Why, because in pasture, the green grass is generally taller than anything else in the field. Consequently, when viewed from the side, it can veil the problems, the dead patches, the bare earth, and all the rest. Consequently, looking out over pasture will make it greener than yours, where you can look straight down.

A subtler effect than avoiding metaphors that your characters would not know -- such as “strong suit” when they do not know the game of bridge1 -- lies in dealing with idioms that were not dead metaphors in sort of culture that your characters lived in.

If you have shepherds in your story, the comment about the grass being greener is a metaphor using something they have all seen -- and if the shepherdess Phyllis retorts that actually, some pasture obviously look worse than the one on the other side of the fence, that can also happen.

Or consider -- brooding.

Naturally, the behavior of Byronic heroes, right? Gloomy, sullen, moody, arrogant, withdrawn, defiant, magnetic, scornful, implacable in revenge, brooding over his tragic past.

At the time this metaphor was devised, just about everyone would have been familiar with the original: the broody hen. Prone to fluff herself up to make herself look larger and peck at people who came too close.

The image was not that the attitude was similar. It was the way the Byronic hero would not let past injuries go. He would brood over them -- having drawn back, like the hen to her nest -- until they hatched in his revenge. You get the same effect as when he nurses his injuries, keeping them strong and not letting them die.

But if most readers think of the Byronic hero mythos when “brooding” is mentioned, in settings where there is any kind of hen-keeping, most characters would think of the hatching aspect.

Another one is lousy. Throughout most of history, this term, or the local equivalent, was used literally. Useful to have a term to indicate someone was lice-ridden, although (to tell the truth) that was normal. (Some places, people even regarded it as a danger sign that you couldn’t support lice.)

Nowadays, it is so thoroughly detached that you can surprise people by alluding to its past, and has even changed from the S-sound of louse to the Z of lousy.

Giving people “short shrift” is a dead idiom nowadays, but it no doubt felt different when executions were commonplace, and oftentimes the priest had to shrive the condemned in a short time. All the more in that the final confession was of grave significance to you as well as to everyone around you.

And being “nobody’s fool” had more punch in the days when some characters could say, “I’m the King’s fool, not yours.”

Hmmm. Or other characters could say, “The King’s fool lives at the castle, and isn’t yours, anyway.”

It take delicate handling to bring to bear the full force. If, that is, it can be done at all.

Evasive action may be wiser. Say that another man’s ducks are always plumper. Say that the Byronic hero hoards his injuries. Say that an article of clothing is shoddy -- or lice-ridden, as appropriate.

And so on.

It can take real effort to dig down to realistic figures of speech. Remember that the characters will always refer to things they find typical, and in an era with little travel, merely hearing of deserts, or arctic conditions, or what have you will not make it natural to speak of something being like water in the desert, or being snowed in. A character from a port might speak of a sailor who spots land after a storm, or being becalmed; an inland character, like rain after a drought, or being flooded.

It requires a stretch to avoid suggesting that the character are not modern, but the effort makes it clear that your world is different.

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If the players are uncommonly fractious, or giddy, or the GM had something up the sleeve, it may be followed by, “And you all wake up in a cell.”

Now this plot device deserves some respect if only for its venerable age. After all, Geoffrey Chaucer kicked off Canterbury Tales by having his characters all meet at an inn.

But -- they met at the inn because they were all going on pilgrimage to Canterbury. That is, they already had a common purpose.

More recently, the hobbits met Strider at an inn. That is because it is a place where travelers would go for lodging, locals and travelers would go for ale, and a thriving community place for gossip and news. Ideal place for people to meet.

And once they know Gandalf recommends Strider, they have a motive to work together.

The GM has the advantage that the players know their characters are a party, no matter where they came from, and thus motives are necessary only if the players are willing to set up a story thus. Sandbox? Less necessary.

For a writer, however, motives are vital.1

On the other hand, a writer also has a free hand in trickling in the characters.2 Even if Jack is the hero, the writer can introduce Hans and Ivan as they meet on the road, and arrive at the inn.

And once they are there -- well, why would they join up?

True, the novelist does have an advantage in giving them a common backstory,3 and a harmonious past, to help, but a present-day reason is also needed.

It’s possible, depending on the story, that they all have the same destination. Perhaps they all want to avenge themselves on the Black Knight. Perhaps they are all faring to the Golden City because there, the Great Library will have tomes on the secrets of the black knight. Or perhaps Hans and Ivan, no fools, want to hire a guide.

This is the weak point, story-wise, in many games, because the characters often have neither motive to go adventuring nor motives to chase down a particular adventure.

True, only one needs a particular motive. Ivan can say that he has to earn his living somehow, after the lord trained him as a warrior and then turned him off with no other salable skills. Hans can say that he needs to earn the money to live off because his brothers cheated him out of his share of the inheritance. But then Jack says that there is a ghost up on the hill, and he can make no promises, but the rumor is that it is guarding gold.

Which would work as a story as well.

And, of course, the opening of “You all wake up in a cell” is also a classic opening because it gives them all a reason to work together, to break out. Or to win the pardon that the lord is offering

On the other hand, unless it’s a follow up to “You all meet in an inn” this is often without giving a reason for the imprisonment. Even if you take their memories away, there ought to be some reason for their imprisonment at least hinted at. If it fits the story, you can make it they are all the innocent doubles of the evil robbers, conjured up by their sorcerer -- that’s why they have no memories -- and abandoned to take the fall for the robbers. Or whatever the usual crimes of the usual suspects are in your world.

Very likely, if they are actual criminals, they brag up their feats to make themselves look tough and dangerous, even if they face no threat so that looking dangerous is the only safety. They even heckle the quiet guy in the corner, taking him for an innocent both accidentally arrested and harmless.

Because, of course, once you put them in a cell, their characters have to match. A GM can get away with it as a plot device. A novelist has to either make them crooks or develop the miscarriage of justice.

Or reverted to the idea of making them meet at the inn. It’s harder to get them to work together there, but it does give a freer hand with characterization.

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The plot-significant violence is already baked in, it was set in the outline, and I’ve already had one slaughter. But, the tale is set in a more violent time.

Most times have, in fact, been more violent. The law is less effective, there’s little in the way of forensics so many escape if not actually caught red-handed, if you escape the immediate vicinity of your crime there is no organized pursuit, patronage protects the guilty -- at that, patronage deploys the law for the horrible offense of being on the other side, so that the innocent suffer as its hands.

Not to mention that the prisons are more unpleasant, so by the time your family talks the king around, you may already have perished from the conditions. Appealing to the law is not always a plea for justice, it’s often a request for favoritism, and another form of violence.

And when the law grows so contemptible, feuds take over. The prince’s protection can remit your sentence for fighting, but it can not remit a dagger between your ribs.

Or, if you are adequately unpopular, a lynch mob. The Spanish Inquisition’s insistence on ordinary rules of evidence (of the day!) meant that many accused witches could not be convicted, but a sufficient whipped-up village would dispose of the witch themselves.

All right, a vast range of these things are possible over the course of history. The laws handled more or less in different times and places. Even in fictional Verona, the prince can rally citizens against the feud, and order death and exile for those involved; Romeo knows that the sentence of exile is real.

