• Welcome to the Fantasy Writing Forums. Register Now to join us!

Recent content by Peat

  1. P

    How can I design an "evil" realistic religion from the ground up?

    Put yourself in the shoes of the character who discovered these facts about your story world and ask how they would have designed the resulting religion to be stable - because ultimately that's where religions come from, people making decisions about what's part and what isn't. My guess is this...
  2. P

    Culture in Medieval Fantasy

    And stuff like this continues today to an extent. I've seen word maps of London denoting where you can find the immigrant communities clustered together - Bangladeshis in Hackney, the French in Kensington (the 15th arrondisement), Portuguese in Stockwell, Jewish in Golders Green,etc.etc. We also...
  3. P

    Worldbuilding with generic archetypes

    The value of worldbuilding depends on your audience and desires. It is a piece of string question. There are audiences who aren't getting out of bed for Yet Another Medieval European setting and there are audiences that don't really want anything else. And everything in between. And because that...
  4. P

    Traditional battle mages

    *pause* Now I think about it, the webcomic Order of the Stick has a really good example of a conventional siege with magic users on each side Giant In the Playground Games This strip is a good start for the arc but a spoilery summary
  5. P

    Traditional battle mages

    People beat me to the punch. Codex Alera features a crapton of magical battles and while mostly people are using their skills to be supersoldiers, we do see some living artillery usage in the second half of the series - and there is a difference between the rank and file with a little magic, and...
  6. P

    Middle Ages were not dark

    Skip, can you also do an essay on things people consider to be Medieval that are actually Renaissance/Reformation? I feel like there's a pretty big list there.
  7. P

    Rules of Foreshadowing?

    GRR Martin has a decent amount of foreshadowing for his later books in book 1. Ditto Robert Jordan. Ditto maybe every major Epic Fantasy series ever - I'm sure if we all sat down and talked our favourite authors, we'd have tons of examples after a bit. Of course, people don't realise all of it...
  8. P

    Writing a Total Jerk as a Main Character

    I think the classic tricks for getting readers to accept this type of character are 1) Have him go against an even bigger jerk, so he looks like the hero in comparison 2) Humour and self-awareness; people like funny, a self-deprecating attitude of "jeez, what sort of douche am I?" really helps...
  9. P

    The generic "Tolkien Rebrand"

    Fair, but even then, I feel like it's honestly been a long time since I've read too many of those. Maybe I'm just reading less and less Epic Fantasy so I'm looking in the wrong place, but I think most of the fantasy I'm reading these days, everyone's human. The Trollocs and Pantathians and I...
  10. P

    The generic "Tolkien Rebrand"

    This is true. However - there's little differences in the aesthetic, and those correspond more with D&D. More fantasy authors' elves are more like Gygax's - long lived but mortal, never lived in heaven, more human - than Tolkien's. Intelligent and non-evil dragons. Dwarves with bad Scottish...
  11. P

    Save the Cat: The Logline

    I generally try doing a logline/summary after I've done my test scenes and am trying to decide how much I like the idea. If I can't, it's probably a good sign that the story has a few too many issues to be worth bothering with.
  12. P

    The generic "Tolkien Rebrand"

    People who find fantasy derivative of Tolkien basically enjoy wallowing in ignorance, and their lies debase our genre and should be fought. To let the "Fantasy is all just Tolkien" line go undersells the many authors whose talk with Tolkien is rather minimal like Gaiman, Pratchett, Pullman...
  13. P

    What do you do when you feel like quitting?

    Sometimes I take a break - a few days, a few weeks, even a month or two. Sometimes I put on the inspirational music and crack on through. Sometimes I just write something else. I've quit a lot of things but writing's almost an addiction. I get the ideas whether I like it or not; might as well...
  14. P

    Firearms in your Fantasy?

    In most of my ideas, no. I just aesthetically find swords and what not more interesting.
  15. P

    Writing dialogue for groups

    Might be worth reading this article on conversation topic patterns - C.S. Pacat - I quite like it as a way to add dynamism and verisimilitude to a group conversation in fiction
Top