Q: Who are the five remainers of the Yelemi Olympians?

A: Artemis (whose domain is the Forest), Athena and Apollôn (their avatars are dead and they lack enough power to manifest another; the term here is “fading”), Hestia (basically running out the clock as the civic Goddess of the Forest-cities), and Hades (hanging around pretty much just to take the Athena/Apollo/Artemis personality fragments with him once they’re fully ousted). Once this shard of Artemis loses enough power that she gets usurped, they’re all gone.

Q: Is there a common priest/cleric/etc class in Shem?

A: Classes, particularly when you get past Apprentice-tier, are pretty personal. It’s more accurate to say that there are common archetypes of Classes for any given professional Path or job; with regards to this specific question, the two most common are in fact Cleric and Priest. Traditionally, a Cleric is devoted to a Pantheon (in Cleric Veil’s case, Sundered Namma) and a Priest is dedicated to a specific God or set of Gods. Less common are Mystics (dedicated to the divinity that is found in/underlies the mundane) and Divines (dedicated to divinity as a general metaphysics, generally through scholarship); even less common are Channelers (become an avatar / vehicle for a God) and Bridges (permit a direct connection between a supplicant and a God), which are uncommon enough that there isn’t a consensus name for them. That said, all of these jobs are primarily social; Cleric Veil does much more teaching than they do healing, and more healing than anything else.

Q: Do the gods have any sort of opinion on the system? Do they think the mortals dipping their toes in divine fire is cute? Or do some of them see them using a divine spark for that and think its weird and gross?

A: It varies hugely by the God and by the Pantheon. Attitudes range between “I will find this Promethean figure and torture him eternally” and “this is the greatest achievement of any mortal across all the realms I have shards in”. The consensus of the Gods of Yelem is that the God which the System is an expression of is legitimately a God and they recognize it as one of the Thousand.

Q: How does Shem work economically? Where does the money come from, or effort/other services if there's no money involved in a transaction?

A: Shem is a cash-and-credit market economy with a fiat currency, very similar to ours in almost all ways. However! Money is deliberately injected into the economic system via (expected net-loss) loans and grants to individuals that are expected to create value to the public/the commons. Taxes are federated; any given entity, whether a person, a business, a municipality, etc is taxed only by one source. Those taxes are levied on a net-earnings basis, and if you live anywhere that doesn’t provide the appropriate basic social support (cities don’t have refectories), you deduct your living costs and any costs needed to provide for your Basic Set requirements from your earnings.

Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.

Q: What is the role of the nobility within Shem? Is it a fuedal system? How much control does the Crown have over the Dukes?

A: Nobles are an interface layer between the Crown and what’s below them. The Crown has a great deal of influence but very little control unless a Duchy fails in its responsibilities, which almost never happens; the Crown would rather help a Duchy remediate the problems than exert hard power. Cities (to a first approximation, any municipality over a million people, there’s only a few) have their own nobles, they don’t answer to a Ducal Seat. The whole point is to have more local autonomy so that the central State isn’t trying to run everything at once, and to have more people (and therefore more Skills) providing multiplicative boosts to assist peoples’ lives. Nobility is strictly non-bloodline inheritance; all nobles adopt their heirs, or grant the Crown the right to select the next holder of the title.

Q: While there is a social taboo in Shem about reaching for immortality, some people do it anyway. How common are immortals in Shem? Are there more taboos about them being part of the government or accumulating power and wealth? How about the rest of the world?

A: It’s difficult to accumulate wealth in Shem, because you can’t own the output of someone’s labor unless they’re your junior partner in a personal-scale venture (such as an apprenticeship), and because the State is the lender of first resort for businesses. There are definitely Immortals who are extremely rich; it is extremely taboo, to the point of “you will probably get straight-up murdered”, to wield political power as an Immortal, however, including through the targeted use of your wealth. Political power being in the hands of mortals is the purpose of the taboo. The exceptions are the Crown, primary combatants (Esse is an Immortal, Esse is a Pillar, this is okay because Esse’s odds of dying in any given year are higher than a mortal’s), and with extensive caveats anyone walking the Theurgist’s Path (since they’re basically an exception to taboos by definition). As for how common it is? Depends where you are (more in townships than cities, herder-folk have the fewest), but Kibosh, due to where it is, has the highest percentage of Immortals of any municipality in Shem by a large margin. This answer is already pretty long, so I’m not going to talk about the rest of the Alqar, much less Yelem as a whole.

Q: Do any other known-on-Earth gods exist in Yelim besides the Olympians?

A: Yes; the ones on Alqar specifically are the Pantheons of Sundered Namma and Absent Tiamat, but there are others, and Tricksters have a whole separate thing going on.

Q: Would Sophie think to ask Jesus of Nazareth if his and her God exists in Yelem?

A: If the question is whether she would think to invoke Jesus of Nazareth specifically for the purpose of asking him if her God exists, the answer is “no”. She wouldn’t think to invoke Jesus of Nazareth at all, even in the context of “what if Christianity is as valid as the Olympian Pantheon”.

Dealer’s Choice Comment: Meredith isn’t a K6BD reference; I actually have an extremely difficult time parsing comics, and flat-out can’t read K6BD. Meredith is, inasmuch as she’s inspired by other media, inspired by Laurence De Montfort from A Practical Guide to Evil and the general zeitgeist of English-language Xianxia protagonists.