Going through the motions versus actual belief

The religous magic users in your setting discover that true belief is not needed to manifest the power of divine beings. How does this affect your setting?

Do it anyway. He got into it because he liked the guy. Magic was always a way to exert Their will on the plane.

People worship the gods anyway.

Using their magic w/o reverence makes them get really salty.

In settings where gods are very real belief tends not to be a real problem.

It might be more interesting if every god had a competing and contradictory scripture/lore associated with them and you had to believe that one was the ultimate truth, but I don't know of any settings like that (besides the real world of course)

Belief is not needed, but the state of mind generated by belief is. Few realize there's a difference, and the gods don't bother correcting anyone. They also don't bother specifying how you should worship them in the first place; they only really care about the idea you are giving reverence to. As a result what the gods actually are is wildly different from what people believe. Many times they're worshipping several gods under a single name, or one god by several names.

Those same religous casters crackdown on the information and continue to worship as usual, keeping an eye out for irreverent clerics "stealing" divine power.

It's happened before, and generally tends to be a big goddamn problem if it's allowed to develop beyond a certain point.

The gods were willing to drop a moon to stop the last guys who worked it out, but the Ur-Rationalists basically skipped right from "mysticism doesn't require faith" to "We don't need the gods, so lets try to usurp them and reanimate the Demiurge into a cosmic frankenstein"

The main deity in my setting is pretty hands-off anyway, though the giant weapons lying around from his war with the old gods and the occasional visit by his valkyries makes it pretty clear he's up there.

Technically, belief isn't needed to use divine magic, but it rapidly accelerates and improves the process. Every sapient creature is born with a fragment of soul energy. Anyone casting spells would draw from this source primarily, but most people don't have the energy for much if any magic. It gradually refills over time when spent, resulting in a deep well of energy.

This is where priests come in. He can petition a higher being for an extra fragment of power to supplement his own. However, as a priest, it would be his duty to convince others to follow and pray to the deity. Their tiny bits of energy goes to him, who he then sends down to the cleric. Thus, the cleric is a shepherd for his community first and foremost. Theoretically, it would be possible to send the magic to a cleric more directly, or for someone to build up their power on their own.

However, sending prayers to a single god is far easier than trying to coordinate those small amounts of energy towards a much smaller vessel. Essentially the difference between rain falling into the ocean versus falling into a jar.

Assuming one managed it though? Well, the god himself doesn't like upstarts very much, and he knows from experience how that would go. Furthermore, any Cleric using this method wouldn't quite get the same spells the normal form of worship would provide, as it's solely dependent on them and their town. Odds are they would end up with the ability to levitate stones and throw them, or something else befitting their roots. Not quite as helpful when you're trying to convince a town to worship you instead of the guy giving out healing.

You'd think fantasy religious would be more interesting if every god was trying to push their own version of creation story even though there are some people who know or would know it's all bullshit.

"Yeah, that guy in particular? He didn't make the universe, he just says that and his guillable mortal followers actually believe him. Who the hell knows who made the universe."

Assuming it really IS just going through the motions rather than some form of frame of mind generated by trying to pray, meditating and such, you'd see a lot of devices like pic related to automate the scroll-reading, hymn-singing and such to basically spam prayers botnet style. Hell, you could have big church farming networks and pay absurd sums of money or goods or whatever to get your wishes "prayer volume".

That actually sounds pretty rad as fuck.

The church has managed to find some way to automate the prayer process to get limited wishes as it where from god but they keep hidden how they do it and the extent to which they can do it.

Queue the PCs trying to make a pilgrimage to get their various prayers answered and discovering the horrible truth.

Well then it's not really divine magic is it. It's just magic. Which would make them wizards with a hard on for [insert god here], not clerics.

Why couldn't they be one in the same? It's not like wizards were originally fedora wearing scholars of enlightenment that we see them painted as today

Even in our own history, the whole 'believing as hard as you can thing' was more a Christian and monotheist thing. Greek gods wanted you to believe in them, sure, but they were more into sacrifices and commemorative sporting events. Norse gods wanted you to be upright and manly. Even the One God of the Jews mostly emphasized that you followed His Law.

