Itterind wrote:
So divine magic is neutered arcane magic? That sounds likely, but the magic of the elven Gods seem to be much more powerful, it is perhaps 'divine' magic?
It would be 'divine' inasmuch as it's being used by a god, but not qualitatively different from the 'arcane' magic used by other magic users.
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divine magic = outsourced from a personality rather then universal laws
So what if you ARE the god? Is the magic you're using outsourced?
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I don't get how the elven Gods are divine if they're not almighty though, someone isn't almight if the... hmmm, better cut it here, people in the west don't like opinions on religion.
Maybe some people don't. The way I see it it all hinges on what you're willing to call a God. There are:
(1) really, extremely, perhaps indefinitely power beings within the universe who are capable of doing almost or perhaps even anything physically possible for a physical being to do (which includes "arcane magic" if your world's "physics" includes such things). There could be many such beings with no contradictions; they're indefinitely powerful but can still interfere with each other's power and such.
(2) Beings identical with the universe, of which there can thus be only one, and whose powers precisely are those of the universe and the laws of nature; everything that happens, happens at their (perhaps subconscious) whim, and physically impossible things are so impossible precisely because they refuse to allow them to happen. This is the god of pantheism and (by some theories) some early forms of monotheism that later developed into...
(3) Beings which transcend the universe and exist entirely without it, and precede it, who created the laws of nature and can suspend them at whim, and create or destroy or otherwise change things as they please; and in some versions of this, created the laws of logic and mathematics and can suspend them at whim too, making it true that both P and not P, or that 2 + 2 = 5. I honestly can't quite grasp this as an intelligible concept so I'm gonna say no such thing is possible, but I put it out there cause lots of people ostensibly claim to believe in such a being.
It seems that in ES, as in most fantasy stories and in ancient mythologies, we're dealing with beings of type 1. Since all known beings of that sort are dormant, nobody can really ask one of them to work magic through them, as your D&D style "divine magic" requires. If one of them was awake, and chose to work magic by proxy of a lesser being, you could say that that lesser being was working divine magic; but the god itself would still be working 'arcane' magic, just by proxy.