Re: godless fantasy
The way that I usually run things is that Magic is an inanimate force that pervades reality and can be manipulated by, in essence, belief. Secular spell casters truly believe that their incantations, gestures, components, etc. are what manipulates magic, not thier belief.
People, of whatever species, believe in their gods, so the magic makes them exist. Priests believe that their gods give them powers, so they have them.
People believe that only priests can perform certain magical effects, so that's the way it works. Perhaps the gods do directly bestow powers on their priests, because the gods exist due to belief, as long as that priest truly believes and brings others to believe in the god, they get 'rewarded'.
Gods don't engage in wholesale war over believers because every REAL believer that they lose diminishes them. Most people don't really believe, they just go through the motions, so losing a very few key believers can severly effect a god.
Why don't we get new gods? Because the old ones protect their territory and it is unlikely that a new weak god would survive to become a threat.
Not a very complementary view of gods, but it does generally fit deific behaviior throughout human history.
