Two major bits of homebrew lore inform every game I ever run:
1. Deities. There were five to start, four representing two great universal dualities (Good-Evil and [Yin-Yang a.k.a. Male-Female] and the fifth representing Neutrality-All-Nothing. Eventually life etc. grew so complex these five realized they needed help; also a new duality - Law-Chaos - had arisen. So, they between them created 16 more deities, for a total of 21.
And despite there being thousands if not millions of different deities etc. worshipped across the universe, almost every one of them is simply an aspect of one of those 21.
Which means, no matter what I ever run or what local pantheon might be used, I can tie it in to this overarching system.
2. Magic. I've made magic a fifth physical force, along with gravity, weak, strong, and electromagnetic. This fifth force is suppressed on worlds that have a particular element (uranium) in their makeup, thus explaining the existence of mundane worlds like this one we're sitting on. Some living beings can by whatever means access this fifth force and in some cases harness it and-or bend it to their will; and these are the spellcasters. Other living beings need its presence in order to exist and-or survive, and these are the creatures we in the real world would consider as 'fantastic'.
This gives me a nice simple easy-to-grok foundation for magic to work on. The differences between arcane, divine and bardic magic are all to do with the means of access employed by the casters.
I do BOTH of these things... but particularly concerning 2.) Magic is smoothly interpreted as a physical force... we can go so far as to say the thesis "EVERYTHING IS PHYSICAL" (in the sense of the STUFF WE KNOW EXISTS that OOmphy stuff, extended stuff that stuff that moves other stuffs about, etc. is all the kinds of stuffs there are!) is a viable theory and possibly correct (or stipulated to be) correct (by the DM)... in this way we dont need to (embarrass ourselves) and attempt to explain why we can seemingly GOTO a PLACE, dare I say a space, that is a purely non-physical place (dare I say space!) where I can SEE other purly non-physical beings and at that KILL THEM! rubbish as far as I am concered and D&D need not commit a DM to some radically austere ontology or metaphysics of non-physical places and things that (purportedly/seemingly/apparently) have both spatial and temporal properties and locations... EDIT: and I dont take the 'existence' of dreams to show that there ARE NONPHYSICAL PLACES WE CAN VISIT; i.e. that we can move our bodies to a dream place; indeed a dream place is no place at all but merely something moe akin to a hallucination (at least I would be prepared to argue for such a claim)...
Anyway, definitely appreciate your take...
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