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Gods and Divine Magic
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<blockquote data-quote="Sword of Spirit" data-source="post: 7620029" data-attributes="member: 6677017"><p>None of those categories work for me because they all assume that if gods are people then divine magic has to directly derive from their agency.</p><p></p><p>Here's how it works in my world. Gods are sentient super-beings. People with lots of hp and powers and some control over aspects of reality (represented by domains, or spheres if you want to go pre-3e). Mortals' access to divine magic <em>originally</em> derived from the gods giving it to ancient priests. Once it was given, it was independent of those gods' agency. The priests have passed it down throughout the ages. The gods may be aware of those who act "in their name" but they don't control or decide if they get spells. If all the gods died clerical magic would still work just fine (with the exception of spells like <em>commune</em> that need someone to commune with).</p><p></p><p>How invested a god is in the mortal world or their own clergy is a matter of individual inclination. Most gods will punish (not by withholding spells, because they can't really do that directly) those who claim to be their priests but blatantly misuse the divine magic they wield, but some may be more hands off than others.</p><p></p><p>This isn't some fringe idea--it's basically how 4e D&D defined it right in the description of the cleric class. I don't care for 4e, but I like how they did this. It's also similar to how some other editions did it, although they usually considered gods to be able to deny at least higher level spells to punish their clerics.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="Sword of Spirit, post: 7620029, member: 6677017"] None of those categories work for me because they all assume that if gods are people then divine magic has to directly derive from their agency. Here's how it works in my world. Gods are sentient super-beings. People with lots of hp and powers and some control over aspects of reality (represented by domains, or spheres if you want to go pre-3e). Mortals' access to divine magic [I]originally[/I] derived from the gods giving it to ancient priests. Once it was given, it was independent of those gods' agency. The priests have passed it down throughout the ages. The gods may be aware of those who act "in their name" but they don't control or decide if they get spells. If all the gods died clerical magic would still work just fine (with the exception of spells like [I]commune[/I] that need someone to commune with). How invested a god is in the mortal world or their own clergy is a matter of individual inclination. Most gods will punish (not by withholding spells, because they can't really do that directly) those who claim to be their priests but blatantly misuse the divine magic they wield, but some may be more hands off than others. This isn't some fringe idea--it's basically how 4e D&D defined it right in the description of the cleric class. I don't care for 4e, but I like how they did this. It's also similar to how some other editions did it, although they usually considered gods to be able to deny at least higher level spells to punish their clerics. [/QUOTE]
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