Shakespeare’s history plays show greater disorder, featuring disputes over the throne and the dynasties, but also just general disorder, taking advantage of the disputes.

That is the sort of setting my tale at least borders on.

There is a dispute over the succession. There will be at least two large scale and deadly fights in the story, one of which has already killed scores, and the other of which will kill at least hundreds, possibly a thousand. But the burning question is: What should the setting have by way of background violence?

At the very least, violence needs to be enough so that the readers will understand why the heroine does not just send her parents a message with her news. She doesn’t dare. The man would likely just be murdered on the way by robbers. Or, more likely, by a lord’s men who realize that the messenger is in service to the other side.

Then, many readers have unduly rosy visions of crime rates. They imagine that the crime rate was lower in days of old, when in reality it was stunningly high when you compare it to the population. (And that when many crimes passed undetected.)

So I need some violence. Not to move the story forward (though it may sprout some effects). To suggest the level of violence they are used to. To explain why the opening violence does not bring on the level of hysterics you might expect nowadays. To raise the stakes by implying that this level of violence is actually not normal, so it is clear that what our heroine does is important.

Fights, I think. At least one of which should prove lethal. Abuse of the legal system. I suspect there will be a murder at a masquerade ball.

All this against a backdrop of continual intriguing where every noble family is trying to make hay out of the crisis, with their support being offered only for every concession they can get.

This story does not take place in a nice time in history. I will have to juggle that.

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I’m not talking about a plot that gets redone by many hands and presumed to have no connection to any other retelling. There are many, many, many tales of sleeping princesses. You can tell your own freely if you don’t point it to a specific one.

Neither am I talking about Matters where so many pens have gotten involved -- not to say have muddled up everything -- that many contradictory things have been added, and the core of what the characters has very few required traits, indeed.

You may wince at a historical fiction purporting to depict the True History behind King Arthur, and how it explains Lancelot, Galahad, and Tristan -- because you know all three of those were added to the Matter long after any historical events were lost in the myth -- but, after all, those who introduced them first claimed they were then in the history.

Rather, I’m thinking about a story sufficiently defined that central core is defined by a single writer’s handiwork. There can be flaws and inconsistencies in a body of work -- consider Sherlock Holmes.

Better, consider Oz. L. Frank Baum did not keep it consistent for the length of two books. Nevertheless, what Baum wrote is Oz, in a way that every well-regulated mind can agree that other writers’ work is not.

Furthermore, I’m not thinking of taking the tale, or elements of it, and pulling it loose enough that it stands entirely on its own as a work of art, without being even a deconstruction or a satire of the original work.

No, let us talk of a tale -- anything from a deconstruction to a fanfic -- that purports to be in the very world the original story is written in.

One thing that you need to think about is style. More or less depending on what is the original.

Oz does not have high style requirements for its world because it was written in a workmanlike style, and in the third person. You could not get away with a fancy or poetic style unless you carefully set it up, but a good plain style suffices.

Ripping off Shakespeare is more dangerous. You do not actually have to write in a Shakespearean style. You do not have to make your dialog all iambic pentameter -- though doing so certainly did not hurt Poul Anderson’s A Midsummer Tempest. But artful use of poetic language doesn’t hurt, and you want to avoid a voice that smacks of informality and the modern day.

Also, Sherlock Holmes. This is for a different reason. Those stories were almost all told in Watson’s voice. This was not a very distinctive style, but it was a voice, and the reader expects closer adherence than in other situations. Even subtle lapses, therefore, strike a discord. (Not to say that all writers who feign Watson’s voice fail subtly.)

And if you change voices, well, it takes considerable art to get into the true Holmesian spirit from another pair of eyes.

In particular, if you want a character as smart as Holmes, remember that everyone thinks the stories with Holmes as a narrator are inferior. He’s more impressive viewed from the outside, since we don’t see the false starts and the troubles in coming to his brilliant conclusions. This applies to any character as smart as he is, too.

Closely related to this is the issue of accuracy. One of the commonest uses of a different viewpoint is to assert that the original viewpoint got something wrong.

Sometimes this works.

Sometimes the original viewpoint character was depicted in the original work such that he would have, or could have, gotten something wrong, or missed something that would change the complexion of things. Or even lied. Ozma can gravely explain that L. Frank Baum, who openly described himself as telling stories of Oz, was, after all, telling them for children, thus explaining omissions.

(Though it would be amusing to see a retelling where a character claims to reveal the true story behind the hero, only to betray himself as an unreliable narrator, show the truthfulness of the original tales, and unwittingly depict the hero’s heroism in more dazzling colors. That would take masterly writing skills.)

But unless you can point to evidence in the original work that supports this gap between what that work says, and what yours says, you have introduced an aesthetic flaw into your work by putting in an incongruity. Especially if you are claiming to deconstruct the original work. You can not alter the work and show how it is flawed at the same time.

If you want to make alterations, you should boldly go forth, stealing the idea entirely, and write it up as your own, original idea.1 Then you get to set the parameters. You can even tell people that this is how the situation in that work would work in reality.

If you claim to be writing in the original story world, on the other hand, you need to accept its constraints as much as if it were an earlier work of yours in a series.2 The original story world still has the right to be viewed as a single work of art,3 and yours must add to it, or depart from it.

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One that I have seen most often errors in is weddings.

The first issue is that vows are a Christian thing. And not even that in all eras.

We know that in ancient times, there was a Christian marriage rite. We know because Christians are urged to use the rite and not rely on pagan wedding practices, which were more loosey-goosey and made it harder to determine whether a couple were married.

We also know that in the Dark Ages, those who did not have enough property to bother just shacked up, while those who did drew up a formal document to arrange things, and then (perhaps years later) in a rowdy ceremony, the bride and bridegroom were conducted to their wedding bed.

Except that somewhere in all the wrangling and fighting over marriage in the era -- and the fighting was not always figurative -- marriage vows were added. In a manner as badly documented as anything could be in the Dark Ages. I have read one author (Georges Duby, in The Knight, The Lady, And The Priest) discuss the possibility that this was aping royalty, because royal marriages had one more step: the new queen had to be brought to the cathedral and crowned. But he was speculating.

However it happened, by the High Middle Ages, the couple went to the church door and there, on the steps, exchanged vows. Those, the words of marriage, constituted marriage. Then, usually, they went in and had Mass said. That was not necessary to constitute a marriage. Neither, technically, were the church steps or the witnesses there -- but they gave more legal rights to the bride, and were strongly encouraged for the obvious reason of making it clear who was married.

One notes that if your society is illiterate, or marginally literate, the witnesses may be vital, and therefore, a lot of foofaraw may be indulged in, not only because people like to party, but because it made the occasion memorable and thus made it easier to find, years later, people who remembered it.

There are cases in medieval courts where people were called to testify that they had seen the bridal procession of the couple, which was considered sufficient evidence of the marriage.

Consider the weddings of your world. First of all, consider what is considered the essence, that without which the marriage does not exist.

Or whether there is a consistent pattern. In classical Rome, the pagan practice was that there was a sacred marriage, involving an elaborate rite, and also that any cohabiting couple might be married, and any prolonged separation might be a divorce, giving judges much bother in deciding who were married.

Compare your society to real-world examples and work from there. In China, the essential process was simply writing the bride’s name into his family’s book. Neither the bride nor the bridegroom had to be present for this.

