If you choose to be reborn, you will not have magic powers, but you will unlock a status window and a skill tree that you can use to give yourself new skills and abilities and improve your physical characteristics.
You’ll get the same thing if you choose to be reincarnated, however, magic will be a factor. And the age of the world will be somewhere like 50-ish years before the full rollout of the industrial revolution, technology-wise. (minor clarification, you keep your current knowledge either way)
However, you will not be the hero or the chosen one. You’re just going to be a person with a perk.
This take lacks whimsy, and that’s my entire gripe with it.
If I can’t use the force to levitate a building or by simply calling on the spirits learn things that are verifiably true, then it’s not cool enough.
Sure, many of the things that we have may seem magical to a caveman brought here from 47,000 BC, but it’s not castles floating in the sky without a visible means of propulsion. It’s not mind-melding with a bird and seeing the world from its point of view.
We have an imitation of magic and not the real thing.
And what makes you think we haven’t got those still in store? The island of our knowledge and the vast coastline of our discovery is still insignificant compared to the vast sea of our ignorance and the oceans of possibility we have yet to travel.
Whimsy is in short supply, but it’s not because the world lacks magic. It’s more because of choices made by people who chose to be dead inside, and shaped the world in their image. I’m not asking you to stop demanding more whimsy, far from it. This old grey bearded man is asking you to form a party, accept a quest and perhaps one day lead the charge of an army in pursuit of returning the whimsy to the world.
Do you accept, traveller?