One more question though; how do avatars and aspects of Highlords work and what does "4 divine categories lower" mean for something like that?
To be clear, "High Lords" are those characters with two or more applications of the Time Lord template.
Having said that, the methods for designing avatars and aspects in
Ascension can seem tricky at first glance. This is because each "divine category" - which is, basically, each template (e.g. the difference between an intermediate deity and a greater deity is one divine category) - is an increase by one order of magnitude, in terms of quintessence necessary to attain that level of divinity.
In other words, the minimum level of quintessence you need to reach the next divine category is ten times the minimum amount of quintessence necessary to maintain your current divine category. An intermediate deity needs at least 10 million quintessence, whereas a greater deity needs at least 100 million quintessence.
So why does that matter? Because the rules for avatars state that the deity gives up 10% of their quintessence to make one...but the avatar is
two divine categories lower than their parent deity. The problem here is the implicit assumption that the avatar has the entirety of that sacrificed 10%.
If that were so, then a greater deity with 200 million quintessence (notice how a god that's at their minimum quintessence for their divine category can't make an avatar without dropping down a divine category; 10% of their quintessence is a lot to spend) would be busted down to 180 million, and the avatar would have the remaining 20 million, being an intermediate deity.
But that would only be one divine category lower than the parent deity, not two. In order to be two divine categories lower, the avatar must have only 1% of their parent deity's quintessence - meaning that avatar should have only 2 million quintessence, and thus be a lesser deity.
So, how do you resolve this apparent conflict? The answer is in
Ascension, but it's rather well hidden.
Several sections talk about how moving quintessence from one person/object to another is only 10% efficient (e.g. "The Power," "The Petition," and "The Bargain"). It's important to remember that
this holds true for creating avatars and aspects, too.
A deity
expends 10% of its quintessence to create an avatar, but of that amount, 90% is lost, leaving only 10% of that invested 10% - which comes out to 1% of the parent deity's total quintessence - for the new avatar's total quintessence. This, in turn, is always two divine categories lower than it's parent, making everything match up.
This is exactly the same for aspects as it is for avatars, just that the percentages are smaller.
So, let's say we had a High Lord that was a tetrad (it had the Time Lord template stacked on it four times), that had a healthy 4.6 quadrillion quintessence (e.g. 4,600,000,000,000,000 quintessence), and wanted to create an avatar. It'd expend 460 trillion quintessence to do so (leaving it with only 4.14 quadrillion quintessence), and the resulting avatar would only have 46 trillion quintessence...enough to be a rank II demiurge, which is two divine categories below the Time Lord template (which is really what a High Lord is, just multiple times over).
When calculating what divine template an avatar or aspect should have, always calculate it's quintessence using this method and apply the appropriate template. It should always have the avatar using a template two divine categories lower than the parent deity, and the aspect using one four divine categories lower than the parent deity.
Hopefully, that answered more questions than it raised.