One can expect fantasy and alien gods to be weirder still. In CS Lewis you're worshipping Lion Jesus when you do good deeds, even if you're consciously doing them in the name of Bird Satan. I like how the gods of Dungeon Crawl want you to do weird shit like 'feed the local slimes' or 'kill something faster than you.'

>"Yeah, that guy in particular? He didn't make the universe, he just says that and his guillable mortal followers actually believe him. Who the hell knows who made the universe."
Reminds me of
> The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy has, in what we laughingly call the past, had a great deal to say on the subject of parallel universes. Very little of this is, however, at all comprehensible to anyone below the level of Advanced God, and since it is now well established that all known gods came into existence a good three-millionths of a second after the Universe began rather than, as they usually claimed, the previous week, they already have a great deal of explaining to do as it is and are therefore not available for comment on matters of deep physics at this time.

For any setting I create it's always the case that the "gods" in spite of their power are not the ultimate beings of the setting but many will typically try and convince people that they are and build personality cults the same way people do.

That would be in the early days of the system, but as society progressed you'd have a technological society based around using prayer spam to be as efficient with your divine power as possible. Tie a permanent wish for stronger winds on the bottom of your wind-powered prayer farms to keep up production, work out the simplest and shortest hymns per unit of power, the best gods for certain tasks.

You'd wind up with an economy and probably culture based around that as well, as the church networks are pretty integral to the society and are tied up with secular industry and government all the way down. Given you could probably use the power to overwhelm people's will to a limited extent with enough prayer, you'd wind up with something I would probably call Churchpunk if I wanted to slap a standardized name on it.
You could do all kinds of stories with that. Government secret police looking to find and shut down illegal prayer-slavery rings, where people are branded with certain prayers and thus forced to dedicate all their power to that wish regardless of aim, military officers trying to protect the great Mandala-halls of the west from aggression from countries running mainly off different religions who prefer different prayers and power sources.

Cyberpunk with a different skin on it, to be honest, and even LESS power in the hands of individuals than before, since the great Prayer Magnates can grand strategize on boards of war similar to that one the Egyptian mage-kings supposedly had, where they'd move a piece and it would automatically switch the prayer drums to boost the speed or accuracy or whatever of the relevant unit, whereas the common chump has his meagre prayer-power, minus whatever he uses on his work, plus whoever he can talk into helping him.

There would be Luddite movements to destroy prayer farming on the grounds that granting power purely based on how many people you can marshal to pray with you is fairer, and such.

You know, in a weird way you are not to terribly far off from the Xenosaga series. Albeit while people don't actively try to subjugate god for the sake of economic efficency many of the most advanced technologies in the setting are based on the fact that they interact with god (U-DO) via the UMN which does everything from allowing faster than light communications/travel to hyper accurate recreations of real life in virtual reality

You know, this doesn't have to be expclicitly a divine magic thing but now I kind of like the idea of low wage people being forced to pray 8 hours a day to help maintain powerful spells that help drive industry

Yeah, I'm assuming pretty disinterested gods here as long as they get their prayer, they'd probably be happy, so they'd love the new system and want everyone to switch to their preferred prayer sources, so there's a cause for national conflict.

I may make this a setting given my group needs a new campaign, might be fun.

The ARCANE Economy

magic has always been around but it wasn't until recent advances in research that wizards discovered a way to finally have spells that could affect wide areas and be maintained almost permanently. It was initially assumed you had to have the express training in magic in order to do magic but enterprising youths with a loathing for tradition began spreading spells out into the public via the internet and people with no prior training were accidently performing spells.

This eventually lead to one entrepreneur who figured how to maintain a great fire by hiring low wage workers and having them recite a spell taking shifts to do this to maintain it and used the fire to power steam turbines.

I kind of prefer it prayer-flavoured just because it wouldn't result in the usual Magitek tricks from the players almost instantly, but that would be essentially the same in application, yeah. I just like the ideas of these vast halls of prayer cylinders above steam turbines, with workers in ceremonial robes working with shovels and coal to keep everything running.