Blai can do his best to come up with appropriately grave examples of each but mostly his position here is that Law Law Law Law Law Law Law.

This person thinks he should consider that actually Neutral Good is the best alignment and both Lawful and Chaotic Good are perversions of pure Goodness. This person thinks he should consider that actually Lawfulness is when you follow your commander's orders no matter what (unless they're enchanted). This person agrees with the last person except that he's pretty sure it's technically a little Chaotic to disobey orders even if your commander is enchanted, it's just a type of being Chaotic that's okay.

Does anyone have anything more material to Project Get The Army To Behave than this.

Some people have more hypothetical questions about whether various things would technically qualify as illegal orders.

These he can answer!

Any requests for the next march-and-talk topic? If there are not he's going with Corruption: Don't.

Wow. Uh. What is he imagining they would do instead.

He is imagining that they would be paid their appropriate wages, plus any bonus loot shares if they're taking missions that come with those, and they would spend those, and not attempt to acquire additional things from the military budget.

The rank-and-file soldiers think that sounds great! Especially if he's also making sure they're paid on time and properly equipped!

...what's his plan for making sure that actually happens?

He would absolutely love to know about all the points in the process where this could fail to happen.

Well, the thing is, there are kind of a lot of them.

Nerosyan could send their funding late. Nerosyan could send less funding than they're supposed to. Whoever's bringing the money could be ambushed by demons that snuck through the barrier, or really well-organized bandits, or some kind of auromvorax hybrid that can live this far north. (Digression into an argument about whether auromvoraxes are actually real.) There could be a blizzard that slows them down. If he had it teleported instead, they'd be using Mendev's very limited teleport capacity, and the teleport might still go off-target, or the teleporter might decide to just take it and fuck off to the Stolen Lands or something (in the Stolen Lands theft is legal so no one would stop them, that's why they're called the Stolen Lands). (Digression into a very one-sided argument with someone who doesn't believe teleporters are real.)

Whoever set the budgets might have underestimated the amount of money they would need to spend on food or weapons or equipment repairs, and take from the money for paying the soldiers in order to compensate, or vice versa. Some of the money might be intended for specific border forts, does he get to order the border forts to do something different? There might be some kind of emergency that's really expensive to fix such that money needed to be redirected from somewhere in order to compensate. Someone might be filling holes in the budget with donations from some specific person of means and that person could die and leave everything to their less-charitable children. In theory they pay casters more if they're higher-circle and that could mess things up if people circled up quickly enough. Someone might just skim off the top because they're greedy or a cultist, why else would they be stealing from Mendev? 

(They can continue in this vein for as long as he likes.)

Okay. If they catch anybody skimming because they are greedy or a cultist he wants to hear about it. He is going to go talk to Rathimus now.

"What can I do for you, Knight-Commander?"

"Some combination of the actual finances and the troops' opinion of the finances of the armed forces are in catastrophic shape and I am not sure how best to address it."

"Both, I would imagine. You're looking for — accurate information? An assessment of which plans for addressing the situation might plausibly work?"

"Yes. Many of the complaints were about possible diversion of the currency itself - do you have a guess how they'd take to promissory notes - does Mendev have the credibility to get those from the Church of Abadar or would it just be another layer of -" Gesture.

"I can't be confident, but I expect they'd be suspicious of promissory notes, particularly at first. Most of them can't read, they'd be relying on trust just to know what it was, and they wouldn't necessarily expect to be able to redeem them any time soon, or trust that they would be honored if they did. I also expect they would interpret being paid in promissory notes as a sign that Mendev was incapable of paying them in metal, with corresponding effects on their trust that the notes would translate to any real wealth. Mendev could — exchange some quantity of currency for a corresponding quantity of promissory notes?"

"It could but it's no good if the soldiers won't want them. They also mentioned -"

If nothing stops him Blai will eat the entire rest of the day beating his head against this problem! It's a bad problem he does not want to have!