Or you might draw up a marriage contract. This would, among other things, make provision for the bride and her children, and such things as remarriage after being widowed, and the possibility of children from other marriages -- or the rights of already born children from other marriages.

Some wedding ceremonies, you will find, are quite elaborate, and all of that regarded as essential. Still, there’s a lot of variety, and you can consider them all as sources to make your own -- provided you apply enough spackle to cover the gaps.

Wedding celebrations, you have a much freer hand with. The point was, after all, to have fun and to be memorable.

Still, read up on the celebrations. People did much odder things than you can dream up, and the practices of people closer to your imaginary society can give you ideas. For instance, in the Domostroi, a Russian advice book from the twelfth century, the practices for a wedding among the wealthy are laid out. (Which do not talk about the bride and the bridegroom, but rather the prince and the princess.) One step is sending messengers to the bridegroom’s parent’s house. Neither set of parents left home during the ceremony, the couple went to church without either of them, but messengers were sent to ensure that the parents were kept posted on what was happening.

You can even downplay the celebrations. There are few cultures in which there were no voices calling for moderation and frugality in celebrations, especially in cultures where excess, and resulting debt, is the norm. You could, say, consider the Little House books, in which the quiet wedding features the bridegroom’s coming by the bride’s parents’ house with his buggy, the couple’s going to the minister’s house, and the minister’s performing the ceremony with his wife and daughter acting as witnesses. Or consider China, in which a widower’s taking a second wife called for little if any ceremony, and it was considered commendably frugal for him to just promote a concubine to be his full wife.

And, if you give the matter grave consideration, you may decide that the story calls for a fairy-tale wedding.2

That is, short and quickly passed over, because it is important only to the characters, not to the tale:

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After considering love interests without love stories,1 I am wandering off into the taxonomy of love stories.

Many people will tell you that a Romance (in its modern and exceedingly narrow sense2) must end with a HEA -- happily ever after.

What they seldom add is that the obstacle to the HEA must be internal to the hero and heroine.

Even if the problem is a misunderstanding produced by the absurdly unmotivated malice and lies of a third party, it is the misunderstanding, not the malice, that is the problem. A dramatic confrontation between the couple and the liar has its plot function in the story, but to dramatize that they have overcome the lies, or to underscore to the liar that no further attempts will succeed, thus prevent more lies from troubling the HEA, but it is not necessary.

Genuine love triangles,3 also, are rare. The apparent rival features not so much as a real alternative as a motive for jealousy, thus arousing both mistrust and possessiveness to move the story forward.

Thus, Romeo and Juliet is not a romance, not merely because it ends badly, but because the problem is their families. All right, there is just a twinge of romance, around Tybalt’s death, when Juliet reacts vehemently to what Romeo did, but they overcome that readily and return to the external obstacle, now compounded by his exile.

If you decided to rework it into a happy ending -- perhaps the lovelorn couple could appeal to the prince for protection? The prince is the only authority acting sanely.

Or perhaps you could rip off A Midsummer Night’s Dream and give one of them an aunt who had married (gasp) abroad. This would take some building up. Perhaps the prince could try to hire a mercenary company passing through, and the captain says that while he wanders far, he has never seen so horrible a city. Perhaps the ball could be in honor of an ambassador, who is in exile from his native city because of politics, and has thoroughly settled down in his new city. Other hints that leaving your city is not so terrible, and that this city is, actually, rotten.

When they flee like Hermia and Lysander, it’s still not a romance, any more than appealing to the prince would make it one, because the problem is still their families.

Now, if Romeo had not crashed the ball, or if he and Juliet had done nothing more than notice each other, but then the prince, dealing with the feud, had ordered an intermarriage -- then there could be a romance. While Romeo was never particularly fond of the fighting, both he and Juliet might object to being summarily married off like that. Furthermore, both might regarded the other warily, as a potential spy for the other family.

The deaths of Mercutio and Tybalt would hardly be a glitch then. They would be a major crisis, with each of them passionate about the death on their side.

On the other hand, it could move away from the love story in the other direction by having Romeo and Juliet each want to resolve the feud. Perhaps they encounter each other while coming to the prince to appeal for something. Or whatever other change you introduce to make this plot feasible. They work together and get to know each other and fall in love.

There could be love story elements as their families plot about them, and perhaps move them away -- for safety -- or arrange a marriage to gain power.

There could even be romance elements as they doubt each other, worry about spying, refuse to confide in each other because if they are mistaken the confidence would end in disaster, and react very different to the news of violence ending in death depending on who died.

But where the obstacles lie, and to what, determine what kind of love story it is. Or is not.

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And do they?

This gets a little complicated because, of course, the laws of nature are apt to be a little different, to enable magic.1

Does your world actually run on the elements of earth, water, air, and fire? Or, for that matter, water, fire, metal, wood, and earth? And if so, do you have the ability to develop that elemental system to the level of detail equal to quantum mechanics?2 Would it improve your story if you did, and let it show in the story?

As for the stars, are they in fact lights embedded in the celestial sphere, moved by the primum mobile within the Empyrean? Or even in the dome arching over your flat world?

Can your wizards scry the Empyrean? And what do they see if they do? Was Aristotle right that the notions of time and space break down with the edge of the universe? And is your prose up to conveying that? And what will it mean for your story?

Now, in Celestial Matters, Richard Garfinkle did a splendid job of a Ptolemaic system. At one point, a space ship gets into trouble, entangled in an epicycle. But this work sticks in memory because of its rarity. Most writers who go into detail have magic be an additional layer, so that all the mundane sciences would work as we have them work.

It is, of course, a fantasy commonplace -- most familiar to me from the Lord Darcy series -- that science is denounced as superstition.3 Only a hedge wizard would use bread mold to treat an infection! Only a herbwife would give willow bark head for a headache!

And quite reasonably, many works have a level of scientific knowledge that is comparable to the tech level. They tend to wisely forgo the whole conflict of technology preventing magic,4 and magic preventing technology,5 tropes.

On the other hand, if you do want to use those tropes --

The whole magic vs. technology thing, on top of philosophical incoherence, complicates the matter of learning. If you can not use telescopes, your knowledge of the sky is hindered. If you can not use electron microscopes, or even microscopes, at all, your ability to see small things is gravely hindered. And if a steam engine simply won’t work in the magical world, is that because basic laws of mechanics don’t work? Or because some magical force is meddling?

Such meddling would, of course, complicate any attempts to discover scientific facts via scientific means.

On the other hand, you could discover scientific facts through magical means, if you so define the ways of magic.6 Use your crystal ball to scry the stars and see them in ways that the best telescopes can not manage. Or determine a way to focus in on things and so see things that are smaller, until you get down to atoms and find you can not make them any more clear. (Quantum mechanical effects.)

Or if you do take the plunge and work out the alternative physics, whatever they will find when they get down so small. Perhaps that matter is infinitely divisible.

Then, of course, you have to fold it back into the story. Perhaps in a tedious lesson ending just as the characters get to escape school.

Perhaps as a MacGuffin7 to get the story moving. The hero and his comrades have to protect the wizard who made a discovery vital to the defense of the kingdom.

