"I don't think half of wizards are women, even laundry ones. Most drow wizards are women because drow are matriarchal. I think the opposite pattern holds among humans, and that there's more human men among adventurers too. Admittedly I do not think this pattern holds at all for dragons. As far as I know, dragons have managed perfect equality of the sexes. You seem to be equating 'adventurer' with, like... 'assassin'? Which is a subtype, not the standard modus operandi. - you might be missing that it is not necessarily unusual for a completely normal military to have attached adventurers, the tactics differ so they don't function the same way but they can still be in the same places after the same strategic objectives as a normal army."

"On Earth, most societies used to educate only the men of the ruling elite until just one or two centuries ago. Even today, some institutes of high education turn away women. Luckily, Germania and several other nations instituted a very wise policy of testing every child for mage potential and conscripting them for a three-year term of service. Before the war, this supplied industry with a steady flow of trained and highly valuable personnel." And now it has led to the perverse result of most mages above the grade-B cutoff dying on the front. At this rate, total war might breed mage talent out of the surviving population. 

The world of her second birth is so young compared to her first. The industrial revolution is still ongoing in parts of the world. General Zettour remembers when electricity was a novelty. Some of the soldiers under her command grew up without plumbing! Tanya is so used to considering universal mandatory education a bedrock of society that she tends to forget that most of the world's (supposed) modern states, other than Germania, only introduced it in living memory. There are people alive today in the Commonwealth and the Francois Republic that grew up through no fault of their own without being taught to read and write! 

"This is a bit of a tangent, but - what proportion of the population, in the countries you know about, are taught" basic skills "at least reading, writing, arithmetic... and some basic facts about laws and taxes, I suppose? And how many are given a more general education that would allow them to proceed to study wizardry or other advanced topcs? I might have made some wrong assumptions."

"About adventurers, I'm mostly confused at this point. It's possible you meant some things were only true of adventurers, and I took you to mean they were true of all adventurers. Could you tell me again what exactly 'adventurers' are?"

"I mean, I don't love the sound of conscription on the grounds that I am against slavery in general, but I'm glad it worked out for you. I would not have even a remotely accurate guess about surfacer education. Drow almost all pick up that sort of thing - I mean, we don't have laws and taxes, but we can read and figure - just because it takes a really dim person not to figure it out over the amount of time we have available if nobody's actively stopping them and nobody's actively stopping most of them. Humans do not have this advantage, I think they can just avoid it and then if they do there's less writing around to pick up the idea from. I'd assume their nobles probably can read and their farmers probably can't and I have no clue about random city people.

"Adventurer is a very loose category. Like, you could call a soldier a kind of adventurer, or a sailor, or someone with a trade caravan, because any of those people might run into an adventure. But they also might not, so you might just say 'sailor' and assume whoever you're talking to is aware that there are sea monsters and pirates in the world. An adventurer is someone who runs into adventures regularly enough that it is a defining feature of what they're doing with themselves, on purpose or otherwise, and who therefore can be expected to be on an upward trajectory of power and at an elevated risk of getting themselves killed this way. Adventures means things like fighting monsters, traversing for whatever reason territory that is dangerous for whatever reason, doing assassinations or searching for useful rare materials or taking over a political unit or waging a holy war or weird bespoke diplomacy that's strange enough you can't have a normal civilian doing it... I'm not going to be able to exhaustively list all kinds of adventures. And then eventually adventurers who don't die retire, and they do things that require power but not excitement, like teleport routes and crafting items."

