The Moment of Ascension
You guys remember my occultist/vmc magus? The one with the complicated build and the interesting personal curse? He’s the only character I’ve ever had ascend. It was a unique experience, but I think it illustrates the principle that the Handbook is trying to get across.
Back in the IRL, I knew that I was moving soon. The campaign would go on with out me. And so, because a loyal NPC of ours had just died, I devised a my-undying-service-in-return-for-his-life scenario. And in fairness to me, this was a long while before I’d ever seen Vax gain a fly speed. Same goddess though.
“Pharasma!” shouted my highly dramatic Dr. Orpheus clone. “Lady of Graves! Long have I skirted your law. My servants step from beyond death. They do my bidding whilst clothed in putrid flesh and gossamer burial shrouds! But I beg of you: Raise this man to life! Accept my service, and I swear I shall no more disturb the souls nor sleep of the dead!”
My GM described clouds parting. A spiral comet blazing towards me, hovering in midair like a winding stair. I ascended literally, becoming a psychopomp in that moment. I was no god, but an immortal being in service to a god. I’d effectively written myself out of the story, but Pharasma kept her end of the bargain. The rest of the party had their loyal manservant returned to life. And even better, I’m told that my character’s divine assistance was instrumental in the final battle against the forces of Chaos. Just wish I could have been there to see it.
In any case, that’s my story of ascension. How about you guys? Ever manage to attain godhood / immortality? What was it like? Tell us all about your own Test of the Starstone down in the comments!
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At least he’s not hearing the prayers involving Vigilante / Lumberjack Explosion.
That dream sequence may have been the most cursed Handbook of Erotic Fantasy. >:[
Closest thing to an ‘ascension’ was when my Ratfolk Wizard hit lvl 20, in the midsts of traveling through a SFX heavy portal. Mechanically in that moment, he gained both his lvl20 capstone that gave him +8 INT (propelling his already absurdly high intellect to the level of Old-Mage Jatembe or Baba Yaga) and got the ‘Immortality’ Arcane Discovery. In-character he gazed into the infinite knowledge of the universe across time and absorbed most of it, becoming a lot like his half-mad patron god, Nethys.
We exited that portal fighting baddies and a tower that shoots lasers, which he demolished with a cast of Clashing Rocks. Then after the battle he performed the final rites of a long-standing ritual to become immortal.
And then we had to go through the BBEGs final dungeon and finish them off once and for all, which went pretty well.
So like… Was he a god though? 😛
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9Z4933yBaU
If Gozer had asked, I’m sure he would have been smart enough to say “Yes!” in a good, loud voice.
Even as the mortal Paladin ascends towards his spiritual apotheosis, all for the sake of creating a new paradigm for the sake of love, the (supposedly) celestial Snowflake becomes more and more mired in the desires of the flesh.
… BALANCE! 😀
Snowflake’s nasty selfishness is finally useful for something. (Hey, she could go down the mountain and find something to graze on, rather than disrupt Paladin’s meditations.)
Honestly! Snowflake loves to complain. She’s just an… old nag.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7uW47jWLMiY
Something something joke about her never becoming an alicorn.
Unless she goes full Nightmare Moon/Daybreaker (her title being… well, I tried to think of some kind of ice-themed euphemism for female blue balls, but Snow Fury [as a play on Snow Flurries] actually kind of works.)
Ice Queen
Ooh, I yhought of an even better name. ‘Precious’. As in precious little snowflake, and its the catchphrase of Gollum, the creature twisted by desire.
Booo boooooooo!
The characters that survived our AD&D Greyhawk campaign all the way from 4th grade to high school ultimately a) journeyed into the Nine Hells to fight an infernal incursion at its source, b) killed Tiamat only to discover that you can’t kill an idea and there will ALWAYS be another Tiamat (and we were now the special enemies of the new one), c) after one enormous battle, hurriedly exited Asmodeus’s throne room into d) Queen of the Demonweb Pits, followed by e) the Egyptian pantheon’s domain (where the DM relocated much of Desert of Desolation).
