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Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 5640895" data-attributes="member: 42582">One thought - once the PCs are planewalking through the afterlife, and therefore in a position to ask the gods, angels etc for their advice on the heresy, it might be easiest if the heresy doesn't matter anymore - that is, if it's become a minor concern relative to the real business of the PCs. Otherwise there is the real danger of this conflict in the campaign being settled by the GM - playing the relevant god or angel as an NPC - rather than by the players, which in my experience can tend to be a fizzer.Or contraposing that thought - if you want even epic PCs to be dealing with heresy as a serious campaign element, then you don't want it to be the case that the gods have the answers as to right or wrong (so as to avoid anticlimax). When I ran a game like this, the gods justified their actions by appeal to the laws of karma, but the players (playing their PCs) expressed a different view and went off and did things their way - including getting the help of a banished god who had himself been banished for interfering with the laws of karma.This may not work if your players are inclined to accept the gods as an authoritative source of valuation. In the game I GMed, they didn't and so it did work. And the PC "paladin" and "cleric" were Buddhist (pure land, for the paladin; something a bit more esoteric and tantric, for the cleric) they were able to display a critical attitude towards the gods without this getting in the way of their own religious devotion.This can probably work for heretics. Or you can have the heretics not be divine casters (a fantasy variant of Quakerism might work like that).My gut instinct would be to treat these people as having either no divine casters (like my posited fantasy Quakers) or as having a new god.Dunno, but (i) the whole "sitting it out" thing probablhy isn't going to work once the PCs are epic planewalkers, and (ii) if your St Ilia sect can be right only on condition that the other sects are radically wrong, it is hard to imagine an active deity, with angels etc to serve her/him, sitting that dispute out for too long.In my "PCs as enemies of heaven" campaign, I resolved both (i) and (ii) by having the PC divine casters - who are, in play, the ones whose situation really matters - worship very non-active, transcendent beings. (This was further helped in the case of the paladin by his relatively poor skill levels in scholarship and doctrine - he was just a simple fellow, doing what he knew to be right on the basis of his Buddhist instincts!)</blockquote>

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