"Conscription is like slavery in that your basic rights and freedoms are violated, yes. It's unlike slavery because it's not done by private individuals or to their benefit, and is to the benefit of everyone involved by forcing them into a better equilibrium. It's the state's job to solve coordination problems when individuals are incentivized to free-ride but everyone benefits if the problem is fixed." (Tanya would love to speak a language where that is a three-syllable sentence but, unfortunately, she doesn't.) "Of course it would be a much better world if there were no wars and so no conscription, but it would take a world government to solve that coordination problem and we don't have one, at least not yet." A universal state would still need an army to enforce its will but it could presumably make do with a much smaller one. "It is a sad fact of life on Earth that states which conscript a significant proportion of their population tend to win wars against those that don't, even if the other side's voluntary army is very professional and well-trained. Maybe one day technology will advance enough that having many soldiers doesn't provide a benefit... not that that would necessarily be better, considering the implied destructive ability."

"And I think that explains my confusion. I incorrectly assumed the examples you gave were typical of adventurers in some sense. I'm not sure anymore what calling someone an adventurer says about them, beyond a nebulous sense of personal power and willingness to take risks, but I assume I'm missing a lot of nuance and implications since I'm unfamiliar with this - social category."

"Okay, well, I'm against slavery for reasons that are not closely related to whether private individuals are having fun or not, all else being equal I'm in favor of private individuals having fun but I don't want them to do it by enslaving people and I don't want the state to either even if they are also using it to accomplish things that I would otherwise approve of... anyway there is no reason we need to come to an agreement on this since we're private individuals and agreed on whether that means we should own anybody.

"There's not a lot that's typical of adventurers; one of the things we communicate by saying we're adventurers is that we're weird. I expect people also figure that if they're willing to interact with us at all one interaction they could have is asking for our spell rates, since we're visibly casters in particular as opposed to the kind with swords, and they can ask if we have the time to clear out a zombie outbreak, and they probably should not expect us to stay in a small town for very long, and we might know lots of exotic languages or be interested in news from far away since our implied travel radius is bigger, and also if that one guy with a spear stabbed us this would start, not end, a fight. They might figure we're unusually likely to know our alignments though in fact we don't - you can't read anything off someone who's not powerful enough, and I am but I haven't gotten it checked, no upside potential downstairs, might do it on a lark up here, no idea if you count. We might have cool stuff, we probably have lots of money by farmer standards, we might be on a specific quest and if we're not we might be looking for one, we might have a particular power level we're aiming for before retirement such as being able to do a teleport route, maybe we're plotting to become gods, maybe we have interesting political problems at home we plan to go fix when we're ready..."

Conscription is not the state owning people, any more than it owns imprisoned criminals. Slave-owning societies can have slaves of the states and some of them even had slave soldiers but Tanya is very firm on the fact that conscription is different. Belmarniss is right that this isn't profitable to argue about, though. The poor young woman grew up (for a century!!) without a state at all. Tanya would probably also be hard to convince of a legitimate state's benefits, coming from such a background.

And - oh. Adventurers are the weird people. The misfits and the outcasts, the wanderers and the rootless, everyone who refuses or fails to accept the strictures of society. And sometimes they're the heroes who set out to slay a dragon, and the ones who succeed.

Neither of those are things normal people do. Normal people hire a band of samurai to protect their village. But Kikuchiyo can still be of benefit to society, even if he starts out by breaking its rules. The other six samurai enact their assigned legal and social role, but he is an adventurer. And so, of course, are the bandits. 

It helps makes sense of why Belmarniss has them pretending to be adventurers in order to scare off would-be assailants. And it underlines the inadequacy of a society whose many problems cannot all be solved by the state or the market, and which must not only tolerate but encourage freelance 'adventurers' - self-admitted weirdos - in hopes they will make things better, at least some of the time. Or maybe it's just that the state does not have the capacity to reign them in, and weirdos left alone will do some good as well as much harm.

"I think I understand better now, thank you. What is an alignment?"

"Alignment's the two-axis Law-Chaos, Good-Evil thing, like how I mentioned Hell's the Lawful Evil afterlife."

"...I don't think I'm familiar with that, uh, schema. The terms individually make sense but I'm probably missing some meaning attached to them in the local culture."

