Unfortunately, blood biography combined with magical checkins and a spell-based binary search (probably using spirit planchets and generations of "retired" agents as spirits) to locate bodies spells doom rather cheaply as government spending goes.
Blood bio, cast with a drop of a ctreature's blood, gives answers to:
Who are you? (The name by which the creature is most commonly known)
What are you? (Gender, race, profession/role)
How was your blood shed? (Brief outline of the events that caused its wound, to the best of the victim's knowledge)
When was your blood shed?
Finding the corpse will have blood in its wounds, which then provides a "brief outline of events." It is reasonable to assume that a brief outline will discuss the method of attackers. Which then, (papers please!) will link them to the last internal checkpoint by their class descriptions or other characteristics linked to their identities.
To be clear though, the public side of things will be absolute silence. Because the public doesn't know about this appearance of weakness, there will be no advertising the weakness. (Otherwise people get the idea that harming the secret police is possible, and we just don't want that...) Reprisals are fine and all, but an aura of omnipotence is better. If the team missed any of its checkins or procedures, their supervisor (to the function of his ability to have fall-guys) will be tortured to encourage the others. If there are some rumors, some of the "usual suspects" will be rounded up and executed for a trumped up charge.
In terms of team notification, every team will, being lawful, likely follow "modernish" police practice of "check in with home base." The logistics of this vary, depending on infrastructure.
- Visible tech: A napoleonic semaphore is not out of the question, especially with items of "whispering wind." (Given how cheap this makes individual messages, combined with the efficiency gains from modern communications and the ability to spy on the communications of a populace, I see no reason why a lawful evil society wouldn't have one of these networks.)
- A wizard did it: Telepathic Bond may be made permanent. Every squad of agents should be placed in telepathic bond with their controller "back at base". Given the communications capabilities that this implies, it's the cheapest possible communications network. An "empire" (evil or not) lives and falls on its communications, which means that there should be a correspondingly high priority assigned to this. We can assert, however, that the idea of battle-ready flying squads ready to teleport to help requests may not be part of the repertoire, likely due to infighting and other politics. Still, even presuming that these aren't "always on" (maybe the controller is managing multiple squads) squads should check in when before they expect trouble and after they're clear.
The players get one missed checkin as a grace period, Then a "ministry of divination" (I'm assuming nation-state resources) steps in with a series of spirit planchettes and does a binary search to find the last location of the missing team (as a function of the region that they checked in from). The binary search only needs to be of a region the size that locate object (remember, both a corpse, the corpse's robes, and the identity documents marked with a specific arcane mark are all items) can cover. Happily, the players removed some of the evidence there, but a corpse is still an object.
That binary search takes exactly as long as you wish, as it's a function of the resources invested into the "ministry of divination"'s binary search capabilities and whether or not the "spirits in the area" are favourable to which side. Of course, if I was an lawful evil ministry of divination, I'd make sure that the spirits in the area were particularly well disposed to me: any spiirt that provides a useful answer has their family rewarded with a lowering of quota or other "random" bureaucratic positive outcome. Any spirit that obstructs this will a) have their family harmed, and b) be otherwise removed using normal mid-level adventurer capabilities.
If I was doing this in 3.5, I'd make sure that the communications infrasturcture all had the necrotic cysts implanted in them so that the parent-cyst could scry (and remote take over) any of her agents whenever she desired.
Disclaimer up front: I am going to recommend psionics in Pathfinder, which is something of a conflict of interest for me because Pathfinder psionics material is produced by Dreamscarred Press, and I have worked for them freelance on psionic material. I am not specifically recommending my own work,1 but it should still be mentioned.
Psionics is your best answer here
Psionics is different from magic, has different strengths and weaknesses, different flavor, but fills a similar niche.
Psionics uses power points rather than daily slots.
Psionics was designed from the ground up to use points, instead of being a separate idea tacked onto a system that was really designed for daily slots.
Psionics can easily be reflavored to match a more “magical” frame of reference than its default sort of new-agey, pseudo-science-y, crystals-and-ectoplasm flavor.
Psionics has already been ported to Pathfinder, unlike 5e’s spell points (or 3.5e’s Unearthed Arcana variant spell points).
Psionics was used extensively in the Dark Sun setting for D&D, which has some significant similarities to Kelewan.
In D&D 3.5e, most of psionics—the parts from Expanded Psionics Handbook—were open game content, licensed under the OGL and part of the 3.5e SRD. However, Paizo for whatever reason really dislike “point” systems, and refused to include it in Pathfinder (saying that they weren’t going to do psionics, and if they ever did,2 they would still use spell slots).
