What is Epic Fantasy?

Fantasy, we know what that is, it is wizards, magic, and probably set in the medieval times, not always but sometimes. Epic fantasy is really something that takes it up a notch from what you normally see. It is about that epic world saving quest and heroes who need to overcome so many odds thrown in front of them.

Think something like Lord of the Rings, where the fate is for all of Middle-Earth. Or Song of Ice and Fire where Westeros hangs in the balance. Generally these stories also create a grand world. They aren’t going to be the same as you’ve seen in a lot of other fantasy. They are going to build out their own thing that feels similar yet different.

What Do I Look For In Epic Fantasy?

1. Story
2. Interesting Main Characters
3. A Unique World
4. Good World Building

Story

I told you this was going to be number one. I want some sort of unique story, to some extent. Let’s face it, if you are going to be saving the world, you’re going to be saving the world. The event that is going to destroy the world can only be so unique. The differences need to come with how the characters are going to save the world, the composition of the group of characters, and the lore of the world itself. I don’t want the world to feel like you could drop Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table into it without a problem. We have a lot of stories like that already, let’s branch out some more.

Interesting Main Characters

Let’s face it, this is a common issue in writing, the main characters are boring. People saw the success of the Twilight movies and realized that if people feel like they are the main character, because Bella is dull and lousy in the movies, that they can create dull main characters and that is fine. Divergent series is a great example of a main character that has zero interest to them.

But I don’t want that. I can already imagine what it’s like to be in your world without having to be the main character. In fact, I’ll get bored with your series if the main character(s) isn’t interesting. I want character flaws for them to overcome. I want weaknesses and traits that are never actually dealt with. I want new flaws to start in the series and mistakes to be made. I don’t want a blank canvas of a character.

A Unique World

Like I said in story, I don’t want something generic. If you can make the story feel interesting in a world I already know and twist that world, that is great. But I don’t want it to be standard King Arthur. Tainted Grail, a board game – it always comes back to board games – does a good job of this. It is a grim dark take on King Arthur, the wyrdness isn’t something I’ve seen before. Menhir are new and unique and while I get the lady in the lake and Morgan Le Fey, it doesn’t feel normal.

Good World Building

How does this vary from a unique world. Isn’t a world that is created uniquely also one that is built well? Not really. Too often authors or movies will place all the world building at the beginning. Then I got to sit through 20 minutes or 5 chapters telling me about the world. Interlace the story as a whole with the story of your world. That is what I am looking for in storytelling. Unless your world is so unique that I need a separate book to understand it, I will have the general idea. So give me the unique information as I need to know it.

Are All Criteria Equally As Important?

No, a great story can make-up for basically anything. Let’s look at Lord of the Rings, the true main character isn’t actually super interesting. Frodo is just an okay character, Bilbo in the Hobbit is more interesting. Sam, Merry, Pippin, Gimli, Legolas, and Gandolf, they are all more interesting than Frodo. But JRR Tolkien tells a good story, he makes a good world, and he gives you information as you go. And he also, literally, has a separate book that is just world building, really, in the Silmarillion. So a great story can make everything else moot, but, if the story is just good, then everything else matters a whole lot more.

Let’s Do An Example

So, I am picking a series that I know I like already and have for quite a while, the Stormlight Archives by Brandon Sanderson. But let’s talk through about what makes this epic fantasy work for me.

Story

The story is definitely strong. Sanderson blends high fantasy, epic fantasy, but also political intrigue. It takes some of what you expect from fantasy like Song of Ice and Fire and Wheel of Time, but really tightens it up. And I would say that Wheel of Time suffers from not getting that political intrigue right whereas Song of Ice and Fire suffers from not getting the epic fantasy right. So this one is really good for me when it comes to that combination.

Interesting Main Characters

The main characters are very interesting. I would say that the are four main characters in the story, though we see the story primarily through three of their eyes. And one of them, people assume that they are going mad, the other has been wrongfully turned into a slave, another is a spoiled brat, and the last one lies to get into the story in the first place. That’s not normal for fantasy characters or characters in books in general. So definitely unique characters who need to grow.

Unique World

The world itself, it is a bit unique. Sanderson does something very interesting with magic, that there isn’t much if any, but then the idea of spren. Basically little creatures or beings that are drawn to different things. It is something that is completely different than I’ve seen before. So while armies fighting amongst each other and people stabbing each other in the back for political gain are normal, the world as a whole is unique.

Good World Building

This is something that I think Brandon Sanderson accelerates at. His world is pretty unique but he fills in information on the world as you go. We get jumps back in time, we get legends that are talked about, but never is it four or five characters in a row. The information comes just as you need it or is shown in the world instead of us being told about it.

Will This Work For You?

Most likely, I think that these are good benchmarks in general for a lot of stories, whether they are epic fantasy or not. I do think that the world building piece, epic fantasy can often fall into that category where there is a lot of world to build, so they build it all at once.

What is your favorite epic fantasy story, whether it is in books, television or movies?

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The first is by duplicating description in the same sentence. or using too much description.

The second is by using large words for the sake of large words.

A couple of examples form books that I started reading and then quit, and one that I am actually continuing.

“The trials are our exegesis…” – A Warriors Path by Davis Ashura

“While thinking internally to myself…” – Ascend Online by Luke Chmilenko

Let’s talk about why these are poor. First, using “exegesis” in a sentence, and I shared this with a co-worker who reads a lot, is not a common word that people know. Learning new words isn’t bad, but there weren’t context clues to provide the answer to what it means. So someone would have to stop reading your book to look it up if they don’t know the meaning. And why weren’t there context clues, because this was sentence number one in the book.

