I'm partly starting this thread to preserve ideas used in my own game in a place that's not dependent on my own hard drives/archives, but partly also because I think the people here in the forum might have good ideas to add to this list.
In core Ascension, there is no real "dividing line" between deities and Sidereals, except that you have to overcome a gang of deities who come after you to take you down before you can become a problem if you're a god who gets enough Quintessence/QP to make Sidereal. In my game, though, Sidereals are a very different class of being from deities; deities are entities "embodied" as pure energy, whereas Sidereals are entities existing essentially as coded patterns in quantum probability (which ultimately governs physical laws). This means that even if a deity acquires enough QP to cross the line to Sidereal, it's still just a deity (even if a really big one) until something special triggers the transition. The basic intent, here, was that since mortals (even those who gain a lot of quintessence) still need to undertake Ascension Quests to become gods, so too must gods undertake special quests to cross the next line and become Sidereal.
My players, being of the absurdly-high levels they are, have naturally asked about the methods one may use to gain Sidereal power, the "quests" one must undertake to prove oneself worthy enough for the cosmos to elevate one to the status of a planar soul. I gave them nine, but left the door open to other methods of gaining "practically Sidereal" power such as how Undead of powerful enough levels (like Akaliches) are effectively gods or better. I'll list the nine I gave them by the nicknames we used to refer to them, after the full list was explained; these therefore don't necessarily sound particularly Epic or Legendary or anything, but they get the point across and are useful shorthand. I'll put each method in its own post below this one, for maximum clarity (even though number 9 isn't really a "Method" as such).
Hopefully these will be useful to others, to spark story ideas if nothing else; however, as mentioned above, I wonder if anybody else has more ideas that match the difficulty and cosmic scope of these?
In core Ascension, there is no real "dividing line" between deities and Sidereals, except that you have to overcome a gang of deities who come after you to take you down before you can become a problem if you're a god who gets enough Quintessence/QP to make Sidereal. In my game, though, Sidereals are a very different class of being from deities; deities are entities "embodied" as pure energy, whereas Sidereals are entities existing essentially as coded patterns in quantum probability (which ultimately governs physical laws). This means that even if a deity acquires enough QP to cross the line to Sidereal, it's still just a deity (even if a really big one) until something special triggers the transition. The basic intent, here, was that since mortals (even those who gain a lot of quintessence) still need to undertake Ascension Quests to become gods, so too must gods undertake special quests to cross the next line and become Sidereal.
My players, being of the absurdly-high levels they are, have naturally asked about the methods one may use to gain Sidereal power, the "quests" one must undertake to prove oneself worthy enough for the cosmos to elevate one to the status of a planar soul. I gave them nine, but left the door open to other methods of gaining "practically Sidereal" power such as how Undead of powerful enough levels (like Akaliches) are effectively gods or better. I'll list the nine I gave them by the nicknames we used to refer to them, after the full list was explained; these therefore don't necessarily sound particularly Epic or Legendary or anything, but they get the point across and are useful shorthand. I'll put each method in its own post below this one, for maximum clarity (even though number 9 isn't really a "Method" as such).
Hopefully these will be useful to others, to spark story ideas if nothing else; however, as mentioned above, I wonder if anybody else has more ideas that match the difficulty and cosmic scope of these?