Quote from: DavetheLost;1020157There is nothing a priori about allowing magic that would require the rest of the world to opperate on the same natural principles as our own does, quite the contrary. It would likely take quite a profound rewriting of the laws of reality. Disease might very well be caused by evil "Disease Spirits" as it is in RuneQuet rather than by microorganisms, just to give one example.

I am currently building a setting with this in mind, where nature runs on magic rather than magic being arbitrarily separate.

I even defined engineering as a type a magic, much less martial arts. My only problem right now is that the distinction between magic and technology is so ingrained into modern fantasy that I am having difficulty envisioning how the world works if everything we take for granted as mundane was inherently magic. It seems easiest to me to just have mundane skills outright granting spells at points if the rules cannot handle it any other way.

For example, a healer with the healing skill would have healing spells and a blacksmith with enough skill could create magic items. I have a very clear Tolkien influence here: e.g. Aragorn could heal supernatural wounds without casting spells (his heritage gave a huge racial bonus) and elvish blacksmiths could forge swords that detect goblins/orcs without being wizards.

Quote from: DavetheLost;1020157Is Clerical magic sourced from actual, living gods? How does this effect society and the world?

This is a theological bag of worms. In real life theologians already struggle with the problem of evil, the omnipotence paradox and the Euthyphro dilemma. If the gods were real and could answer questions, things would be much different.

Since that was too difficult for me to deal with, I decided to combine Eberron's agnosticism with D&D immortals. Clerical magic comes from an ill-defined "The Source" that also empowers deities (loosely similar to the Loa); clerics need not worship a specific deity. The gods themselves are flawed, basically good (sometimes crazy) people who spend most of their time managing the celestial bureaucracy and answering miracles. They are not jerks who let evil empyrean titans run rampant like the 5e MM shows, nor are they beyond game statistics (you can kill a deity, even at low level and by accident, but their position just goes to someone else... possibly their killer a la The Santa Clause).

Certainly, as I've said in other recent threads, if there was sufficiently powerful magic that was sufficiently easy for a large number of people to master to a high level of power, odds would be that the entire society would be magic-dominated.

But if any of the above conditions weren't true; if magic was not sufficiently powerful, if it wasn't sufficiently easy, or only a limited number of people could master it, or if it was very difficult to master to a significant level of power, then society would likely not be magic-dominated.