Imaginary Metaphysics

Berkeley

Preamble: I doubt that my players care about the metaphysics of my D&D world, but thinking about how it all fits together, makes imagining a world more fun for me. In order to keep it straight in my own head and perhaps provide an overview if anyone happens to be interested, I've started formulating my ideas on the page.

An Introduction

You think therefore you exist.

Your thoughts exist because you think them.

In the world of your imagination, you have full control. Everything is fully malleable to your whims and changes as you will it. When you forget or get distracted, it all disappears.

You are not the only consciousness, not the only will. There are others. We'll call them "souls."

How do you interact with other souls? There must be some shared space, an environment of interaction where your ideas and theirs coexist and where concepts are held in common. We call this "reality"

Reality is very different than your imaginary world. Its objects are not dependent on you for existence. It operates on rules external to you. You cannot rearrange everything merely by wishing it so. Instead you are limited by your position, limited by the force of your will, limited by the wills and perceptions of others. Fortunately, you have a vehicle for interaction, this is your "body."

A body is an intellectual tool, used for navigating shared reality. It compiles the compounding structures, rules and limitations that you encounter and organizes your perceptions into something comprehensible. This processed experience appears to you as the physical world. Matter and energy represent shared ideas. Physical space corresponds to conceptual positioning.

Your perceptive facilities manifest as bodily organs (eyes, ears etc.) and you affect the shared reality through the actions of your body. When your hand moves an object, it moves for everyone. You can communicate with other souls via manipulation of physical reality (like the air vibrations produced with your voice).

"Ineluctable modality of the visible: at least that if no more, thought through my eyes"

- Ulysses, James Joyce  

Participation in reality is non-elective. You are anchored to your body and through it, perceptions pour into your consciousness. All external information comes in through your body and is processed through the frame of physicality. Other souls perceive you and you are accessible to their wills. In a significant way, you are stuck in the material world.

This is your situation.

___

This could describe "real" reality. I'll get into fantasy below. 

Magic

Once you recognize the underlying nature of reality and can see past the convenient shorthand of materiality, you can find new tools to interact. Instead of merely moving things by pressing on them with the matter of your body, you can apply your will directly to the complex cobweb of forces holding an object in place, and, by altering the balance just a little, change its position or form without physical touch. This is what we mean by "Magic."

Engraving of Hermes Trismegistus

The world is a dense mesh of force and observation, and the balanced matrix of it is difficult to shift. Calculations must be comprehensive and will applied precisely. To aid in this manipulation, the sages of the past (and occasionally intrepid inventors of the present) have devised formulas and heuristics to aid in implementing specific effects. We call these "Spells." 

 The Gods

Reality is much broader than the small band we are able to experience and we share it with beings unlike ourselves. 

Some beings possess wills vastly more powerful than ours. They can exert tremendous force on reality and the world bends to their will. Sometimes this manifests in vast bodies capable of tremendous physical feats, more commonly these beings have no observable body at all. 

Your observation and attention transfer energy of a kind and there are beings capable of metabolizing this energy. When you intentionally focus this and use it to empower another being, we call this "Worship." 

Lynd Ward

The "Gods" as they are commonly conceived, are powerful beings fueled by worship. Their origins are varied and often obscure. Their capabilities, motivations and ultimate natures are diverse and rarely fully perceptible to us. Nevertheless, they receive widespread worship and seem to use their power to act in the interests of those who revere them.

In the same way, that you cannot be fully contained by your own imagination, so there are consciousnesses that are not fully contained by our reality. We cannot comprehend where or how else they exist but is clear that they transcend the universe as we know it.