Or even a discovery during the course of the story, but foreshadowing has to be very good for that.8 Making new discoveries is hard to pull off. Much wiser, on the whole, to apply principles that have been enumerated before to new situation.

Which means, of course, like any other plot device, slithering in whatever level of knowledge they have and will use, with sufficient subtlety that it can still surprise the reader.

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Actually, a whole range of things. Not all of them that would let your book be filed in the Romance section of the bookstore.

Not all of them, in fact, qualify as a Love Story or even a Love Subplot -- and not just in stories where the main character already had a sweetheart or is married, but ones in which the main character meets a love interest and marries in the end.

A love story is the story of a romantic passion and the obstacle to it that produces conflict. If the romantic passion is in a story where there is another, main conflict, there must be an obstacle specifically to the love for it to be a subplot.

So if your hero flies an interstellar shuttle for the army, bearing supplies to the desperate forces, and at the mammoth space station factory, he meets a cute, sweet mechanic who keeps the shuttles running, they can fall in love. If they both want to stay single for the duration, you don’t have a love subplot, which would require, say, his being wounded by the loss of his planet in the war and unable to move on, or her boss’s disliking all pilots and so assigning her to keep them apart.

There is, of course, no hard-and-fast rule by which their interactions are, or are not, a subplot. There can be a wide hazy area where they have difficulties of a greater or lesser degree that can be argued over. If he objects to being ordered to a certain location when another one gravely needs supplies, and she argues that the generals must look to the strategic situation, how serious a rupture would have to be, to qualify as an obstacle their love?

Then, from the writerly viewpoint, it doesn’t matter. The question is how grave a rupture would serve the plot. A serious rupture that leads to the hero to believe that since even she can’t be brought to see the problem, he will have to defy orders? Or a mild argument to give an excuse for info-dumping?1

The mild argument is as legitimate as the rupture, though, obviously, she had better serve some plot purpose in the tale or not appear at all. Especially if she’s used as an excuse for info-dumping.

But she can do all sorts of things.

Perhaps the pilot was happy-go-lucky and now feels the stakes have been raised.2 Either for winning the war -- both her safety and their future are at risk -- or for particular events, down to and including her being taken prisoner of war, or being brought under fire.

Perhaps she can provide support, whether putting in extra work on the shuttle or alerting him to what happened in the space station while he ran his mission. Or helping him with her knowledge of the station if he has to run a covert mission because they suspect spies and their own superiors’ complicity.

Perhaps she is a symbolic reflection of the approval that the hero won. As in the love triangle, her choice reflects that.3 And, of course, if the wedding is well-attended, it gives a larger and more concrete expression of the restoration of order to the society. Given that they served for the duration, it’s even a symbol of peace.

It can also help support the notion that his work in supplying the combat soldiers is noble and worthy even though he doesn’t actually fight. This sort of plot device is, in fact, more common for female characters than for male ones. In World War II propaganda stories about war workers, the women won the hearts of a soldier or the son of the factory owner to emphasize that while she has undertaken factory work, it has not made her unfeminine or unattractive. (Sometimes with the added femininity of helping nurse a wounded soldier back to health.)

And of course, a wedding is a classic way to round out a tale.

In the fairy tales, Vasilisa the Beautiful wins free of Baba Yaga’s cottage (with a magical doll and her mother’s blessing) and comes home with the fire (in a skull) that she was sent for. When the fire burns down her house with her stepmother and stepsisters in it, she takes refuge with an old woman. While she has solved the problem with her stepmother and the witch, she makes linen or sews. And in the end

Rare is the story that can now lay out that they will live happily ever after that blatantly -- nowadays, if the love interest is introduced that late, it is to have them hint at a future -- but still, you can round out a tale with a wedding, and thus mark its end.

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The range is neatly captured in the superhero genre.

In Wearing the Cape by Marion G. Harmon, the advent of superpowers occurred at the Event. Everyone knows that there were no superpowered people before it, and now there are, and the series is about coping with the changes. The reason they all call them superheroes and supervillains is that one of the first donned a superhero comic get-up and took a superhero comic alias -- even though his identity was publicly known -- in order to channel people’s reactions from “mysterious and unknown occurrence” to “the Event caused superpowers.”

In Astro City by Kurt Busiek, the snippets of history have traced superheroes solidly into the nineteenth century. Indeed, the first founding of Astro City quickly picked up legends of mysterious figures meeting out justice. It’s a known thing.

(Marvel and DC -- never bother to work it out.)

These produce very different effects.

One has people floundering, the world changing, classification efforts continuing and continuing to fail if the situation has any complexity, and all the uproar. It also has the possibility of resolution and restoration, thus requiring careful handling to keep the series going.

The other has sagacious old souls who can tell you stories that help you cope and understand, even if it’s stories about how monsters blindsided them with strange properties, even if the old souls are cynical, defeated cripples who barely survived lost battles, or suffering souls, trapped in curses, or even ghosts.

There can also be libraries of lore, and the common people would have customs to cope. It also implicitly states that the heroes can resolve the problem of the day but not the nature of the world, which is useful.

This works best with lower scale threats. Vampires, ogres, what have you. Silver John and his fellow dealers with trouble deal with things that extend no farther than a town -- and have Judge Pursuivant, older than most, aid them with knowledge now and again, including the knowledge that things were so when he was their age. Conan the Barbarian’s troubles can extend to a kingdom but no further, and can be as small as himself and a companion.

Threatening the world, by itself, has its problems in making the world flimsy.2 Threatening it repeatedly -- to avoid anticlimax after escalation3 -- makes it look very flimsy. But threatening it repeated and having no history of such threats shows the hand of the author. Blatantly.

If, every few years, spell-slingers of some kind conspire to summon something, or cast some spell, that would be disastrous on a large scale, and their conspiracy has large, blatant, undeniable consequence so that everyone knows it -- that’s awkward enough. If, however, there is no history of this happening, if the hero of the tale is not told about how this is always happening, if he did not hear about it despite growing up where there was actual news -- that, aesthetically, requires an explanation.

Did the stars converge and create an era in which such fell magics are feasible? When will it end? Was there a past era in which this happened, and would sending librarians to hunt down the histories of that time help?

Was our hero conceived at the exact hour when the era began? Does that give him the powers to deal with the spell-slingers beyond the lot of ordinary mortals? Was our hero’s conception the force that brought about the era? And aren’t we lucky that the heroes managed to bring him to their side? Or perhaps it’s his nature --

Or it could be something else. A broken seal on an enchanted ward. Then it’s just a matter of learning that, discovering where the ward is, figuring out how to fix the seal, and doing so while every evil-minded spell-slinger existing fights you?

(Hmm. Every evil-minded spell-slinger who wants to do something that the ward would prevent. Some evil-minded spell-slingers wouldn’t mind because the ward does them no harm. Some would, on the balance, prefer that it go because the power it gives others over them is worse than the power it grants them. Some even would prefer that it be sealed up because they prefer that the world be safe, and they might even help.)

Which would, of course, terminate the series unless you managed, somehow, to segue to another plot. Perhaps cleaning up consequences in the world or lesser perils -- or perhaps fixing the ward required them to go to another world, and seal their root back. Now they venture from world to world, solving problems.

At any rate, it would change.