"I am a little undereducated on this because the surfacer books love contradicting each other about it and drow are all like, we're Chaotic Evil and going to the Abyss, so who cares. I think if I were guessing you'd be Lawful something but maybe there are heights of Lawfulness I've never experienced downstairs and in the grand scheme of things you're not Lawful enough to count."

"...please assume I don't know enough to understand that. Abyss is" - Tanya dredges her memory - "...another plane that contains an, uh, afterlife?" Now she's regretting asking the question but it would probably go even less well if she pretended to know what religious beliefs Belmarniss is talking about.

"Right, the Chaotic Evil one. The nine afterlives are the Abyss for Chaotic Evil, Abaddon for Neutral Evil, Hell for Lawful Evil, Axis for Lawful Neutral, Boneyard for double Neutral, Maelstrom for Chaotic Neutral, Elysium for Chaotic Good, Nirvana for Neutral Good, Heaven for Lawful Good. Everybody goes someplace unless something has gone wrong somewhere but only reasonably strong people read to alignment detection spells so most folks are guessing."

Tanya can't recall any similar Earth religion. For all she knows Golarion has the right of it; Being X was definitely something going wrong somewhere. But since the many Earth religions ardently believe in their (contradictory and manifestly false) afterlives, the fact that people on Golarion believe something is entirely unconvincing.

"Alignment detection spells are meant to foretell which afterlife you'll go to? What do they examine about the person?" It would be nice to be able to objectively measure whether someone is a lawful and/or good person, but for obvious reasons Tanya is very wary of anyone (any church?) claiming to do this without a lot of solid evidence. Not to mention that one wouldn't want to take the definition of 'good' and 'evil' from a religion, either. 

"Their history and disposition, I guess? Some books suggest that giving to charity is a particularly accessible sort of Good to do for folks who get nervous but I can't rule out that it was satire or something."

That's sensible of her. Charity is a bad idea, but you can't rely on fair afterlife judgements and the beings conducting them aren't interested in letting mortals know the rules.

"I have no idea how a spell could tell the history of a random person in front of it but I suppose that's no more surprising than a translation spell. ...are there spells that can tell more about a person's history, any kind of useful information?"

"...there's Detect Thoughts, though that's less history and more present. To be clear alignment reading spells are identifying the present, persistently existing alignment of whatever they're looking at, it's just that that's a characteristic determined by your history and disposition as I understand it."

"I don't understand what you mean by 'persistently existing'." That's a weird turn of phrase. Are there non-persistent alignments, or something?

"It sounded like you thought alignment detection was like, in the moment weighing the moral valence of somebody's actions throughout their life. It's not, that just already happens in the background constantly and in a powerful person it leaves a readable trace."

"I see." Religious philosophies and cosmologies always have an endless amount of details, because they accumulate everything their believers ever thought of without any process for removing false and disproven theories. (Well, they do remove the religious theories of their political enemies...) Anyway, if Belmarniss regards it as a theoretical curiosity that she hasn't even checked about herself, it's presumably safe for Tanya to forget about it.

"So, going back to the previous topic - regardless of who is or isn't an adventurer, or called that, you think it's fairly common for bandits or murderers - or other threats, like monsters - to be around, and for the local authorities to know where they are but to be so short on resources that they will ask strangers passing through to take care of the problem. I still don't think I fully understand what a society looks like when that's true, and how it can stay true without either bringing about a reaction - a new kind of government, or a private association, to address the threat - or else the state collapsing entirely. To be clear, I've read about times and places in Earth's history with widespread banditry, but they all involved despotic rulers who didn't care to fix the problems as long as they could keep taxing the population, and who also suppressed any attempts to organize a militia because it might take part in a revolt or civil war. Or else something like war or a drought pushing people off their land, with some of the refugees becoming bandits. That doesn't seem to match the picture where the authorities do want to deal with the problem, and have enough money to pay adventurers to fix the problem, and yet can't permanently solve it by spending that money on a standing home guard or something." It can't be true at the same time that they can pay for a solution, and are willing to do so when given the chance, and yet rely on random chance for that opportunity. That's not how rational people act, state or no state.

