Religious Magic
Through training, religious initiation, and careful practice, certain individuals become conduits of divine magic. Through them flows the power of their god or gods.
Unlike the arcane, domain magic draws from the natural fabric of reality. It alters the world without fraying it, and causes no contamination.
Domains define what kind of divine power a character channels, and miracles are the forms that power takes in play.
Domains
The power an individual masters lies within a domain: a category of divine concern and expression tied to their god. When you gain domain mastery, you increase mastery in a specific domain, not all domains.
The selected domain should match the god your character follows.
Good-aligned concerns: wellbeing, prosperity, purity, and sanctity. Commonly linked to harvest, fertility, hearth and home, medicine, and maternal divine figures.
Evil-aligned concerns: primacy, strength, wealth, and power with little regard for others. Commonly linked to wealth, death, war, conquest, and paternal divine figures.
Lawful concerns: order, security, sanctity, and the primacy of groups, tribes, and nations. Commonly linked to law, sun, state deities, war, purging, and paternal figures.
Chaotic concerns: individual aims, specific callings, and little concern for broad order. Commonly linked to magic, knowledge, night, moon, trickery, travel, fate, and maternal figures.
Neutral concerns: priorities beyond mortal moral and legal structures. Commonly linked to wilds, animals, plants, land, terrain, sky, sea, and earth.
Alignment in these descriptions is a primary tendency, not an absolute rule. Use these domain frames as starting points to build your own religion and practice.
Miracles
Divine conduits bring their gods' power to bear through miracles. Miracles come in two primary forms: signs and incantations.
Minor invocations made through hand and body signs. They are simpler and comparatively weaker, and cost no favour.
Deliberate invocations using divine phrases, hymns, and liturgies. They demand more from caster and deity, and cost favour.
Favour
Favour is a reservoir of divine power that is spent to cast incantations and resets upon sleep.
Potency
Every miracle has a potency, measuring both the scale of its effect and the mastery required to perform it.
You can only cast miracles with potency equal to or lower than your mastery in that miracle's domain.
Miracles Known
Domain users are granted divine capacity more broadly than arcane casters. Rather than learning specific miracles one by one, they can cast any miracle from their domain that is within valid potency.
Miracle Access Rule
You can cast any miracle in your mastered domain, as long as its potency does not exceed your mastery.
Attacks
Some miracles are attacks. When a miracle is an attack, its attack bonus is equal to the caster's Will.
Miracle Attack Bonus = Will
Rules Interaction
Miracle attacks count as attacks for effects that reference 'attacks', but do not satisfy effects that require a specific attack type such as spell attacks or weapon attacks.
Threshold
Many miracles impose harm or conditions that targets resist with checks. The value used to set those check difficulties is your miracle threshold.
It is influenced by features, but primarily by Will. Your base threshold is:
Miracle Threshold = 8 + Will
As Will rises, your miracle threshold rises with it, making your divine effects progressively harder to resist.
Rituals
Some miracles are slow, deliberate rites requiring setup, tools, and time. These are called rituals.
Cannot be performed in combat
How long the ritual takes to complete
How long effects last once complete
Channelling
Some miracles take multiple turns to complete. These miracles list a channelling duration in turns. You must keep channelling until that duration is reached.
A turn counts as spent channelling when you first cast the miracle and each subsequent turn you choose to channel it.
How it works
1. Cast the miracle. You gain the channelling condition. This prevents actions other than basic movement and prohibits out-of-turn AP use.
2. Each subsequent turn. At the start of each turn after resetting AP, you may channel. Doing so spends the miracle's AP cost again (you do not spend favour again), increases turns spent channelling by 1, and the condition persists.
3. Finish channelling.You finish once turns spent channelling equals the miracle's listed duration.
Reference
Quick-reference summary of key domain rules and formulas.
Starting favour = Will
Can be increased by features; resets on sleep
Incantations cost favour
Signs cost no favour
Potency <= mastery in that domain
Applies to casting access
Any miracle in mastered domain within potency
Not learned spell-by-spell
Will
8 + Will
Base value before feature modifiers
Non-combat; ritual duration + miracle duration
Slow, controlled divine workings
Pay AP each turn channelled
Favour paid once at initial cast
None from domain magic
Domain miracles do not fray reality