| Method 4: the Amidah Method I based this one on the notion that the Amidah is absolutely unique, and therefore it must in some way represent a Cosmic force akin to the Sidereals themselves. This seems to be partly borne out by the facts that (A) one needs to spend two Transcendental slots to get it, if one wants to do it that way, and (B) it grants several Cosmic abilities as part of its package, like d100 hit dice and infinite Wishes (aka Alter Reality).
Method 4 for Sidereal Ascension, therefore, is to become the Amidah, the Paragon of Paragons, and stay that way for at least 1000 years. At the end of that time, the Amidah must commit suicide, and in so doing destroy the power of Amidah entirely (since it normally gets passed on to whoever defeats the previous Amidah).
This, of course, means that nobody in that cosmos can ever again become the Amidah, and therefore this method can only work once for any given cosmos.
The real key to adjudicating this method, I think, is in coming up with a suitably exotic method of suicide for the Amidah to perform, which will destroy not only the Amidah itself but also the power it had. In my game, I postulated only one such method, that being to go the wrong way through a massive portal in the Dreamheart Tempest (called the Portal of Sleep) within the Region of Dreams. The Portal of Sleep is postulated as being the entry point for all slumbering spirits of conscious beings multiverse-wide, into the Region of Dreams; when they wake up from their dreams, their spirits simply "fade out" from the Dream plane and reappear in their actual bodies. The Portal of Sleep is, therefore, supposed to be one-way; actually entering it the wrong way would literally cause the entity doing so to "dissolve" in the cosmic sense and enter the sleeping minds of every sentient in the cosmos simultaneously. I had previously stated that this would catapult the "wrong-way" entity's being into the Far Realm as a result; in the special case of the Amidah trying to become a Sidereal by this method, it means that the former Amidah thus becomes a new Far Realm layer and stays that way.
It was pointed out that in theory, this method says nothing about the Amidah being a deity, and could therefore be undertaken by a mortal if he becomes the Amidah; I actually thought that was a cool feature to keep for plot reasons and would allow it, but other DMs may feel differently.
__________________ "I am a vampiric half-dragon half-troll lycanthropic fiendish snail! Tremble at my illogical glory!" -The Tongue is Mightier Than the Sword, OotS, Dragon #345 "Come to the Far Realmy side...we have pseudonatural cookies..." - Tlin, Alienoid Warlock, during a game session in March 2007 |