Recent content by jhmcmullen

When you can find a way to declare something, anything, everything in the world building as relevant to the story. “What musical scale do they use?” in a story about a deaf miner, for instance. (I could make it relevant but music doesn’t show up for the MC except as feeling vibrations.)

Mods, please remove this if it's a common repeat or if it's in an FAQ that I haven't found. I haven't seen it yet, and I think it might be useful to some people. Patricia C. Wrede has a set of fantasy worldbuilding questions that you might find useful. These are not, "Oh, you must answer all of...

I read a couple of authors, such as Philip Masters, who boil down cause and effect in a way that you can steal it and put it into your secondary-world fantasy. Generally, these things fall into the "so you want to do realistic RPG" camp, so you check the RPG section. (D&D, for instance, is...

Can I ask what you mean by "unrealistic"? Because you can mean, "A human wouldn't act that way," or you could mean, "That event wouldn't happen like that," or "That's inconsistent with other things in the story," or probably other things. If you think the character or characters act in a way...

Depends in part what kind of story it is. If it’s a very short story and it doesn’t need much in the way of world-building at all, sure, a name generator and fiddling until it sounds right. Let’s assume this is straight secondary world fantasy with world-building and the whole bit; we’re not...

If in your heart you feel like you need to explain it, then explain why it doesn't work in this particular scene, and do it relatively early in the story. If the wizard can throw lightning bolts, maybe the dialogue goes: Even if you don't do more than that exchange, it's clear that magic has...

Science fiction; I had a ship crash-land on an Anderson disk. Fantasy: I had a city overtly ruled by vampires, where the basis of the currency was blood. All monsters (well, almost all: the exception was the point of the story) were allowed there, and the fact that the city was at an important...

Day of the Triffids, by John Wyndham — I haven’t owned it for yonks, and it’s for book club in a bit so I should re-read it. If Wishes Were Retail, by Auston Habershaw Dream-Quest of Vellitt Bose, Kim Johnson And a couple of non-fiction, including a little one on time-keeping, A History of...

I’ve recently gotten into a tabletop roleplaying game called Iron & Gold, which is by Précis Intermediate Games. It’s a bit of a stretch mentally for me because there’s one physical stat rather than three or five, but I’m getting used to it. I’m about ready to run a superhero TTRPG as well, but...

An example of a detail where I did have confidence in the author — I just read “If Wishes Were Retail” by Auston Habershaw. It’s a fun cozy fantasy set it what is pretty much the real world but like, with genies and gnomes. And even though the mention of gnomes seemed to come out of thin air...

There was a paper roleplaying game that had a magic system something like that. There were magic words, and you had to string them together to get the effect you wanted. Part of character growth for wizards is learning new words. I am blanking on the name, and I might be misremembering details.

I don’t like wordy, moody writing, exemplified by a page-long description of a hallway with a paragraph for wallpaper. If i can’t bring myself to care about any of the characters, I won’t finish the book. If there’s a logical inconsistency with the world and no hint that either the author will...

On the other hand, that's postcognition of a sort, so he might be very useful in mysteries.

Though of course, I never answered the question. Teleportation. I find teleportation very cool, in any of its forms (what constitutes an object you can teleport? Does it matter about mass or volume? What about kinetic energy?) Telepathy. I once noodled with the idea that everyone's brain was...

I write a series of super-powered-individual stories that are explicitly based on a roleplaying game system (in that case, ICONS Super Roleplaying System Assembled Edition), but I gather a number of superhero roleplaying games. If you're totally bereft of ideas, they're great. But, as someone...