Quote from: beebereven if magic isn't divinely granted, what about divine favors?  somebody's going to be right, and somebody's not.  it just won't work the way it does IRL.

Well, as I mentioned over here, you can definitely leave things in the dark even in high fantasy. Just because there's magic loose in the world doesn't mean that any mortal knows the truth about gods and the hereafter, or that any religion is necessarily right.

If you place priestly magic off by itself, then this is a problem. On the other hand, if you model your setting's magical practices on those of antiquity, then there's no real difference between one sort of magic and another. They all invoke deities, etc., but at the same time you can say that it's the magic ritual itself that holds power and leave the "reality" of the gods open to interpretation.

Not that any ancient person would have reached that conclusion, but as game masters we can fiddle with the "truth" and offer it as a possibility and a source of ambiguity. And it's still the case that the distinction between priestly magic and wizardly magic is artificial. This way, priests perform magic, period. How they do it is a mystery, perhaps even to them.

Quote from: GoOrangeYeah, one fear I had with monotheism is that players would view the religion as a parody of Christianity or Catholicism and any negative portrayals of priests or churches would be seen as a slight on someone's real life religion.

I think there's really no way out here. A monotheistic religion has to encompass all kinds of things, being about an omniscient, omnipotent being. Therefore it's really, really hard to miss comparison to any real world religion. If you've seen one "one god", you've seen them all.

Unless we're talking about some tribal god who simply doesn't acknowledge other divine beings, but that's a monotheistic _church_ as opposed to a monotheistic fact.