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Message: <blockquote data-quote="paradox42" data-source="post: 4987033" data-attributes="member: 29746">Method 1: Do It All TwiceI stole this one from BECMI D&D, admitting so to my players in game in fact. BECMI featured a class of beings known as "Old Ones" who were more powerful than Immortals and may have created the multiverse countless ages ago. There was only one method detailed in that game for crossing beyond the Immortal stage and becoming an Old One; however, the actual rules said that if a character actually did this then he "wins the game" as the Old Ones are so powerful as to be beyond game rules.Of course, that doesn't really apply to us today!But for BECMI, which featured 36 mortal levels and Immortal advancement up to "Hierarch 5," the Do It All Twice method means that a character must advance from a mortal all the way up to becoming a Hierarch 5, and then by way of looking for greater challenges voluntarily give up Immortality itself and reincarnate as a mortal. The character would essentially "dump" all his quintessence, in Ascension terms, and start life over again as a level 1 mortal with no special advantages. The character must then advance again all the way through the 36 mortal levels, and all the Immortal stages up to Hierarch 5, and thenagain become bored enough to give it all up to reincarnate as a mortal. The second time, though, the Old Ones come take the character away (apparently destroying him utterly using Blackballs, but really taking his soul across the Dimensional Vortex) to make him one of them.In modern Ascension terms, the 36 levels are obviously not a hard cap, but the basic idea here is that the soul must begin as a level 1 mortal, prove worthy of godhood through adventuring and questing, advance through divine ranks to the very top (whatever that happens to be for the cosmos at hand), and then give it up by dumping quintessence voluntarily such that the god effectively vanishes and the soul reincarnates secretly as a level 1 mortal again. This second mortal must then do the same advancement again, all the way to the top, and then again go looking for something more and try to give up godhood.The second time, the Sidereals actually convert the soul over to the new form, that which exists beyond godhood (for my own game I said this means the character's soul becomes the heart and mind behind a newly created demiplane). The god the character was appears to be dead and gone again, to other deities, but actually then exists in its new Sidereal form. In a cosmos where the Sidereals are asleep, they actually would wake up just enough to perform the conversion, which would put the character's now-demiplane soul to rest with them, and then go back to sleep.One of my players asked (very cleverly, I thought) if the Vicissitude ability could be used to shorten the time it would take to do all this; since Vicissitude is actually supposed to be a separate consciousness that (importantly) starts out as a level 1 mortal and advances separately, I ruled that indeed it could be used that way. So in games where the Dm agrees with me, a character could achieve the "Do It All Twice" condition by having a Vicissitude advance to the ultimate pinnacle of godhood while the original character also advances to that same pinnacle- and then go looking for a way to get more.</blockquote>

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