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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Falling Icicle" data-source="post: 6083935" data-attributes="member: 17077">There's alot of different ways of looking at it. One interpretation is that clerics that serve an abstract cause instead of a deity still get their power from a divine source that isn't a deity, much like how druids in some settings draw their power from the divine forces of nature instead of a god. Perhaps good, evil, darkness, the sun, etc. are omnipresent divine forces and those who become spiritually aligned with those forces can tap into them for power. The difference between a fighter that champions some cause and a cleric is a matter of spirituality. The fighter may serve the same cause, but it isn't a part of him the way it is a part of his cleric friend. He just doesn't share the same enlightened understanding of the forces he serves that the cleric does.Another way of interpreting it is that maybe the source of divine power is the cleric himself. This can even be the case if there are gods, the gods just help mortals ignite that divine spark within themselves that enables them to use divine magic. In this case, there can be many alternative paths to such enlightenment, devotion to a deity is just one of them. But how does this differ from arcane magic? Well, it's an entirely different approach. Arcane magic is about understanding the way the universe works, and learning how to "hack" it. It's like a programmer who learns the universe's operating system and ways of exploiting it to have it do what he wants. Divine magic is spiritual and about personal enlightenment. A practitioner of divine magic may not really understand the technicality of how he does what he does, it works simply because he has a strong enough belief that it will.</blockquote>

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