect victim to unleash their sexual sadism upon, and then proceeds to manipulate her "torturers" into turning against each other.
• Translator Microbes: Keltham's native language is Baseline, a language with exactly zero native speakers on Golarion. Several different spells are employed over the course of his stay to ensure that it remains possible for people to communicate with him, each with different effect-profiles: Tongues (a relatively short-lived spell allowing the target to speak and understand all spoken languages), Comprehend Languages (another relatively short-lived spell, allowing the caster to understand all languages in both spoken and written form), and Share Language (which lasts a full day, and lets the target understand and speak and read and write a chosen language with the same degree of comprehension that the caster has).
• Unproblematic Prostitution: dath ilan's Civilization has no problem at all with sex work as a profession, or even with payment for sex between non-professionals (e.g. if someone's flirting attempt failed). This is of course partly thanks to cheap reliable contraception and the eradication of STIs, and Keltham concedes that it becomes less viable in a world like Golarion which has neither of those things.
• What You Are in the Dark: When Keltham prays for the first time, and uses a dath ilani writing exercise to decide what kind of god he should be trying to reach, he ends up thinking hard about his own values and ideals, and what a "Kelthamverse" where he is the median would be like. One of the things he ends up deciding is that "Kelthamians" are honorable and aren't the first to defect, "even in the dark, even if reality is ending the next day and there's no more iterations of the dilemmas".
  The Kelthamians of the Kelthamverse, Keltham decides … are not in a world where nobody actually cares about anybody else or has any honor. Kelthamians keep their promises, always, whether or not anyone is watching. Kelthamians don't betray their business partners, whether or not anyone is watching. They don't qualify as 'Good' by Golarion's bizarre standards … But they would also keep their promises in the dark, even if nobody ever knew.
• You Shall Not Pass!: Cayden Cailean uses all that remains of his power to hold off the other gods while Pilar Paneda, Carissa Sevar, and Keltham use the Starstone to attain divinity. He knows he won't survive, but he never liked being a god anyway.

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