"I don't know what numbers you're imagining when you say 'fairly common' and was imagining a pretty vague idea of 'where they are'. It wouldn't be 'go three leagues west', it'd be 'we're hearing reports from the road to the north' or 'two people have gone missing in the woods over that way'. If you organize a militia and it is made out of normal people and they go fight, like, a dracolisk, they will simply die, if they find it. There is not a way for a bunch of farmers with normal non magical weapons to succeed against many possible things that could be bothering them. They need powerful people, and that means current or retired adventurers, and I bet some places get by by having a not-very-retired adventurer or two happen to live there, and there aren't enough to go around and there isn't fast enough communication for writing to their liege for help to have as good turnaround every time as asking a passing party, if there happens to be a passing party before they've heard anything from their liege."

"I do understand that a regular militia is only appropriate for some threats. Sometimes you have to call in the army or home guard or - whatever."

"So there's a persistent labor shortage of skilled and strong, uh..." private military contractors "adventurers? That's why so many people try to become adventurers, except too many of them die in the process and also some of them turn to banditry and exacerbate the problem? ...and I assume some of them do it for the personal power and prestige and so on, not in search of a job, but even if they didn't the market demand and social sanction would be enough. Any local administration would be happy to hire one permanently but they can't even reliably get them to freelance. Or maybe most of the adventurers settle in the big cities and there's a persistent shortage in the countryside. Did I finally get it right?"

The word 'liege' takes Tanya a moment to place, presumably it's not the city of that name... Wait, are these people feudal? Tanya had dismissed 'baron' as a word carried over from older times! But of course there's no reason to assume that. Barons were very real in Germania just a century or two ago! She kicks herself mentally for not noticing this sooner.

"Can you say more about lieges and barons, these words imply a certain - organization of society and law - but I don't want to assume anything."

(The speed of communications is a very important subject. Tanya had sort of gotten the impression from Belmarniss that magic enabled faster comms than sending letters! She'll make a note to come back to the subject later.)

"I don't know the etiology of surface banditry, to be clear, I'm working from books, I am in fact working mostly from novels. Same problem with barons and stuff! We don't really have those downstairs although occasionally you get people styling themselves 'princess' or something and taken more or less seriously. You might be missing that someone might take up adventuring in order to accomplish the task that constitutes an adventure, I think that's probably common."

"Yes, I understand that ordinary people sometimes have no better choice than to take a lot of risk and try to personally fight some present danger. The ones who survive are dubbed adventurers, and they may feel a social expectation to keep adventuring."

If Belmarniss is relying on on works of fiction then Tanya is going to downgrade all her information about the surface world! (Politely and quietly, of course.) For all Tanya knows, Belmarniss is working off the local equivalent of The Three Musketeers!!! Well, it's not her fault for not having better sources, but she really could have said so sooner!

(Tanya of course has not read The Three Musketeers but she has a general impression that they were a less socially responsible group than The Seven Samurai, as well as a less realistic one. And a less capable band of soldiers, presumably; what could they do, form into firing lines one abreast?)

"About communications, I thought there were faster spells than sending letters, by which I assume you mean horseback messengers. ...let me guess, the spells require a high casting circle so only adventurer wizards can do it?"

"Sending is lower circle for clerics so they probably do more of it but the circle in question is fourth so yes."

"...I may be able to recreate a nonmagical technology from my world which instantaneously transmits messages up to a few hundreds of miles away. Is this an obviously bad idea for some reason, including attracting attention to myself?" This world may not be full of barons and bandits outside of novels, but Tanya isn't sure what it is full of (dragons?) and should proceed with caution.

"...it might draw attention to yourself but it sounds nice! How does it work?"