Following this final grand tour of hearty homebrew and nearly every module the DM had ever purchased, our handful of remaining PCs were summoned by our patron, Bahamut, and collectively sponsored for godhood. IRL the DM had moved across the state and our campaign was coming to an end.
My druid / Hierophant of the Cabal? He went on to become the demigod patron in several of the campaigns that I DM’d, though (given the fluid nature of divine power in Fritz Leiber’s Lankhmar) he became (to quote John Constatine re. The Spectre) “sometimes practically the most powerful thing in the universe, sometimes little more than a bloke in a green hood.”
I love that the consolations prize for, “Sorry guys. I’m moving,” is godhood. XD
My Drow cleric pulled it off through a LOT of lying and murder. She then promptly usurped and killed the not!Lolth of the setting (causing a massive schism and civil war among drow in the process) and, in the epilogue, is supposed to steadily be going mad with power and plotting to take a crack at some other gods.
Sounds on-brand for a newly minted Queen of the Demonweb Pits!
https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/meanwhile-in-the-abyss
None of my characters have ascended while I was playing them. I do have a paladin who is married to her god (literally, they have six kids), but she went back to adventuring once the kids were old enough.
A couple NPCs that I ran for the DM ended up filling holes in the Greek Pantheon that opened up after a god war that was going on in the background. Seeing as one of those was seriously Chaotic Neutral leaning toward good, with heavy emphasis on the chaos, that got to be…interesting. Her holy symbol is a silver cyclone on a black background so people tend to stay beyond arm’s length with her clerics.
Gotta be a bit nerve-racking stepping into the pantheon with a Kratos rampaging through the setting.
Heh, this was so long before God of War the developers were probably in diapers, if they were even born yet.
*A retroactive Kratos rampaging through the setting.
I’ve had characters attain immortality, but never any that achieved godhood.
One was a servant of Bahamut that was granted immortality in exchange for (effectively) a babysitting service. Dragon Familiar in 3.5 only allows for a wyrmling familiar. Wyrmlings only last a year. But so great was this crusader that there was effectively a multiplanar waitlist among worshippers of Bahamut for their wyrmling to serve the bariaur duskblade as familiar.
Another player character at that table achieved immortality by becoming a living construct, a Green Star Adept that achieved apotheosis. I forget what he did with it though.
Not “ascension”… but I did have a character that the gods deemed “too dangerous to be allowed to ascend”.
So, early 80s, BECMI set D&D, I’d playing this character for years, they were an Elf, so I’d long ago maxed out my level at 10M, but exps still accrue… anyway our GM was like “Hey, let’s do an Immortals game, so grab your highest level character and let’s see what they’d be as a brand new immortal…”
So we each start tallying the exps o our oldest PC, now I’d been playing the same PC off and on in most of our GMs’s games for just over two years. We played 3-5 days a week (including weekends) every week, on Holidays, we didn’t care, we played.
Now the other guys tended to make new characters a lot more, to try out new things from dragon magazines and from the Gazetteers, etc, but I stuck to my Elf pretty religiously (I had five PCs in total I made for his D&D games, and then we played a few single sessions of other games, but they never stuck like D&D did).
So there we are doing our maths and everyone else finished adding up their exps and had already started on on figuring out how many Power Points they could rebuild their character as a God (called Immortals in BECMI) with. And I’m still adding. A few minutes later… //I’m still adding//.
GM laughing says “Ah, having trouble adding?”
“Nope, it’s fine, just several pages of exp…”
“Several… pages?”
See, I’d dutifully written down every bit of exp we were given for the characters in each session, with what we’d done to earn it… for over two years of gaming with what was probably 3-10 sessions a week (we played long on the weekends, from Friday afternoon after school all the way till late Sunday night)… so I finished and told him how much exp I had on this character.
He balked and said “Let me double check that.”
He did, and then promptly said, “Nope, the gods unanimously decide [PC Name] can never die and become an Immortal… he’d be too powerful. Pick another character…”
See… in the Immortal Set, you gained Immortal levels by spending Power Points into a lot of areas, not only in Leveling up, but in your Attributes, your Plane, your servitors, etc. Every 100 exp you have convert to 1 Power Point… and I had so many exp that I could have not only hit maximum level, maximum attributes, bought outrageous powers, had several blinged out personal planes of existence, etc, but I’d have still had enough Power Points to do it //again//.
