Magic and faith are one and the same on Tarras. There is no separation between divine power and arcane power—all magic flows from the gods, and all gods derive their power from belief.
Anyone can become a god by accumulating enough believers, though "belief" is defined incredibly broadly. People don't have to literally worship you or think you are divine. A quiet word spoken in your name to prevent bad fortune, a farmer touching a stone marked with your symbol before planting, a soldier whispering your name before battle—all of this feeds divine power.
Belief is not about faith in the religious sense. It's about attention, invocation, and the directing of hope or fear toward a name or concept.
However, there are only twenty positions of true godhood on Tarras, no matter how much belief one accumulates. These twenty "god spots" are derived from the Elders—cosmic entities that most often manifest as dragons.
The system is built on a 5×4 matrix:
Each Elder's essence intersects with each Sphere, creating The Twenty Domains—twenty distinct expressions of divine power, from Conjuration (Void-Life) to Destruction (Ruin-Power). Each domain can only have one presiding god at a time.
All magic practiced on Tarras draws from these twenty domains. A practitioner is, functionally, a priest—they draw power through their connection to the god of their domain. Whether they call it "spellcasting" or "prayer" makes no practical difference.
Most practitioners are monotheistic, devoting themselves to a single domain and its god. Cross-training is possible but difficult:
This creates schools of magical thought that are simultaneously theological traditions.
This system means:
Divine politics matter. If a god is overthrown or killed, their domain's magic is disrupted until a successor claims the spot.
The Usurpation of the Old Gods wasn't just a mythological event—it was a literal war for control of these twenty positions of power. The Akkosian Pantheon had to displace the existing gods to take their spots.
Accumulating belief without a god spot leaves one in a strange liminal state—powerful, but not truly divine. What happens to such beings?
The Elders themselves are not the twenty gods. They are the cosmic foundations from which the god spots derive. Can they be killed? Replaced? Or are they eternal?
This unified magic-divinity system appears to be specific to Tarras. Other continents and other races may have entirely different relationships between magic, faith, and power. Whether those systems have similar constraints or operate on different principles remains unknown to most scholars on Tarras.