Fiducia Rathimus is not by nature a particularly expressive person but it's not difficult to tell that he is sympathetic to Blai's plight. It sure is a bad problem! It sure would be better if it were less of one! Unfortunately if it were trivially solvable it would have been solved already. 

They are briefly interrupted by someone who wants to purchase a scroll from the Fiducia, but otherwise he can keep at it all day until the scouts return to give their report on what awaits them the next day.

If he cannot vanish the problem today he at least wants a plan to chip away at it over time. ...maybe once Ember manifests a healing ability not easily replaced by channels he can talk her into selling it in bulk. He vaguely thinks that's how the last person-who-could-do-that he heard of made the party's money. What in Rathimus's opinion would be a good thing to aim for, it's probably the same general sort of set of things that paladins can get as mercies but she'd be able to hit everyone she could touch once a day.

Disease healing would be particularly lucrative, especially if someone manages to circle up to the point of being able to teleport — they'd be able to send her out to cities having plague outbreaks and find large numbers of eager customers. Failing that, the ability to regenerate lost limbs would be quite valuable, but that typically requires a powerful paladin or cleric. He expects that other mercies useful outside of a combat situation are likely to be less lucrative (powerful paladins can sometimes cure blindness, but she'd be limited to the customers who either don't have access to a third-circle cleric or can't afford their services even when they aren't bidding against a third of their city), though even if she can't manage disease healing some mercies can treat some of the symptoms, which could be a smaller income source. If she manages to duplicate effects that would normally require a costly component, like Restoration, that could also be quite valuable, and given that she isn't in fact a paladin it's possible she would be able to.

He'll let her know, in case she can steer that at all. Does Rathimus have any other ideas?

For raising money or for reducing corruption more generally?

Both, it seems they're intimately related and he should not have simply accepted the Queen's assertion that the budget covered the present amount of army.

Fiducia Rathimus is not saying out loud with his mouth that that's a really fascinating claim for a paladin of Iomedae to be capable of making, but he is possibly saying it a little bit with his face.

In terms of raising funds: securing donations has historically been a popular source of funding for the Mendevian crusades, though it will likely be more effective as he secures more victories. His diplomatic advisor will likely have better ideas about which targets would be most receptive. He could secure permission for Ember to sell her services somewhere that doesn't have reliable access to positive channels, where her skills will correspondingly fetch a higher price — does he happen to know if her powers are divine in origin? Do any of his other companions have particularly unusual skills? It is a characteristic mistake of adventurers to underestimate how much money they could make selling their skills in a city doing 'boring' work. Item crafting could be highly lucrative, particularly if any of the paladins are strong enough to learn how to craft wands and interested in doing so, but it would require an upfront investment of time. In principle he could attempt to get a loan from the Church of Abadar but they will want to price in the risk of his irretrievable death as well as the known traits of Mendev. (And so on, and so forth.)

The corruption problem is significantly more complicated but Rathimus will similarly attempt to provide suggestions, with more caveats about his confidence in any of them actually working and the extent to which different problems feed into each other. (For example, it might be helpful to have complete purchase records, in order to identify problems like 'we are consistently under-budgeting for cold weather gear,' but people will be even less likely to actually consistently document their purchases (not that they were doing so reliably to begin with) if they know they'll be prosecuted for some of them, and so on.) 

He doesn't know if Ember is divine or arcane but he bets Nenio can figure it out and then, yeah, she could if arcane probably make a mint in... Rahadoum? He doesn't think she would hold up particularly well to a tour of the Chelish forts. The Count is unusual but not in a way that makes him functionally very different from a cleric; the wizards are wizards; the paladin's a paladin and the archer's an archer; the talking weapon is unusual but not obviously remuneratively so. The Wardstone event gave them some funny spillover powers but nothing that makes them qualitatively special or that seems like it would obviously have them making scrolls or wands or anything faster or at less materials cost than anyone else does once they learned.