So that’s my story of the Character “too powerful to ascend”.
(I did have one of my othe rPCs ascend, we played a bit, but Immortal stuff just wasn’t our jam so we went back to our regular games… with my PC who ‘wasn’t allowed to die’ – though as you might have guessed, PC death wasn’t at all common.. until then. Then all of sudden the idea that one Character couldn’t die ratcheted up the danger levels. It was both kinda stupid, but also funny.)
I have actually achieved ascension twice. The first was an affably evil vampire who became an embodiment of secrets. However, the second was table favorite the lovable rascal Rook.
As referenced in “The Sacrifice Play” my most poignant character death was the luck rogue Robin Hood/Jack Sparrow mashup character, Rook. After burning all of his luck and falling to his death to save his beloved, he caught the eye of the deity of Love, Luck, and Deception: Myrana. He had actually visited one of her shrines earlier that evening and was bearing a rose from it when he fell to his demise. As he lay dying, she came to him and made him an offer. He could die, and pass on to whatever reward he had earned, or he could work for her, and become her agent in mortal affairs and so keep an eye on his former companions and love interest from afar. He took her deal, and was given a golden eye which allowed him to temporarily extend his luck abilities to others and became an agent of the divine. He was granted immortality, but no longer had the ability to choose entirely for himself. Thus was borne one of our groups favorite recurring cameo NPCs.
In the last campaign I DMed, my party obtained a golden apple from a primaeval tree that had been swimming in ambrosia for millennia.
The person that tended the tree and gave them the apple was a demigod who had a chip on his shoulder with how mortals only seek power and influence over each other, so when the party asked if they could have the apple to use the divine power to break a curse that was slowly decaying alive the citizens of a small village that non of them are from, he was sceptical.
A test was in order! He bestowed upon them for the briefest moments his divine power, as a sort of “first one is free” thing. He then told them that, if they were to take a bite of the apple, the ambrosia suffused to the fruit would grant them power far beyond what he gave them, and would grant them that power permanently.
Cue the monk player. he IMMEDIATELY took a bite, and BAM! he was a demigod level divine, and the remaining apple turned to ash.
A few problems:
1) without any experience using divine power, he had no idea how to use it to cure the villagers. AND he was now to blame for them not getting a cure to their curse.
2) In our setting, to quote TvTropes, gods need prayer. BADLY. His insane boons would get weaker and weaker with every passing day, because he had absolutely zero followers; he was starving to non-existence and fast.
3) That confirmed to the demigod that he was right about mortals, so forget asking for HIS help.
and most of all.
4) he became known as the guy that ate the apple. It’s current year, who wants to be known as the guy who eats the apple offered by a mysterious entity? There have been multiple religions throughout history that explain why that’s a bad idea.
In the end, he was able to fix his mistake, get rid of his divinity, and cure the village but he had to eat a metric ton of humble pie first. Lessons were learned of the folly of greed, and by campaigns end he returned to the village and pledged himself to protecting it in life and in death.
But yeah, that’s the only story of a player becoming a sort of god.
Now that’s an awesome story.
Funny enough, I had a game where godhood was the stated objective of the party, and it was not to be- a Wizard with the Instructor archetype for a wizard cohort, representing a human and elf couple who sought it after every other lead on immortality or life extension hit a dead end. The two simply did not want to be parted from each other by time and mortality. In the end, they rejected the opportunity to reach godhood to instead fix a fundamental flaw in the world and restore it to its prior state after a disaster from far in the past.
Notably, Nocticula of all people did them a solid after a chance encounter (the planes themselves were starting to bleed into the mortal plane, they helped her and some of her then-fellow fiendish sorts find a safe place)- they would not age so long as they remained with a few miles of each other. This was lost with the world fixing, but after the world and timeline changed, it’s shown that she remembered her deal with them and allowed them to live full lives together.
