Building in an existing world

[CupofJoe]

Thanks to the Cup as what belongs to Joe. Or is it a cup made out of Joe?

As long as there is caffeine involved, I am a-o-kay.

Anyway, thanks for offering up some specifics. If I might take the liberty to re-state: you took the world as-it-is (changing the names to protect the guilty <g>), but then altered ... something. Some sort of weirdness. Did you find those alterations forced "real world" adjustments into the story?

Mainly in geography. I needed X to be near to [/far from] Y or for it to take a while to get from A to B.
When the big bad appears, everything changes; the current reality, the whole shebang. But even then it was still based on what I had learned.
I cribbed and then tweaked a lot of what the MCs do to stop the BB from what I got from a Demonist friend of mine. And yes, they do believe they can raise and commune with demons [and who am I to judge]. So even a lot of what happened then was "real world". Amped up to 110 rather than just the usual 11 but a demonist reading the story should have been able to follow what was going on and know what I was leaving out or changing.

Let me get more specific here. If the story is essentially real-world, when do you let the reader know something is different? A couple of instances come to mind: Folk of the Air, by Peter S. Beagle, and Neverwhen, by Neil Gaiman. In the former, we're a bit into the book before things get weird. In the latter, if memory serves, it happens very early, within a couple of pages. I offer these because in the one, the hook is more with the characters while in the latter the hook is with the plot.

Neverwhere is probably closer to the mark. The initial hint of something wrong happening is on the first page when as friends are having an end f week drink, someone reads a University newspaper article [it was a few years ago] about an ECR [Early Career Researcher] disappearing. The third in a year. But that was more of a teaser / Pavlov's Gun. I couldn't make the disappearances of scores of people over many years suddenly come to light in Act 3. There had to be a ramp-up and rational explanations along the way. One of the MCs [a librarian] is slowly drawn into a search for "the truth". And as we know people are great at making links and finding patterns, even if none exist...
So are the disappearances...
Just coincidence? [These things do happen. Something like 4-5000 people drop off the map in the UK every year]
Is there a serial killer on the loose? If so who? [That guy in the School of Theology looks at people strangely. Or the landowner always complaining about the students destroying their crops? And does anyone else like the night guard in the Physics building?]
Did they just quit, the result of huge pressure of their PhDs [I think a lot of people may be surprised how many researchers have mental health issues during their PhDs. This is the theme I would push further if I was to rewrite the story].
Or is it a demon/old god from another reality using the psychic energy of people at the edge of their sanity to feed? [Seriously? You believe in that crap? For real?]
I tried to keep all the possibilities open as long as I could.
I felt it worked best when I had a Scully/Molder dynamic; a skeptic and a believer fighting to get to the "truth".

But that's just one detail. If you have others to offer, regarding how the weird, the fantasy elements, affect the real, I'm all ears. Well, mostly ears. Well, just two, as it turns out.

One thing I knew I had to do until the final act was reign in the fantasy until the very last moment. I hoped I had dropped enough breadcrumbs for the reader not to be too surprised or felt cheated [far worse a sin]. Almost like an ACD Sherlock Holmes story, I hoped the reader would put it all together and see how it made sense, just as it started to unravel.

 

[WooHooMan]

So, WooHooMan, where do to fantasy elements enter in?

Referencing my first post: I treat the fantasy elements the same way I treat any fictional elements. They’re molded in such a way that they can be inserted into our real world.

If I don’t want the police involved in a murder mystery, for example, I’d make the murderer a vampire or the victim a wizard which would probably outside of the police’s jurisdiction or capacity to deal with. And then the protagonist who needs to solve the murder would probably be made into someone who can deal with vampires or wizards.
On the other hand: if I want the police involved with a vampire-on-wizard murder, I’d mold the police so that they could deal with it.

 

[skip.knox]

To make things easier for myself, I decided that humanity would outnumber the other races by a significant margin.

That's a good example of what I think I'm struggling toward here: there's a fantasy element (other races), so how does introducing them affect your world building? Deciding which would be the dominant culture is an example of that. And you're right: starting with humans makes things rather simpler, not just in world building but also in narrating the story.

Which brings up the related question of how fantasy elements in a "real" world might affect the writing. For example, do you give different speech patterns to anfylk, dwarves, elves, and humans? Did you work that out ahead of time or as you went?

Magic is common enough that most people will know at least one person with some kind of magical ability.

I like that approach for figuring the extent to which magic permeates the culture. Variations could be, you only meet that sort in the countryside, or only in the cities, or only at court, or only in a certain geographic area. All the way over to the converse: magicians are everywhere except in certain places. Every approach there has interesting implications. One other that occurs to me: is the distribution the same across each of the races?

Magic is complicated and difficult enough that it's not halted technological advancement, but it has slowed it somewhat.

So here's my one follow-up question: where *does* magic get used? That is, in what capacity, for what purposes? Just curious.

I lost my train of thought, and this may have been more of an explanation of my setting than an answer to the original question - but I'm open to elaborate where needed.

At least you have a train. That's doing better than me!

 

[Svrtnsse]

Which brings up the related question of how fantasy elements in a "real" world might affect the writing. For example, do you give different speech patterns to anfylk, dwarves, elves, and humans? Did you work that out ahead of time or as you went?