That means that the psionics for Pathfinder is a third-party port, by Dreamscarred Press. DSP’s work is pretty much entirely licensed under the OGL, and much of it is found on d20PFSRD.com. However, d20PFSRD.com is largely updated by unpaid volunteers, and Paizo’s material gets highest priority, which means several later works (Seventh Path, some entries in the Psionics Augmented line) are not on the SRD yet. There is more than enough to use, however, including the entirety of Ultimate Psionics which includes all of the open game content for psionics from D&D 3.5e as well as DSP’s 3.5e psionics work.
However, if the flavor of psionics doesn’t work for you, and you don’t want to have to reflavor it yourself, there are even more resources out there for you to use. Ernir’s Translation of Vancian Spellcasting to Psionic Mechanics is exactly that, a translation of more “magic”-y flavor to the psionics mechanics. This is not the same as a spell points variant just tacked on top of existing spellcasters. Ernir rewrote every spell and class from the ground up with spell points in mind. It’s a phenomenal project, and well worth considering. However, it is written for D&D 3.5e—translation from that to Pathfinder is simple enough (for the most part all you have to do is fiddle with the classes’ HD and skill lists, and feats’ and prestige classes’ requirements—see our Q&A on that for more details), but you would have to do the translating. So between the two, it comes down to which you find easier: translating DSP’s Pathfinder psionics to the flavor you want, or translating Ernir’s classes and spells to Pathfinder.
For more ideas on working in Kelewan, consider Dark Sun
Dark Sun is a D&D setting that is an almost-dead world, Athas, orbiting a dying, hence “dark,” sun. Athas is covered in desert wasteland and almost entirely devoid of water. Civilization is limited to a few tiny city-states, and even there the definition of “civilized” is stretched to its limits. And Athas got this way because of the abuse of arcane magic and the cutting off of the divine realms, leading to a situation where magic in general is rare and distrusted. Instead, psionics has flourished there.
And I bring Dark Sun up because, like Kelewan, it is also heavily lacking in metals. That means that Dark Sun requires special rules for handling gear made of other materials, and those could certainly be useful for you.
Less usefully, Wizards of the Coast never made any Dark Sun material for D&D 3.5e. They did for 4e (though much of it was really bad, clearly material intended for another setting that just had the Dark Sun logo slapped on top), and of course Dark Sun had a lot of material from TSR back in the 2e days, but those systems are quite different from Pathfinder. Unlike 3.5e, which is easily translated into Pathfinder, those are largely not (you might as well just base your work off of Feist’s novels directly; they’ll be more helpful than 2e or 4e material).
However, weirdly enough, Wizards of the Coast gave Athas.org a license to produce Dark Sun content for 3.5e. And they did, quite a lot of it. I’m not wild about a lot of their work, but Athas Campaign Setting itself isn’t so bad. And some of its ideas about equipment may be useful to you in developing Kelewan and its distinctive equipment.
I specifically worked on the Psionics Augmented: Occult line, most notably the empath medium archetype. This material is not yet available on d20PFSRD.com.
Paizo did sort of do their spell-slot-based psionics with occult “psychic” magic. However, despite the name and the use of several psionic power names for occult spells, the two are really very different.
Best Answer
I believe the answer would be no, and here's why:
I firmly agree with the statement "No major crime committed would go unpunished." Major crimes being public manslaughter, openly aggressive acts of vandalism/robbery, kidnappings, or the like. This is due to two factors. 1: Most persons capable of committing these crimes would likely realize who and what they'd be facing, and so a good number of them simply wouldn't commit said crimes. 2: the wizard does what a wizard does.
I do not agree with said wizard being able to enforce the law the way a fully staffed guard corps would be able to, as there are an unending parade of petty crimes happening that he'd never be able to keep up with. He's a powerful wizard, but he's not omniscient (while he may have scrying magic, they don't last forever, and they don't cover an entire city OR able to see everything clearly at once) and he's not omnipresent (while he'd likely have teleportation magic, he doesn't have an endless number of spell slots to use them).
I believe he'd do great things in dropping a city's crime rate (Khelben Blackstaff did wonders reducing Waterdeeps magical disturbances when he moved in, for instance) but I don't think he'd be able to replace the guards. Too much ground, and not able to keep up with "my neighbor kicked my dog" and "but she let her dog in my yard first!" type pettiness."
Smallest city is hard to determine, but I'd say a few thousand or so. A few thousand citizens is enough that crime rate is low enough to personally intervene and be able to replace the guards, but the citizenry is also probably docile enough to not have much crime anyway.