The character that did ascend to godhood- both times I played her in fact- was an Elven Alchemist (in her first appearance)/Investigator (in her second). She’d almost been their opposite, as an unintended parallel. She’d already lost her husband to age and had mostly moved on, (Orc and Elf, suffice to say it was a bittersweet inevitability both had accepted early), the responsible and clear-headed sort who was a bit distant from everyone even so.
As part of her build, she had Medic as a free archetype and all the bells and whistles for Medicine checks- including Mortal Healing, being (loosely) a follower of the concept that divine intervention caused far more issues than it was worth. She didn’t dislike the deities, she respected the good aligned ones in particular and would concede there were situations mortal people could not overcome on their own where it was a necessary evil, but she had the view that mortals needed to eventually grow to thrive on their own, and that deific influence could have huge unintended knock-on effects- the kids need to move out eventually, and good intentions aside you can only get lucky so many times trying to remove a splinter with a battleaxe before your hand slips.
By the end of the game her role in saving the world wound up drawing quite a bit of unwanted attention, intensifying when her medical breakthroughs continued to improve the world. She outlived her companions due to her natural lifespan and healthy lifestyle, made peace with her long life meaning such partings were simply something to accept and to enjoy the time she had (even re-marrying a human woman and inventor with a daredevil need for speed streak), and growing increasingly exasperated as she got a taste of the Life of Brian treatment that seemed to die down in her golden years…
‘Seemed’ being the key word. When she passed on to the other world and realized she had quite a few senses she hadn’t before, her companions knew she had arrived by hearing her from a few planes over. “MOTHERFU-”
Bonus points: there was another party member who wanted godhood: a familiar specifically. His master reached godhood herself, he did not, instead becoming one of her servants. He was not amused, and even less so when the elf lady who *vehemently* did not want to became one too.
I know I already responded to the rant once, but I re-read it and realized I’d overlooked my LARP character’s unexpected (and unasked for) immortality:
An avatar of Death was hunting a certain PC and cornered me to grill me for information. I stammered and demurred, explaining that I had a quest that was about to begin immediately (true).
“Very well, then,” says the entity, “we will continue this when you return.”
“Perhaps,” I say (hoping to never see this thing again), “but it is a perilous mission. I might not survive. Probably better if you find someone else–”
(Swiftly placing one gauntleted hand on my shoulder) “Your soul will not leave your body until we have finished this conversation. Go, and return quickly.”
I scampered away, joined the mission and, improbably, survived. When I returned, I discovered that a gang of Paladins had hunted and killed the Death avatar.
I consulted the game marshals.
Plot Committee was called in.
It was adjudicated that, unless I met up with a more powerful being who could undo the curse (unlikely), I was stuck as functionally immortal but neither invulnerable nor eternally youthful. I would never drop below 0 health and always be able to be revived, but if the character ever died of old age, he’d be stuck haunting his own dust and bones.
I know I’ve talked about my character Miang from a 3.5 game here in the past. And I’m pretty sure I also mentioned how she gained Divine Rank 0 by landing the killing blow against a foe that had Divine Rank 1 (or something like that, it’s been so long I can’t exactly recall the numbers involve now).
So technically speak she at that point attained “godhood” of a sort. As the game went on it became quickly apparently that have a single PC with Divine Rank 0 was game breaking.
At around the same time our regular GM started showing up less and less and the group would take turns being GM and telling side stories or such. (We didn’t really care that it made the timeline kind of messy, we all knew the game wasn’t going to live too much longer and just wanted to keep playing as long as we could keep the group together.)
At the end of the epilogue session I ran, though I think we only had three people including myself left at that point, we agreed that after Miang’s mortal concerns would be finished she eventually attained demi-god status. I can’t recall if we specified what she was supposed to be a demi-god of though. *shrug*
Though given the strangeness of how the story of the game worked she was a somewhat benevolent demi-god serving….Vecna of all deities.
(The game had some pretty weird twists and turns.)
Not during play, but…the alchemist in one long-running campaign wanted to take the Test of the Starstone and ascend to divinity. The group agreed that the party assisted him in the Test, only for the hunter’s tiger companion to ascend in his place.
