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Magic satchel


In role-playing video games, a magic satchel is a character's inventory in the game. The magic satchel can often contain more (or larger) items than should be physically possible for the character to carry.

The concept is so common in fantasy fiction that it is parodied by the character The Luggage in the Discworld series.

The term hammerspace describes the seemingly invisible place from which fictional characters, such as cartoon characters, pull out very large objects, such as mallets. Technically the term hammerspace is not used to refer to a magic satchel itself, but rather the area or pocket of space that a magic satchel occupies; a magic satchel is like a door to hammerspace.

The "bag of holding" is a similar concept in the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons.

A real-world example is the clown car which often is used in the circus, in which numerous clowns clamber out of a tiny automobile.

The concept of a magic satchel was alluded to many years before role-playing or computer and video games. For instance, in the medieval Welsh epic Y Mabinogi, Pwyll is given a magic satchel by the goddess Rhiannon; this satchel can never be filled except by a man putting his body into it. This trick is used to save Rhiannon from an unwanted Otherworld suitor.

Typically, a magic satchel can carry almost any number of items or money. Many computer games have a limit of 255 units, 65,535 units, or 4,294,967,295 units, the maximum values for an unsigned integer represented by one byte, two bytes, or four bytes, respectively.

In many games, none of the objects in the satchel have any weight: One can carry an armory's worth of swords, several dozen suits of armor, scores of healing items, a small fortune in the local currency, and even a vehicle without any strain. The PC game Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge makes a joke about this phenomenon involving the main character picking up and storing a large sleeping hound dog in his pants. A similar situation can be found in Dust: An Elysian Tail, in which the protagonist stores a sheep in his pocket and his companion comments about it.


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Wikipedia

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