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The one where a writer laments that a fully functional economy means that his hero can’t afford to start the quest to destroy the Evil Overlord? He needs a sword, a horse, and some travel rations and any one of those things costs more than the money he has on hand?

Don’t do that.

I mean, it’s fine to give your world a fully functional economy if you want to, but it’s kinda easy to work around the limitations on your hero.

If you want to. Having the hero have to get odd jobs with travelers to travel could be interesting.

If you don’t want to, you can have your hero

• find some coins in a treasure trove buried long ago for safety;

• walk instead of going on horseback (and really, horses don’t speed things up much unless you can change horses at post stations, which are generally a government monopoly because no one else cares enough to keep them) and use a quarterstaff to fight;

• find a sword and some coins in the attic and slip off with it to avoid inconvenient questions;

• have a mysterious figure give him not only the quest but the wherewithal, since the Chooser of the One1 wants him to move;

• have a mysterious figure give him enchanted dice that let him win the money to go on the quest, and also incentive to move because they accuse him of cheating;

• buy a barrel of odds and ends and find it contains gold and a sword, whereupon he goes on a quest to avoid questions about where he got it as well as to save the world;

• have been saving for years and years to buy something only to learn he needs to spend it to go on this quest;

• be a blacksmith and make his own sword;

• set out on the journey in hopes of finding some way to go on and have a magical horse trot up to him, bearing a sword and rations in a magical bag that will never go empty and rather giving him the creeps as he realizes that he can not escape;

• or be born to a more wealthy family.

And that’s without changing the economy or the threat. You could do many other things, such as making horses cheaper.

You are Lord Of All You Survey, plus Lord Of Anything That Hasn’t Come Into Focus Yet Because You Have Yet To Turn Your Attention On It.

The downside of realizing all this flexibility is that occasionally it induces decision paralysis. All of the above options will have ripple effects throughout the story. I have, myself, been stuck in outlines because I needed to shape the story’s perils to match the characters’ spellcraft, and to shape the spellcraft to meet the perils.

Choosing one fixed point -- a functional medieval economy with no magic -- may aid you in operating from that point. But then you have to let the other parts flex to fit it.

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They would be linked together by cause and effect, and the plot structure. They have form, and elegance, and flow.

Sometimes other issues intrude. It may matter that the young wizard’s quarrel with another pupil precedes his friendship with two others. It may also matter that he learns a certain spell after the friendship begins.

But it may not.

Both the spell and the friendship, of course, should be important to the tale -- though the spell may merely be an indication that he is learning the wizardry, rather than an indication of a specific spell. Both lead up to the climax where his friends guard his back while he casts the necessary spell.

But that doesn’t mean there is a necessary order for the two scenes.

If cause-and-effect fails to require a sequence, there may be thematic reasons to arrange them a certain way. Perhaps the lesson can acquire tones of isolation as the young wizard feels that he will only study, so that the later friendship contrasts, and is more vivid. Or perhaps the friendship gives him more confidence that there is point to the school.

The order can even, artistically, work out as a matter of mixing things up. By putting a scene of lessons between scenes of pupils interacting with each other, you can ensure that the story does not monomaniacally focus on one element of a story for a long stretch. All the more in that the readers may forget other elements, or think you did, in the stretch. (I once threw in a bit of local color into The Princess Seeks Her Fortune1 partly because the focus was too narrow.)

But sometimes none of these considerations arise, and you have to just pick an order and put the events in it.

Obviously, multiple characters having viewpoints can aggravate the problem. Sometimes a multiple-viewpoint story is structured as one character tells for a time, and then another takes over, but frequently, it is characters who split up and are literally doing things at the same time. Then you have to choose which goes first.

Sometimes there is an aesthetic point to it. If what happens in one scene puts dramatic irony into another, perhaps. Or would it better if the significance of the first scene came suddenly into focus as you learn what you learn in the second scene? You have to consider how to handle the drama, but it really does matter which one goes first.

The real question arises, of course, when you do not have any particular reason, and you must simply put them in.

Always look for ways to fix that, of course. If the characters are friends, have them discuss the lesson, or the upcoming demonstration of whether they mastered the spell. Foreshadowing, or calling back to the previous scene.

But when push comes to shove, sometimes you just have to plop them in. And it does help build up the world, a bit, that things happen pell-mell.

It still can be a trick to write. After all, you wrack your brains looking for ways to elegantly structure your scenes, to ensure that the connections between them are drawn with sufficient subtlety and sufficient clarity, to build up the causes and results.

To throw that away and not care is a wrench.

The fun part is that in revision, it may be impossible for you to tell where you had the problem. The scenes flow or don’t flow, and some of the ones that don’t clearly had to be in the order they were in.

Such is the art of writing.

1

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Historically, of course, nothing could be simpler. People died all the time, of all sorts of causes, down to “trifling little colds.”

If you handle it with care, you can just do it. Jane Austen doesn’t mention how Mr. Darcy and Mr. Bingley came to be orphans in Pride and Prejudice, or Captain Wentworth in Persuasion. How Henry Tilney lost his mother in Northanger Abbey only comes up because Catherine has let her Gothic reading give her the silly notion that there had to be something extraordinary about it, she couldn’t have just died.

And that’s with a setting and plot heavily involved with social relations.

Even in the modern day, many a wandering hero seems unattached to any past. Parents never arise. Conan’s are never so much as mentioned in Howard’s stories. If you want to know about Aragorn’s, you have to read the appendices.

But if the story needs the deaths to be mentioned --

This takes delicate handling. Especially given that readers are more accustomed to eras where Oscar Wilde’s quip makes sense:

To be sure, that you have to mention the deaths means that there is something important about them, so you have more leeway. Still, it can be awkward.

The most realistic thing in most historical settings would be for your hero to have two brothers and a sister who died before a year old,1 from some illness or another, a brother who drowned while swimming, a sister whose skirts caught on fire and died of the burns, a sister who died of an infected tooth, a father who clutched his chest one day and fell over dead, and a mother who took ill with consumption and wasted away -- it was actually cancer, but it was past the medicine of the time to diagnose,2 let alone treat, it.

But packing this all together in an info-dump gives us -- beside an infodump3 -- a rather morbid stretch. Dribbling out all this information could take awhile in the story and so take up more space than it warrants. Furthermore, the level of detail may lead to the deaths forming a collective Chekhov’s Gun, especially since modern readers are apt to take this all as unusual.

Then there is taking them all off in one fell swoop. Assuming that the story can take that sort of dramatic death and the importance of it even in the backstory -- the problem is that the causes of death that can do that are few, and have to be orchestrated.

I have heard complaints that, in Regencies, carriage accidents are used far too often, people grabbing for them on the assumption that they are like car accidents. Now, while they could be dangerous, carriages were by no means as fast as cars, and consequently their accidents were far less likely to be lethal.

Certainly, things can be done to kill the family off in a group.

I note that it is eminently practical to limit the number of children involved. A fair number of historical marriages were childless, or had only one or two children. Few indeed had only one child and then saw that child survive, but enough to make it practical, all the more in that many readers find it normal.

But whether the main characters has brothers and sisters, a lone older brother (to make him a second son for a time), or only parents, they can die off together if that serves the plot.

The main character fell ill and was sent to the country to recover, or went to school, or was isolated as punishment, or merely was too young for certain events. (The precise reason for escaping the death imposes some requirements on the causes of death.)

