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The Right Amount of Fantasy Stuff

How do you know when your world has the right amount of fantasy stuff to populate it?

One of my settings is on the lower side of Fantasy. There are 2 or 3 distinct spell-casters. There are two major time periods in the world. One where 'giant cloud gods' ruled and magic was just everywhere, and a modern time where giants are made of stone and trapped underground (statues).

The modern period has magic-users, but no supernatural threats to pit them against. Maybe monsters made by the giants still exist, or the giants can psychically affect/control people. Maybe the land around giants have weird magic that causes all the animals to have weird magic properties.

My magic users are very limited in what they can do. So sometimes it feels like there isn't much "Fantasy" going on.
 
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Mythopoet

Auror
There's no such thing as the "right amount" of fantasy stuff. There's an audience for everything from fantasy with no supernatural elements at all to fantasy where the magic system is the main selling point. You simply have to decide how much "fantasy stuff" you want your story to have and market it toward the target audience of that kind of story.
 

Penpilot

Staff
Article Team
25% Fantasy, 25% plot, 25% dialogue, 25% nudity.

If you shift about 15% from plot and bring up nudity to 40%, I think there's a chance at making the best seller list. :p

But seriously, what's "right" depends on your story and the promises you make to the reader early on. If you give the impression early that the story will be overflowing with dragons and magic, and it's not, the reader will be disappointed and will feel misled. But if you establish early on in the story that this will be a magic scarce world, then the reader will know what to expect and won't feel misled when magic doesn't abound.
 

X Equestris

Maester
There's no right amount. I'm sure you'll be able to find an audience for any level of fantasy-ness. A Song of Ice and Fire has relatively little magic going on, but it's compelling enough to get and keep an audience, and a large one at that.
 
I was wondering the same thing. Very interesting comments so far. Its my first time writing fantasy and I am struggling to find a balance as well. How do you know when you have gone too far or too little?

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Svrtnsse

Staff
Article Team
I don't think that having too little fantasy within the setting is much of an issue. Too much though, that can cause problems. The risk you're running if you put in too many fantastic things is that it gets confusing. If you put in time and effort into making things up for your setting, you'll also be tempted to include it all in the story.

It might be work, but there's a chance you might end up including things that aren't necessarily relevant to the story. If you manage to avoid that, and include all your cool stuff in a story-relevant way, then there's the risk you're confusing the reader with too much new cool stuff. That too can be avoided, of course, but it might be tricky.
 
If you look at the more contemporary stuff, especially for younger readers, a lot of it has just one magical element or even just one magical character. Everything else is representative of "our world," with the magic as an intrusive force for better or worse. (Think Mary Poppins descending to change the life of an ordinary family, or the Babadook appearing to terrify the **** out of them.)

Of course, stories of that nature are often small-scale, meant as critique or commentary on a specific time and place. If you want to write an epic taking place across continents or generations, you may require more fantasy elements to properly counterbalance the added number of realistic elements.
 

WooHooMan

Auror
Fantasy isn't really defined solely by magic. In fact, I rarely even have magic in my stuff.

I joked with a friend of mine that my current story isn't fantasy because there's no magic or general fantasy conventions. Instead, because it still has a constructed setting, it's a piece of "anthropological fiction".

What I'm getting at is that "fantasy" is a very loose term.
 
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