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The Starstone doesn't "ascend" anyone. Every single person who has taken the "test" was incinerated to a crisp. It is pure dumb luck, but statistically inevitable given the sheer number of people who risk it, that four people - Aroden, Iomedae, Norgorber and Cayden - already had a spark of divine potential that endured after their corporeal forms were destroyed they survived. There is in fact no test at all, which is why nobody who has passed remembers it, the stone is merely imbued with tremendous and thoroughly uncontrollable power. Aroden put it in a very public and open place for anyone brave or stupid enough to try because he couldn't harness it as a power source, and thought it was a useful way to either dispose of potential rival aspiring demigods, or at least distract them from more viable methods.
The other three Ascended are unaware of their tremendous fortune, and Aroden told nobody the secret before he died. But if one of them had, they all had reason to kill him - Cayden would have killed him for getting people needlessly killed and then be unable to reveal it without diminishing his own worship, Iomedae would have killed him for allowing his most able and dedicated servant nearly kill herself because he saw her as nothing more than a threat to his own power then as a useful tool when it failed, and likewise be unable to reveal the secret without diminishing her worshippers, and Norgorber doesn't need a reason and his worshippers wouldn't care, but he would appreciate the delicious irony of being the last one to know.
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The real reason orcs have such a martial culture is that they have been fighting a long and bloody war against a cabal of evil interplanar wizards throughout the span of history and, some posit that they will do so again. These evil wizards drove several species to extinction in their quest for power and completely wiped out an ancient civilization of dark elves deep below the surface. The changes their foul and arcane contracts wreak upon the fabric of reality rippling outwards without respect to any natural law, changing past, present, and future with impunity.
Even now, the malign influence of these wizards can be found in the pages of disused arcane treatises and bestiaries that refer to common spells by strange names, make reference to an entirely different taxonomy of dragons, or assert the existence of universal moral constants. Rumor has it that in seeking these scraps of ephemera out, one can learn more about the dire threat that still lurks beyond the walls of our reality in their isolated towers along a blasted and benighted coast on some other world.
I think a funny way to do a conspiracist character would be for your character to believe in some of the craziest stuff that happened in other Adventure Paths that the player would know because of their personal familiarity with the story but the character would have no way of knowing.
Obviously you don't want to spoil other players on other stories, since that would be rude. But stuff like "Elves are actually aliens" and "The Necronomicon is in Casmaron" should fly.
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I think a funny way to do a conspiracist character would be for your character to believe in some of the craziest stuff that happened in other Adventure Paths that the player would know because of their personal familiarity with the story but the character would have no way of knowing.
Obviously you don't want to spoil other players on other stories, since that would be rude. But stuff like "Elves are actually aliens" and "The Necronomicon is in Casmaron" should fly.
See... this is all well and good. But what you really gotta do is bring in your character from a custom setting home game. Some day, I'm going to take my very relaxed magical trust-fund kid Thistil and drop him in a Golarian game, acting on the wrong setting's lore.
"The gods we know are only those that remained behind and didn't ascend, clinging to their thrones.""Nobody knows for certain what happened to the gnomes, and I'm personally not sure what is pretending to be them now."
"The god of war maintains an endless cycle of self, cheating the natural order by overtaking each usurper's being- wait, what do you mean he's dead? When did that happen?"
The halflings' True Name for themselves is not secret, nor has it been forgotten. It was hidden, locked away in a magical vault on a forgotten demiplane by ancient wizards. If it is ever found, every single one shall assume their true forms and join the ranks of their kin, the giants.
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I think a funny way to do a conspiracist character would be for your character to believe in some of the craziest stuff that happened in other Adventure Paths that the player would know because of their personal familiarity with the story but the character would have no way of knowing.
Obviously you don't want to spoil other players on other stories, since that would be rude. But stuff like "Elves are actually aliens" and "The Necronomicon is in Casmaron" should fly.
I once had an idea for a conspiracist character along similar line back when the OGL controversy was fresh, in that the conspiracies were just things from the game's predecessor that didn't exist in Pathfinder's universe or don't work that way:
"No, seriously! Neothelids are mutated larvae of a species of emotionless, psychic, squid-headed people who live in the Darklands and eat brains! They reproduce by inserting their tadpoles into your ear or something (and apparently it goes kinda funny if they use gnomes as the host for some reason), and it turns you into one of them! Neothelids are what happen if one of those tadpoles never gets put in someone, they just keep growing and never develop beyond animal-level instincts! What?! Neothelids are intelligent?! NONSENSE!"
"You gotta believe me! There are chickens in the Outer Rifts! Flesh-eating demon chickens!!!"
"Whadaya mean "Hell?" Aren't there nine of them? There are? But they're just called Hell collectively instead of "The Nine Hells?" WHADAYA MEAN ASMODEUS HAD A BROTHER?!"