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Enchanted Trinkets Complete--a hardcover book containing over 500 magic items for your D&D games!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="mythusmage" data-source="post: 2279998" data-attributes="member: 571">Magical thinking doesn't really mean that all knowledge is already known. After all, it is always possible for new revelations to occur. And each new revelation could be used to improve life. While the knowledge or understanding is absolute, it is only absolute in a narrow sense. In effect the new revelation makes the understanding, the knowledge more comprehensive.Then you have those situations where the new revelation apparently contradicts the old revelation. What really happens is that the new knowledge supplants the old. What was once true is no longer true.Or, what is true for another is not true for you. That is the essential property of individual understanding, of personal revelation. How you see the world, how you understand things determines what is true and what is not true in your case. This is the heart of magical thinking, the idea that it's all valid.But there you're dealing with the paint instead of the framework. In my definition what matters is not what you include in your tale, but how what you include is handled. In a fantasy a spaceship travels through space because that's what spaceships do. In science fiction a flying carpet flies through the air through the use of a technology which allows the manipulation of gravity for a desired effect.I would say, no perceivable limits that we can see. As our understanding grows we learn there is more to a subject than we know. Add the fact that our ability to understand is likely to grow in the future, we'll be able to comprehend far more than we do now.Genre trappings serve more as stage dressing than any other purpose. Really, they tend more to limit than define. You see 'flying carpet' and you think fantasy, even when the item follows scientific principles in its realm of existence. 'Spaceship' on the other hand means science fiction, even when it works in a magical fashion. My purpose in formulating my description of fantasy (my definition if you like) the way I have is to get past the trappings. To open up the possibilities of what fantasy (and science fiction, and horror, and romance etc.) can be. My concern is not with what the story is about, but how the story is about it.</blockquote>

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