If you choose to be reborn, you will not have magic powers, but you will unlock a status window and a skill tree that you can use to give yourself new skills and abilities and improve your physical characteristics.
You’ll get the same thing if you choose to be reincarnated, however, magic will be a factor. And the age of the world will be somewhere like 50-ish years before the full rollout of the industrial revolution, technology-wise. (minor clarification, you keep your current knowledge either way)
However, you will not be the hero or the chosen one. You’re just going to be a person with a perk.
This take lacks whimsy, and that’s my entire gripe with it.
If I can’t use the force to levitate a building or by simply calling on the spirits learn things that are verifiably true, then it’s not cool enough.
Sure, many of the things that we have may seem magical to a caveman brought here from 47,000 BC, but it’s not castles floating in the sky without a visible means of propulsion. It’s not mind-melding with a bird and seeing the world from its point of view.
We have an imitation of magic and not the real thing.
And what makes you think we haven’t got those still in store? The island of our knowledge and the vast coastline of our discovery is still insignificant compared to the vast sea of our ignorance and the oceans of possibility we have yet to travel.
Whimsy is in short supply, but it’s not because the world lacks magic. It’s more because of choices made by people who chose to be dead inside, and shaped the world in their image. I’m not asking you to stop demanding more whimsy, far from it. This old grey bearded man is asking you to form a party, accept a quest and perhaps one day lead the charge of an army in pursuit of returning the whimsy to the world.
Do you accept, traveller?
As a lover of science I find your recidivism ghoulish. Math rocks are magic. It’s insulting to think of modern science as magic as they requires me to turn off my brain and live as if I don’t have the answers to those things. But magic as the question asks is a force outside of nature. It is something that could benefit our greatest knowledge seekers. It is purely whimsy as the other person put it.
And I think you are trying to point out how amazing the things we take for granted are.
But I want to make something very clear. We do not have magic in this world. There is no divine being handing out miracles. There are no demons corrupting the world with dark forces.
We humans do these things, the divine and the demonic, that’s us. We can be amazing and we can be the worst thing that has ever been inflicted upon ourselves.
To borrow a thought, we do it to ourselves, we do, and that’s why it really hurts.
If you can’t understand what possibilities magic could do for us, what limitations we have with our math rocks, then I earnestly and whole heartedly implore you to open up your mind and dare to imagine.
It’s those who can imagine a world we don’t have that will give some of us the passion and the fascination to find out where our limitations can be pushed
2 questions:
No one asked you to believe in angels or demons or devas or yokai or anything else that is objectively not real. The fact that’s how some people define “magic” does not mean that’s the only definition. Some people have defined marriage as a holy sacrament exclusive to their mythological beliefs. That doesn’t mean that’s the only definition, and I find it odd that you would dismiss the very many viewpoints that do not have such an Abrahamic bias.
We do not have all the answers to every question nor are we ever likely to, if for no other reason than the maximum information density of our brains is finite and a mind vast enough to know everything would necessarily exceed the limits of our finite universe.
Now, far from finding imagination foolish, I think it’s one of our most important skills, but let’s be clear, most of the fantasy magic systems we fantasize about would be objectively terrible because in almost every case, the consequences of such a world would not be how we imagine it, particularly since every magic system we imagine is almost universally internally inconsistent. That by no means suggests we should stop imagining, I merely stated I’d rather live in a world that has consistent rules than one that is arbitrary and capricious.
Perhaps you might learn to practice some humility and ask a question or two before you go throwing around terms like “ghoulish.”