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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Wayside" data-source="post: 2282075" data-attributes="member: 8394">I can't rationalize Celebrim's setup for him, but "magic" is both mystical and mechanical in my game. Well, first there are a multiplicity of magics, but the one that has access to "near infinite amounts of energy," as you're talking about here, is mechanical without having anything to do with incantations or the waving of sticks in super-secret patterns of power. It's a question purely of "will," but not will in the modern sense of an autonomous agent who navigates between a number of possible choices (that would be will in the sense of, say, Dune), not "will power" or anything like that. In fact will in the sense we generally use it, and also self or ego or personality, aren't the causes of actions at all, but their effects. What I mean is that commonly, we posit a thinker behind every thought, and the thinker is the cause of the thought. But in my game the thinker is produced as an effect by the thought, is its slave not its master, and there is a deeper entity than this surface effect of an ego or self. One is able to "do magic" by undrawing the territories of the self and becoming a nomad in the steppes of this deeper entity, by taking the self out of play, in a sense de-mechanizing it. One takes oneself out of play as an effect--one learns to become a cause--and when the full power of a will begins to be unleashed in this way it can do almost anything. It can draw energy out of n-dimensional space and manipulate it, it can move backward or forward in time as easily as turn left or right (which makes for some insanely interesting fight choreography, incidentally), it can become other selves completely at that surface level, can know your next move in a fight by becoming you, and I don't see any of this as really handwaving science, no more than believing in human free will handwaves science. You could even make quantum uncertainty a product of the competing powers of these deeper wills, that is, could found science on this mystical possibility, as all science is already founded--that is, on a mystical possibility.</blockquote>

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