Then a serious outbreak of disease took out everyone else. This would require a substantial distance and time away.

Or food poisoning. Depending on the setting, you may have to deal with the assumption that it was, in fact, intentional poisoning, but in most eras, merely being too young to attend a meal would protect the main character. Or disliking a certain dish and not eating it.

Or setting the place on fire. Which place depends on whether you want the main character to have a family home, but if you do, most eras have enough hospitality to allow some other place to catch on fire with lethal consequences.

There is much to juggle in here. In particular, in timing. Depending on the family’s situation and how old the child is, the deaths could have all sorts of economic consequences.

A small child whose father was in a gentlemanly profession in Regency England, or a warlord in the Dark Ages, would face poverty. The heir to the title in Tudor England would face wardship, which allowed the guardian to asset-strip his inheritance and forcibly marry the ward off.

Then, a small child in Regency England might find he, unexpectedly, inherited the title. A grown son might find he could just move into the family business and take charge instead of being his father’s subordinate.

In tension with this, how long ago the deaths was would determine a great many things about reactions. A decade after, the son might coolly recount that his family tragically perished in a house fire while he was at school.

Especially given that in most historical eras, he would have faced, sadly early, the fate that everyone knew was coming. The real trick may be conveying this viewpoint to the reader.

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Single status can help in some respects. To add another fixed point in the interminable series, on top of the hero, gives you less scope to shift things about the hero and thus makes it harder to keep the series going. Being by himself also makes it easier to justify his life, since he has to consider only himself. When only secondary characters fall in love and settle down, it’s much easier to keep the story going.

But -- it’s not necessary.

Starting the story with the characters meeting and falling in love does tend to make it difficult to segue graciously in their working together, or with one character having adventures while the other does other things.3

The second path also raises the specter of the love interest slowly fading from fictional existence from not being present to the readers’ attention, and sometimes, not being remembered by the writer.

In particular, if a love triangle arises, the main character’s fidelity needs convincing reasons, and the absence of the love interest means that the most obvious reasons are not available.4

On the other, giving the main character a love interest can happen in the backstory.

Manly Wade Wellman, in his Silver John stories, gave Silver John a sweetheart, Evadare.

In one story, Silver John and Evadare even marry, but -- and this is important -- they don’t fall in love in the course of a story. They have met before the tales begin.

She signifies in stories where she doesn’t even appear, when Silver John faces a gorgeous villainess with enchantment, and he draws up her memory to help him stand against the villainess and her attempts to bewitch him. This requires a good story-telling skill, to ensure we are convinced that he is actually in love with a woman without any objective evidence for us of her lovableness.5 It takes a delicate touch to build her up before that.

In other stories, Evadare helps with the uncovering of, and the fight against, evil. Sometimes she is imperiled by the evil, thus raising the stakes, though not in a way that undermines her. This is an important aspect. Such characters must be plausible secondary characters, ones who will keep up the adventure and be useful in it. Otherwise, they may fade away from attention.

But Evadare does not keep the series from working. Silver John, as the hero of an interminable series, doesn’t change, and Evadare, as a continuing character, doesn’t either. Being in love is one thing, falling in love with another.

Furthermore, this lack of change allows the stories to continue in the same vein.6 A story in which the interest of the tale is whether these couple will get together means that the stories after are about fighting their common foe and thus a change. Those who came for the love story will find it less interesting to merely face the dragon or the ghost of the next tale.

And obviously, of course, having babies is a grave danger. Even if they have a base where they work from, even if they can juggle things so that the babies and young children are not in danger, children are new characters. They start to increase the secondary characters who can’t just leave, and they will change in the course of the stories.

But the love interest? Alone?

Sometimes it works. A love interest in an interminable series can work, if it helps the story, but it takes skill.

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Why --

You could put Christianity in it!

I hope.

But simple as that might seem, I have seen some hideous failures in doing so, even when the religion is part of the backdrop,1 and so I have some warnings.

At one extreme, I have seen the Church as a hollow shell, without any teachings at all. A Church with two factions, one for hunting down all those who fail to conform to teachings, one for spreading those teachings -- and what were those teachings? Hmmmm?

All right, they did think that summoning demons was bad. This is generally agreed upon, and would be more so in a world where demons wreaked havoc, rendered large regions uninhabitable, and killed all the inhabitants, all the animals, and all the plants, in the process.

If they have to spread that teaching, they are in deep trouble. And hunting those who summon demons would be the act of all rational men, except insofar as the clergy have special powers.

This being LitRPG, they did have such powers. The “hollow shell” is a grand old tradition of role-playing games. Especially given that, generally, the nominal worship was of polytheistic gods, with each cleric serving one god. (This is all the more ironic in that clerics were introduced into Dungeons & Dragons to deal with a vampire.)

Polytheistic religions and Christianity have different practices because they have different beliefs. It might possibly to make a polytheistic religion have a structure more than Christianity than any extent one -- they have, after all, taken many forms -- but it would take work. And probably philosophy.2 And definitely spackle.3

Then there are those who introduce a hollow shell of a religion under the name of Christianity. With perhaps a few quirks. Which they misinterpret.

It’s one thing to have irreligious characters in your work. It was apparently a proverb “Ubi tres medici duo athei.“ -- “Where there are three doctors, there are two atheists” -- during the English Civil War and all that rigor about religion. Sir Thomas Browne casually cites this in Religio Medici:

It’s another to forget that they will specifically be irreligious in the style of their era. Young men being recklessly defiant would revel and feast on a fast day if you are putting in the Middle Ages, whether the region is Catholic or Orthodox -- but if it’s Puritan (since high fantasy tends to take a loose view of era), on Christmas.

A particularly striking example of eras appears in historical fantasies set during the decline of Rome (chiefly Arthurian), or a world modeled on it, with Christianity. Here you have the Christians, there you have the pagans, and these are set groups -- even though, in reality, the pagans were converting, because this was the triumph of Christianity.

True, the writer depicts the Christians in a manner that you do not understand why anyone would convert, but that’s falsifying the situation. In particular, sparse though our knowledge of it is, they do falsify paganism to be more to their taste, such as making them more cosmopolitan.

They tend to omit the Christian alms-giving too, though in real life Julian the Apostate seethed over the way the Christians won people by looking after the poor. Though one work, with a thinly veiled version of Christianity, sticks in memory because the heroine shamelessly uses the religion for help in misfortune and never has a nice thing to say about its adherents even while they are helping her, and the work never even suggests that there is anything wrong with being such an ingrate.

In that setting, and one where Christianity is the religion of the land, characters will not be hopelessly ignorant of its doctrines insofar as they affect the character. True, I have run across people who make egregious blunders about their own church’s doctrines, but -- I have run across a fantasy tale where the heroine is reconciled to the notion that there is a church spy working at a brothel by the concept that she’s reporting the men who visit, and if they do not confess to fornication, they get caught.

That is, she is reconciled to it by the concept that priests are violating the seal of the confessional. It is difficult to understate the gravity of the priest’s offense in the scenario she believes. It is forbidden for a priest to even indicate whether someone has come to him for confession. In the era closest to the high fantasy work, the penalty was for the priest to deposed from the priesthood and packed off to a monastery for perpetual penance.