I ran the Shackled City AP years ago. The Cleric/Rogue/Shadowbane Stalker passed the Test of the Smoking Eye to gain control over Occipitus, a plane in the Abyss that was once part of Celestia.
She got a neat template and a bunch of powers that could only be used on Occipitus. At the very end of the campaign, she also jgot a free Wish spell from an altar to the former ruler of Occipitus, Adimarchus.
Ooh, time for one of my favorite stories: The Saga of Brian Patrick Hood, or “How I won Call of Cthulhu for the first time”.
So back in college, we were doing a Call of Cthulhu campaign, and after I rolled max Power during character creation, I decided to try and make what was in essence a PC cultist, the last scion of an ancient sorcerous dynasty whose parents had set out one day to perform a great ritual and who had vanished without a trace. Brian was setting out to try and rebuild some of his family’s lost power and to try and discover what had actually become of his parents.
After a couple of initial adventures, our party had gone to L.A. to look for a missing girl (named Kai Hito) who I had seen in a vision, and I had discovered hints in Kai’s diary that the nearby collective of Buhddist monks contained a cultist circle. I cautiously broached the topic with Kigo, the leader of the monastery, and received covert confirmation, causing me to promptly become obsessed with learning more about the Mythos. Unfortunately, nobody else shared my interest, and the discussion turned towards ways to break into the monastery. So, I set out on my own to warn the monks, in hopes of preventing offense.
After I warned Kigo, we had a long conversation about the responsibility of magicians and the resemblances between Kai and me, in which I unwittingly hinted at the existence of a special bond between me and Kai. Kigo lead me deeper into the monastery, and despite several OOC hints I followed eagerly into a hidden system of caves. Finally, we came upon Kai lying impaled upon a stalagmite, kept alive by some form of magic, and with dozens of cables attached to her and humming with a strange blue energy.
Kigo explained that it was he and his circle that had made Kai disappear. She had massive natural magical potential, which they had hoped to steal for themselves. Unfortunately, she had somehow locked her mind and soul, and hence her power, behind an unbreakable psionic shell. Kigo believed that I could unlock her mind, allowing him and his followers to siphon off her magical essence. I might have done it, but in true Lovecraftian fashion my character’s saving grace turned out to be his racism. Kigo had accidentally let slip that he was not truly human, and though I could justify, even glorify, the sacrifice of innocents for power, I could not justify giving that power to non-humans.
I tried to cast a spell I had learnt the previous session that would have transported myself and Kai to the eldritch realm of the Twilight Queen, but to make the spell work on the other side of the continent from the Twilight Queen’s mortal demesne required a luck roll, which I failed. This was where things got exciting, for Kigo knew enough magic to realize what I was trying to do, and he promptly burst his flesh-mask, revealing himself to be a giant scorpion-like monster.
The monster was much faster than me, and struck first. I declined to dodge, as I had another use for my action that round. The attack hit, and knocked off over half my hitpoints, but then it was my turn. I gasped out “It is given to man… to have dominance over you and your kind… You should have known this.” and in a single swift motion I drew the steel dagger I had established I always carried, and buried it to the hilt in Kai’s heart. Her hands flew up to grasp my arm, and a single thought pierced my mind: Thank you. And so Kai died with a smile on her face, her magic beyond the reach of Kigo forever.
At this point, I knew I couldn’t escape, and I had only one goal: to bury that same dagger in my own heart, and prevent Kigo from stealing my own magic as he had tried to steal Kai’s. Kigo’s stinger lashed out again, and took enough hitpoints that it should have left me unconscious. However, the Narrator let me have one final action, and with a grin of victory, I sank the dagger into my chest. Everything went dark.
I still don’t know if the Narrator had come up with this next bit in advance, or if she just made it up on the spot because she felt I deserved a reward for my heroism. Apparently, the last spell my parents had invented, the one that caused them to vanish, was a spell of ascension. It destroyed their mortal forms and translated their souls to some kind of alternate dimension, there to reign as god-like beings of pure magic. And apparently they had cast at least some preliminary rituals on me, because when I died fighting Kigo that same ritual Invested my own soul with the same godlike power and whisked me off to join my parents in their parallel realm.