Ascended heroes

Ascended heroes are those (former) mortals who have become resident in the Astral by trading their mortality for a dependence on worship. They serve as "gods" to many of the cultures.

Rules

1. Ascended heroes can only be in one place at a time; they cannot create avatars. Thus, if they are destroyed anywhere, they are destroyed everywhere.
2. Ascended heroes can only interact across planar boundaries with mortals that worship them--there must be a pre-existing tie, voluntarily established by the mortal.
3. Ascended heroes cannot annoint clerics, they can only teach spells and enter into pacts.
4. The power of an ascended hero is directly proportional to the worship. Without worship, they must find another source of power to continue existence (ie become a devil or an angel or a demon).
5. Ascended heroes can be proactive and can discriminate based on style of worship
6. Ascended heroes are influenced by their worship and become the thing that their worshipers believe they are.

Consequences of These Rules

Worship of ascended heroes (generally called ascendants, since many are not heroic) tends to be much more localized and uniform than worship of the Congregation. It is rare that worship extends outside of a sub-region or nation (except via those who learned to follow them). Those that worship ascendants also tend to be much more singularly devoted than those that worship the Congregation or revere kami--the dependence of the ascendant on the quality and fervor of worship means that they structure their cults/churches to focus the worshippers on that ascendant instead of spreading the faith. Generally, the churches are henotheistic--they accept the other ascendants and gods as real entities and only rarely proscribe their worship, but focus their worship on their patron. The less-powerful ascendants tend to gather cults rather than outright churches (the big distinction is how open the worship is).

Without clerics (who inherently have independence from the church structure), ascendant cults are even more dominated by the structure of the organization. All of their power is taught as "mysteries" and cannot be taken back from heretics and apostates, which means that culling and careful selection is vital for success. This also works to keep the organizations small and compact.

Schism in faith is the worst nightmare of most ascendants, as it literally causes internal dissonance. They care less about political schisms, as long as they don't lead to differences in faith...which means they still care quite a lot.

Notable Heroes

• The Queen Ascendant
• Nocthis
• Shadow-sun, formerly of the Congregation Deceased as of 254 AC.