It did not help that little else about the Church was shown. A few glitches can get lost in the full panoply, but when it’s the only thing really there, it’s necessarily prominent.

One notes that all these issues are high-level. You can get past them all and still have plenty of problems with your high-fantasy Christianity. But you do have to get the high-level right, first -- and I see a lot more high fantasy that gets the high-level wrong than the details.

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This has useful aspects to it. For instance, organizing the impressions. You do not want a random jumble of things, unless the character is overwhelmed by the profusion and notices things at random.

Think of what the hero would first notice on being ushered into the ballroom. Perhaps its immense height, and the gleam on the ceiling, and where the chandeliers glow on the ceiling. Perhaps how the wall’s curtains rise up over the sea of dancers, who hide each other.

Perhaps he notices those dancers nearest to him first, instead. Whether he knows them or not.

Things can be arranged so that his viewpoint shows what you want it to show. Perhaps all the guests arrive at the top of a stairway, so that everyone can see them as they are announced, and thus giving him a view over the glittering company. Or perhaps the queen has been arrived, and guests are being presented to her, creating a clearing so he can see more.

Keeping this in mind also helps with the show-not-tell aspect of it. What does this character actually see, or hear, or smell? Put that in. In the order in which the character would notice it. There is, of course, the little problem of complex appearances being sensed in a brief amount of time, which, alas, this is little help with, but at least it keeps them organized.1

Furthermore, the viewpoint helps with priority of details. Suppose that the heroine has gone down by the stream. She looks over the water to the sun-dappled shadows of the grove there, and sees -- a unicorn!

She’s not going to ponder the details of the grove once she’s spotted the unicorn. She is much more like to marvel at the wonders of the unicorn, giving you time to enumerate its color, its height, whether it’s the goat-tailed creature of the medieval era or the horse of the modern day, and any other useful details.

It also underscores the importance of choosing the right viewpoint character. If the character can not see what you need described in the right way -- perhaps this is the wrong viewpoint character?

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If a historical fiction, a science fiction work, or a fantasy tale is to be anything except a fancy-dress ball against more or less elaborate scenery, you need to get into those different things. What’s more, you need to get into the minds of those who do things differently, or it will just be stage-acting on the part of your characters.

This can be tricky. For one thing, you have to consider the material conditions of the world. I have heard of a woman who went to see a Shakespeare play done with period lighting, and reported that suddenly, those white ruffs are clearly and obviously useful, reflecting light near the person’s face, which is very useful in dim light, and much cheaper than more candles.

More dangerously, you have to consider your own time. What do you take for granted? What do your readers take for granted? How can you convey to them that these characters think differently, without alienating them?

Some ill-conditioned souls just have to be written off. When a person refuses to use someone’s actual, historical nickname -- El Grosso, the Fat -- on the grounds of its being fatophobic, as a reader, he is preening over his superiority too much to consider the era.

In which, like most eras, bynames are handed out with an eye to accuracy and distinguishing people, and people are less hypersensitive to accurate description.1 One social scientist worked in a Chinese village where one inhabitant was known as the Stutterer. He could not explain to the Stutterer why Americans thought it cruel, every explanation being greeted with a blank-faced counter, “But I stutter!”

Not to mention that, like most eras, the time had large portions of the population malnourished much of the time, commonplace hunger, and dying of starvation no astonishment. (Most people, of course, would be borne off by a disease in their weakened state.) This gives you a different attitude toward being fat.

Or age gaps between couples. I have read someone grumbling about how much older Rochester is than Jane Eyre, and admitting it was “normalized” then.

Actually, that’s wrong. It is abnormalized nowadays. Large age gaps are the normal thing. Partly because older men had more clout, to be sure. Partly because a man needed to build up a livelihood to keep his wife and children alive, which could take years, while a woman needed to be young to still be fertile.

This, of course, ties into the mortality rates.2 They were a lot more familiar with death, because it hit, frequently, at all ages, and close at hand.

It also leads into other elements, such the proper relationship of children to parents. Fathers, and mothers too, will pack sons off to occupations they have no interest in, and possibly no talent for. This can be malice, but on the other hand, owing to era, the son has to have a livelihood, or he will never marry and may even die of his poverty. And, of course, in many eras, they want him in a gentlemanly profession. The stigma of a connection to someone in trade --

Part of it, of course, may be inheritance patterns. Primogeniture helped keep the family prominent and powerful by keeping the wealth together. Most powerfully in case of kingdoms -- the partible inheritance of the Frankish kings was disastrous -- but even with noble or merely wealthy families.

The downside, of course, was for the daughters and younger sons. There were cases in Regency Britain where several daughters and younger sons received inheritances that, combined, were less than not only what the oldest inherited, but the income he could expect to realize annually from his inheritance.

And no one objected to this. It was the way things were, despite the frequent downward mobility of the other children. Their gravest problem was that they were expected to remain gentlemen, which meant that the scope of employment was very narrow -- though their condition had actually improved from the Regency.

It is easy to imagine a younger son, or a daughter, fretting over the exclusion from inheritance. It is harder to imagine their regarding it as natural.

But just giving them modern thoughts puts them in a fancy-dress ball, not a world.

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That would make faster-than-light starships fantasy, and ghosts and dragons science fiction.

It can produce the most amazingly vacuous counter-arguments. Such as, those are different kinds of impossible.

Very true.

Faster-than-light starships are flat out, per all our knowledge of physics, impossible, with only the vaguest speculations of it might be conceivable if things that we have literally no evidence for exist. Furthermore, its existence is incompatible with many other observations and facts.

Remember that Newtonian mechanics are, in fact, a special case of Einsteinian ones: those in which relativistic effects are negligible. Likewise, any replacement for Einstein’s theories has to cope with its accuracy in matching Newton’s and then being better when relativistic effects are not negligible.

The other -- well, no one ever actually tried to prove to me that dragons were impossible by anything other than assertion. Or ghosts, either.

The most I have heard is that locations said to be haunted had infrasound, creating the sensations. But -- besides the way the person arguing this offered no evidence, which is happenstance -- it could also be that the ghosts cause the infrasound, or are attracted by it, or even use it to manifest.

As for dragons, no one ever produces anything but the assertion.

One notes that there may be scientific reasons why certain types of dragons are biologically impossible. On the other hand, there are a lot of types of dragons, and there may be reasons why what appears to be impossible may actually occur.

The answer is considerably more superficial. Gadgets. Gobbledygook. Lab coats vs long robes bedecked with stars.

Fiction turns much more on what the reader feels than what the reader thinks.1

This does not mean that there is not a principle involved. Science fiction attempts the suspension of disbelief by appeal to the authority of science. Even the difference between a fireball and a pyrokinetic attack turn on the science side of parapsychology and the way the technical terms echo that.2

Lab coats summon up thoughts of science. Robes, of magic. To go into a room filled with people in lab coats is more convincing than you will get effectual treatment for your sickness than if you went into a room filled with people in wizards’ robes, who are probably cosplaying and not even quacks.

This appeal to the authority of science does have its ripple effects on the genre. Particularly on the borders, where they blur together. Or mix, which is a different thing.

Even though John Hemry’s Paul Sinclair series takes place in a futuristic Space Navy, the stories that two dead sailors are haunting where they died are not part of the science fiction, though that it could have been vibrations or mistakes keeps it with just a hint of the fantasy genre.

