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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 7005529" data-attributes="member: 4937">This assumes that:a) Gravity works according to the same laws that govern this universe.b) Gravity is what makes things fall down.Neither can be assumed to be true of a fantastic universe. Some alternatives:a) All worlds are finite in size, and have some body beneath them that causes them to float (a magic turtle, made of a substance impervious to gravity, for example).  At some great distance below all worlds is a very vast gravitational body, exerting a field that from the perspective of the individual worlds is perpendicular to the ground.b) Gravity does not exist.  The apparent gravity that people experience is actually the world, and its surrounding crystal sphere(s) and associated bodies, accelerating continually in a single direction without upper bound.  c) Gravity does not exist.  Earth spirits abhor the ideal of things not being 'grounded', and so continually pull on anything they observe above them.  The strength of this pull does not depend on either the distance from the surface or the orientation of the person.  In other words, there is no 'center of gravity', only a nearby spirit pulling you down to the ground were you belong.  The world could be disk shape, or any other shape, and gravity would generally work in the same way you'd intuitively expect.  A scientific investigator in such a world could prove this by noting slight deflections from true 'down' on the slopes of very large mountains (as the spirits here consider 'down' nearer to the perpendicular of the slope rather than the perpendicular to the plane of the world as a whole).   A second way to prove this would be that gravity would very quickly and very suddenly drop to zero once you gained enough altitude that you were outside of the reach of the spirits.  This would be very different than the experienced microgravity of an orbiting body.  In this world, objects could achieve escape velocity at very low speeds and hang in place above the world without orbiting.'C' is in fact the physics of my homebrew world.  It's also the reason why gravity on the elemental plane of earth is always perpendicular to the surface you are on, allowing you to walk around the inside of a hollow sphere.  It's also how magic related to gravity works, such as the 'fly' spell.  You basically trick or bargain with the earth spirits to leave you alone.  An anti-gravity field is simply tricking or coersing the earth spirits (they are pretty simple mindless things), into tossing everything away from the ground rather than pulling it down.  This doesn't require massive expenditures of energy on the part of the spell-caster, as the average mortal spellcaster's mind simply can't conjure up the sort of energy required to perform those feats on their own.  Transmutation magic is simply tweaking the anima that makes reality have a certain character on a local scale so that it has a different character, which you can do if you know the right words much like a programmer can program a computer.  Essentially, wizards 'hack' reality using its own interfaces, as if they were the legitimate authority in the universe with a right to do so.  Divine magic is similar, except that instead of hacking the system, you have some bargain with the legitimate authority in the universe to act on your behalf.  So a Wizard would trick the local gravity spirits into thinking he was their boss, where as a shaman would call up their boss and have him (or her, or it) issue a legitimate order.</blockquote>

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