It would explain some of the sound effects chosen for spells in Morrowind, that's for sure.

An Orc never lies, my friend. They're not nearly subtle enough. They're honest to a fault. It's one of their better but at the same time most hindering qualities.

I think of it this way; everything the T0 has suggests that the planes are not spherical, but flat. Even if the Imperials know that there are other continents, I've never heard of them sailing around the world. To them, the idea of the planets and planes being spherical must sound crazy.


Sanguine gave you the power to make the target's clothes disappear (as well as the caster's) but it only worked at a certain place at a certain time on certain people. Namira gave the power to extinguish torches; not nearly as impressive, but still unique. Molag Bal gave you the ability to survive what would otherwise kill you.

And yes, I believe Daedra and Aedra can do things that mortals cannot. It could be that they're of a higher subgradient, or simply that the possess far greater knowledge than most mortals. As I recall, Mankar Camoran, with his given resources, did some pretty amazing things for a mortal.


We've got the Dragonborn and those born under birthsigns with special powers, so yeah, they could have special powers.


I don't know what the limits are as to what powers can be lent to mortals. If there are limits. But yes, Oblivion has had both Daedra and Divines give or lend powers to mortals.


Either that or, as I said at the top of my post, attempting to comprehend the planes as spherical when everything you've experienced suggests they're actually flat.

At first I was very confused why Adanorcil was replying to these, because they're totally right things. Then I saw what they were in reply to and was stunned. You've managed to use exactly the kind of language anyone else would use to explain why baloney about gamma rays is a bad idea to say the opposite.

"Scientific magic" and "magical science" are bad ideas because they are a mockery of both science and magic. They have nothing of the best of either.

And using science to explain magic is better?

I tired once for the hell of it...it ended badly.

I have an idea.

See, there's this electron in the real world, right, and the electron is a superstring. Except that it's not actually a string, even though it looks like one in our universe; it's actually the intersection of two 4-dimensional membranes in higher dimensional spacetime. What we see as a string is merely where it intersects with our more unfurled 3-dimensional space, and it happens to vibrate in the right way to look like an electron.

One of the 4-dimensional membranes inherently carries a kind of charge that tends to decrease entropy in a system and the other membrane carries the same charge but is negative (it increases entropy in a system).

Where these three dimensional membranes intersect is the shape of a sphere which seems like a void (because the two charges largely cancel each other out) but it also releases energy into that void. When the membranes first intersected that energy had a tendency to be completely unformed and could rapidly defy the normal laws of physics until an instability in the intersection allowed yet another dimension to unfurl within that void, but it wasn't a spatial dimension, it was a temporal one. Then the various released-energy components of the two membranes coalesced into things more like the membranes themselves, but a little mixed up.

And one membrane was called Anu and the other Padomay and the unfurled temporal dimension was called Akatosh and so all of Aurbis is zipping through my computer in the form of an electron RIGHT NOW because of the way it intersects with our universe.


So as to avoid people misinterpreting my ironic tone here as sincerity, I'll get to my long-winded point: where does invoking "science" that has nothing to do with furthering the story get us? The answer: nowhere. Tease richness and complexity out of the lore, by all means. As long as it deepens the story. Otherwise, it tends to muddy up the literature with elements that do nothing to make it better.

This isn't even science; I think it's technically theology, or theosophy.

Oh no, I didn't mean to associate myself with any argument presented in the thread prior to my posts; I was just addressing Jara of the Black Wind's statement that "magic should just be magic." I don't think it should and believe that it's good to seek out more complex and satisfying explanations for things, but whether or not "scientific magic" is the way to do that is beyond me and I didn't mean to imply that I was supporting that approach.
Sorry for the confusion, I'll try to be more contextually relevant in the future.