Actual juxtaposition of ghosts and spaceships, or any other fantastic elements where one appeals to the authority of science, and the other does not, has to be handled with care.

Most writers have the magic not turn out to be real. The problem is that many of them do not handle it graciously, so that the revelation is anticlimax.

Sharon Shinn handles it nicely in Archangel, where, in fact, the readers but not the character grasp the technological nature of the marvels, but -- and this is important -- while keeping us in sympathy with the characters.

Janny Wurts pulled it off nicely in Cycle of Fire, but -- and this also is important -- the powers that received technological explanations were still wonderful after the explanation.

Jack Campbell, on the other hand, gave us a world in Pillars of Reality with both Mechanics and Mages, and even in the first book gave us more sfnal hints. But the Mages remain the Mages, and have powers, and the most science we get is one Mechanic talks about quantum mechanics.

On the other hand, there are the blurs. This generally happens in adventure SF where the technobabble is a sop to the notion that this is science fiction. Obviously more prevalent back in the day when fantasy was less respectable than SF, and you could make a living in planetary romances and space opera. Psionics gets a lot of its weight from this. Andre Norton’s Ice Crown uses psionics talk to deal with the kingdoms and crowns, with the power the crowns assert over the kingdom. (Then, in her fantasy Witch World, we had technological peoples invading the fantasy world, and thus getting its benefits as well as fantasy.)

Even without psionics, the more the technology babble resembles an incantation, the softer the science fiction is getting, and the border to fantasy to drawing near.

Such is the nature of the genres. Muddy and unphilosophical. But it’s what we got, and it does reflect that actual nature of aesthetics.

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In hunting-and-gathering societies, a raid mobilizes some proportion of the band, but this is misleading compared to modern wars, because it is all tooth. Every single member mobilized goes to engage the enemy.

At the opposite extreme, aircraft often require dozens of dedicated technicians, vastly outnumbering the crew, without even getting into questions like supply chains for parts, and the base where the aircraft stays.

So -- how much tooth to tail do wizards have?

It varies, clearly, from work to work.

Gandalf traveled with his staff. Other magical items seem pretty permanent and, barring Galadriel’s bowl, for use by anyone.1

Conan faced sorcerers with towers stuffed with -- stuff. Much of it was used up in this spell or that. Lord Dunsany also had the magician in The Charwoman’s Shadow use up stuff. But in neither case is the spell-slinger the viewpoint character, and we never see the supply, whether the spell-slinger gathered it himself, with all the limits this puts on his time, or bought it, with all the concerns about quality involved. Though in some of his short stories, Lord Dunsany had a wizard, or apprentice, do the collecting, and one turns on the failure of the apprentice.

So -- there are four approaches.

The spell-slinger is all tooth himself, and has no tail. There is no more fuss about his fighting than with the regular bother of inns and the rest that any traveler would face.

Makes him the most dangerous -- assuming the potency of magic doesn’t change between this and the other approach. It also means that you can’t fight him by interdicting his supply of eye of newt. You have to have defenses against magic.2

Or --

The spell-slinger is not the tooth. He is just the tail. The wizard enchants swords or brews potions and never himself comes within leagues of the battlefield. It can give your front-line warriors quests for the right magical item, and supply headaches. Or you can have a foe engage in the classic military maneuver of attacking supply forces, thus producing a battle where no one expects it.

Or does go with the military forces, but only to provide support skills. Intelligence, or healing, or what have you.3 The classic military maneuver is more expected here -- expect body-guards -- but will still give a twist to the story.

Or --

The spell-slinger requires a lot of tail to produce his tooth. This can be interesting. Notice how the classic sword-and-sorcery tale brought the barbarian to the tower. Even if the spell-slinger wants to attack the barbarian, the general approach is to lure the barbarian toward the tower.

Innovations to enable his carrying stuff about tend to erase the effect of needing stuff. Makes him more like the one who doesn’t need it.

Be warned that running out stuff, like running out of ammunition, needs delicate handling to avoid showing the hand of the author.

This actually breaks into two separate ways. One is that he can go buy things, which requires a market.

Perhaps it’s an underground market and raises all the usual questions about reliability when it’s all reputation within the market and no one can go to the law. Goods, no matter how vital to your attack, or to your defense, can be hard to find. Your foes may intercept your supply of eye of newt and win by default.

Or perhaps it’s an open and law-abiding market, which might lower prices but does mean that all the spell-craft is likely to be known. Always complicates matters, when your foes know what you can do.

But, for the other way, he can go and gather it himself. Know that it is what he needs it to be.

The downside of that is, of course, that it takes time. And knowledge. And the skills may not transfer, so he may need to know a score of occupations to get what he wants. Perhaps he should master extending his life, first. And he should definitely avoid fighting as much as possible, in order to converse his supplies.

It’s something to consider. Whether it’s the magic you want affecting your battles, or the battles you want affecting your magic, it’s an important matter, visible even from a high-level view.

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As a trivial backdrop it is seriously underplayed, especially given that most societies are much more keenly aware of the weather than ours. Cold, heat, rain, wind, sun -- characters should notice these things. Some skill is necessary to convey how urgent these matters can be for travel, or even for chores.

On the other hand, past that --

The problem with weather as more than trivial backdrop is that it shows the hand of the author. Vividly. The storm that throws the heroine’s ship on the shore and barely lets her escape, dripping, to the hero’s home. The fortunate wind that let the hero’s sailing ship reach the land in time lead the forces against the Dark Lord. The late snowstorm that ruins the planting and brings famine. The tornado that forces everyone to run for shelter and then ruins the place they were searching for evidence.

All right, in the opening of the story, you have more leeway. Shakespeare can drop Viola, and later Sebastian, ashore from a wrecked ship, because this sets off the story. It literally occurs before it, though in a medium less constrained than a theater, actually depicting it does no harm.

If the story is resolved when a character is washed up by shipwreck in the fifth act, only to be revealed as the alleged murder victim, or the long-lost brother, or the husband of the woman extorting marriage with the hero --

Artful use of weather consistently, throughout the story, may buy you some leeway. If the characters are constantly noting the weather and being hindered or helped by it, if they particularly notice that the signs are bad, the tornado may not be so much of a surprise.

If the villain is warned that his structure will attract lightning, or that he needs a lightning rod, it can be hit by lightning later.

If the characters discuss how sailing season is coming to an end because soon it will be storm season, and how it seems to be early this year and so some ships will be wrecked and others reach the wrong harbor because it’s closer, a shipwreck victim is not so surprising. (The contrived coincidence of who it is is somewhat harder to pull off.)

Then, seasons are easier to manage. Explain that the sailing season is from May to September, and no one sets out except when desperate otherwise, and you can trap your characters in locations from October to April.1 Especially if the storms are also likely to affect the mountains between settlements. (Mountains are unnecessary to explain why they prefer sea, but they don’t do any harm.)

Winter is another. I used that myself in Even After.2 Whenever it is winter, the characters hole up and wait until spring. Even if it also means they have to face the spring floods from the melting snow.

Even that, to be sure, needs delicate handling to convey to the readers the importance, since few of them have experience with anything but major disasters being a problem. But it can be done.

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