I have not given the different races different speech patterns. Early on in the worldbuilding process, I decided that language and communication would be an issue, and that there wouldn't be a Common tongue. Once I actually started writing the story, I conveniently forgot about it (no sarcasm, I really did).
The speaking of different languages is mentioned here and there, but it's not something that's had any impact on the story. What has had more of an impact is regional accents, where it's mentioned that this or that person has a northern/southern/refined accent. The world is a large place and the difference in language is more of a regional than a racial thing.

One thing I'm trying to do is mundanize (it's now a word) the fantastic elements. Since magic and elves and all that are well known and accepted parts of life in the setting, the characters and the narrator don't reflect much on backstory explanations. It's difficult to remove completely, but I've been getting better at it.

Example:

In LD#1, Roy and Karl visit a coffee shop. The barista, who's an elf, forgets to bring milk for Karl's coffee when bringing out their order. Rather than going back to get milk, the elf makes a small jug fly through the air so that Karl can get his milk. Karl is a little bit wide-eyed - not because he's never seen magic before, but because it's uncommon for elves to so obviously show their magic skills. The elves have learned the hard way that it's not a good idea to remind humans just how powerful they are.​

So, yes, there's a bit of an explanation there, but it's more about Karl's reaction and about the relationship between elves and humans, than it is about flying milk.

I like that approach for figuring the extent to which magic permeates the culture. Variations could be, you only meet that sort in the countryside, or only in the cities, or only at court, or only in a certain geographic area. All the way over to the converse: magicians are everywhere except in certain places. Every approach there has interesting implications. One other that occurs to me: is the distribution the same across each of the races?

Among humans and anfylk, roughly one in twenty-five can wield magic to some extent. The strength and ability varies from person to person.
Among elves, pretty much everyone is at least as strong as an average human magic wielder.
The dwarves... I don't know, they're pretty much just background decoration at this stage (they're mentioned now and then in scenes with a lot of people, like busy city streets or the arrivals hall at the grand central station).

So here's my one follow-up question: where *does* magic get used? That is, in what capacity, for what purposes? Just curious.

Example time again:
In LD#1:

• Mr. Remieur hands Karl a suitcase. The suitcase is sealed with a presence enchant and can't be unlocked until Mr. Remieur is no longer in the room.
• At Queen B's the bartender has an enchanted chill box that keeps the beer cold (because the power is out al the time).
• At the tea house Napping Piglet, Rhea's shamanistic powers are strong enough that the place won't burn down if someone tips over a candle.
• Roy has a photograph that's fading with age, and he's thinking he should get down to the local arcanist and get the aging reversed and bring the color back.

In LD#5,

• Alene's identity badge has an authenticity enchant which makes it vibrate a little whenever someone touches it, to signify the information on the badge hasn't been tampered with.

In LD#8,

• Symmindur (who's an elf), makes apples of ice grow from a bonsai tree (he's a show off who wants to chill his fancy whiskey).

In LD#10,

• Sallay, the owner of a second hand shop, uses divine magic to mend items donated to the shop. The shop is a shrine dedicated to the god of broken things, each donated item is a sacrifice, and Sallay uses the love the previous owner had for their items to fuel the mending.

In fairness, I never really nailed down what it would be used for, just that it would be there and that it wouldn't be a reliable replacement for technology. Reading through the examples, it seems like magic is mostly used for small scale custom jobs.
Perhaps it's a bit like small, local business today? They provide good quality stuff and personal service, but it's often cheaper and easier to just buy mass produced big brand items to do the same thing.

At least you have a train. That's doing better than me!

The entire series was originally going to be called Werewolves On A Train.

 

[Svrtnsse]

In fairness, I never really nailed down what it would be used for, just that it would be there and that it wouldn't be a reliable replacement for technology. Reading through the examples, it seems like magic is mostly used for small scale custom jobs.
Perhaps it's a bit like small, local business today? They provide good quality stuff and personal service, but it's often cheaper and easier to just buy mass produced big brand items to do the same thing.

I mused a bit more about this, and I'm thinking it might be a little like with people working in the arts these days: musicians, actors, writers, painters, poets, etc.

Some get famous and become superstars, others manage to make a living out of their art, and others yet have to rent out their skills to others.
Add to that, those who aren't strong or skilled enough to support themselves with their magic, but need a non-magical day job and who just do magic in their spare time as a hobby.

 

[skip.knox]

I am doing something roughly in the same neighborhood. Gnomes and dwarves can do things that other folk cannot. Gnomes mainly with wood and metal, dwarves with stone and metal. Neither folk regard what they do as magic, though they freely admit there are special tools and processes involved, all carefully kept secret. A "scientific" investigation would reveal magical forces are indeed at work, but no one at the time of the stories I've so far written calls them magic or supernatural. The word most often used is "craft."

Which demonstrates an interesting aspect of this topic. I asked how one starts with the "real" world and adds magic, with what writerly adjustments. One such adjustment, described by Svrtnsse, is to make certain parts of magic natural. That is, certain things that we would call magic, the people in-world do not. This, while keeping other sorts of magic perceived as obviously supernatural by the people in-world. IOW, the writer redefines what constitutes natural versus supernatural.