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@Eiwynn That’s an interesting thread, and a neat question. I’ve been thinking about it while I was finishing off the beta draft.
I think the magic aspects in MotPD fall somewhere between hard and soft (what’s a material that you can bend easily, but it retains its shape afterwards?) From the early planning stages, I knew that I wanted to include a path through the game that was in contrast to the more studious, material, research/investigation one of a ‘normal’ physician.
The mystics in the game (mostly just the PC, really, though others are mentioned) believe they are able to receive aid from the deities. I don’t outright define many hard ‘rules’ for this, so much as imply the limitations through usage. A player with a high Mysticism stat can (variously) hear voices that help with treatment, ‘sense’ or ‘see’ some sort of upcoming threat, and sometimes learn things about a person’s past that they should not be able to know. But they can’t just immediately sit down and ask “hey, deities, what’s the cure for the plague?” Also, performing this ability requires concentration and relative quiet (though I do bend that rule somewhat), or some ritualistic aspect.
I think it helps that 99% of the game takes place in a contained space, Thornback Hollow, where the ‘wider world’ implications of people having mystic abilities don’t have to be fully addressed. Your colleagues react to you doing these things with “oh right, you’re one of those mystic types” (communicating that it’s a known practice among doctors), while most of the NPCs just tend to ask what you’re doing (but aren’t scared or anything).
What I really tried to do was write the game in such a way that somebody who is ignoring the mysticism stuff will be able to regard all the Dweller/deity stuff as nonsense (if they so choose). Even if you engage with a little bit of mysticism, it should be possible to view or explain it as “well, the person is meditating on a problem, and the voices they hear are just their inner monologue guiding a solution.” The ‘sensing’ could just be you staying quiet and listening for things. Knowing about a person’s past is harder to brush off, but, at a stretch, you could say you’re just really good at cold reading. The visions you see are due to massive stress and your relative lack of sleep, and so on.
It only takes a turn for the truly inexplicable if you dive right into the Dweller in Thorns pathway. At that point… yeah, magic and deities are real, no getting around it 