I know what “exegesis” means, and because it was the first sentence, I immediately stopped listening to the book. What the first sentence tells me about the book is that it’s going to be using a lot of big words for the sake of using big words. And it’s supposed to be an epic fantasy book, premise seemed interesting, but if, in one sentence, it feels like the writer is shooting for showing off their knowledge of the English language, it isn’t ideal.

The second example is really about that first one, giving too much description. “Thinking internally” is a redundant statement. Besides that, the Ascend Online book, which isn’t bad thus far, spends too much time going through the fine details of the RPG aspect of a LitRPG. That can be done at the start, but then needs to fade to the background and that’s another way it is overwritten. It doesn’t just imply some things that the writer knows are happening in the background, but instead spells them out in great detail. This is something that happened in the Arcane Ascension series, where the writer would spend too much time explaining something that the characters already know for the sake of the reader.

So how can you avoid overwriting a story?

I think the biggest thing you can do is be a harsh critic of your own work. Not of yourself, but taking a step back from the work, look at it and ask yourself, is this part needed, or is this from a different story that I just haven’t written yet. Just because you’re cutting something, doesn’t mean that it wasn’t good, it just might not be for this story.

Along with that, ask yourself if you need to spell that out for the reader or how easily the reader can understand it. If you feel like a reader can infer what is being written about, for example, when leveling up in a LitRPG, if you’re in a video game, like Ascend Online is, have there be a noise, like a ding, when a skill levels up. As a reader, I’ll know that whatever skill was used immediately prior to the “ding” leveled up, the author doesn’t need to tell me that metal working leveled up when you were just working with metal, that should be obvious to any reader, and if the reader missed if, they know from the “ding” to look back at the previous action to see what it was. Doing something as simple as that will make the story flow better.

Ask yourself, is all this backstory/world building needed at the beginning? That’s another piece of overwriting that I see very often. It falls into the camp of too much description, but ask yourself where and when you need the backstory and world building. Too much of it is front loaded, instead, put it in when it is needed. I suspect what you’ll find, even if you had it front loaded before, is that when you reach the end of the story, there will be world details that still haven’t been put into the story, and that’s awesome. That means you’ve found the parts that were overwritten and don’t matter to your story. Also, by interweaving the backstory and world building into the main body of the story, I, as a reader, am more apt to remember them as if they are all at the beginning, I might just skim over them to get to the action.

The other thing that is often forgotten in LitRPG or with self published writing, is use an editor and copy-editor. The copy-editor is going to cut down on grammar and spelling issues, so not as important for overwriting, but the editor is the person who is going to track down those overwritten bits, question why there is so much detail or why you are using a word. They are going to be harsher on your writing than you will be able to ever be. With that, it’s important that, even if you have a friend who likes to read and is good with English, don’t use them as your editor. They aren’t going to be able to be as harsh on the work as it might need to be, because they know you. I feel like I’ve read several books where they had some editing work done, but the author either refused to trust their editor, or the editor was a friend. So there’s another thing, the editor wants you book to succeed, even if you don’t know them, because they want more work from you. When they suggest cutting something that you really liked, it isn’t because they hate you or what you wrote, it’s because they genuinely should care about helping you make the best book. So find an editor that you can trust who isn’t your friend.

Obviously, there is more that you can do, but let’s spend a little bit of time looking at some books that I really do like.

The Dresden Files – I don’t think these are overwritten. My reasoning for that is because Jim Butcher gives you enough detail but not too much and he doesn’t spend any time at the start of any books explaining something about his world that is going to show up later. There are points where as a reader, I feel like between books he’s repeating himself, but if someone was reading them once and as they came out, they probably would need that reminder. Since I’m reading them after the fact and in a row, I wish it wasn’t there, but it is smart that it is there.

Lord of the Rings – Tom Bombadil. That’s all that I need to say, JRR Tolkien had some stuff that he wanted to get into the book and added to the book that is most certainly not needed. Tom Bombadil was cut from the movies for a reason, and probably should have been cut from the book. I’ll give him some slack for the time frame, but Tolkien does overwrite, and when you think about The Silmarillion, you can see how much he cut and had in backstory that he decided to publish separately, thankfully.

Chronicles of Narnia – I think that this is another example of something that isn’t overwritten. CS Lewis does a good job keeping his series short and to the point in each book. There are a few bits that haven’t always aged the best, but that isn’t an overwriting problem, so not an issue for here. From The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, through The Last Battle, you get the information you need when you need it and the stories are on point. You could argue that The Magician’s Nephew is simply a book of backstory, but it is fairly important backstory for the world, and the book reads as a novel onto itself with plenty of action and interesting moments versus just an explanation of how the world works.

What are some book series that you think are overwritten? Are there some sentences that are really poorly written, if so, share them below, please, I love weird stuff like that.

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For this series, I’m going to be focusing on races from the PHB (Players Handbook) and not some of the extra places that might have more races like Volo’s Guide to Monsters, Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes, or Xanathar’s Guide to Everything. Those are extra things that are cool to pick up and add into your game, but you don’t need them, having the PHB is needed.

Elves

Elves will be the first race that we talk about, for no other reason than they popped into my head, and as I was reading Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes, t here was a nice section on them that I remember fairly well.

Dungeons and Dragons, like most fantasy, pulls from JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings when it gets its idea for elves. The elves are long lived, generally lean towards being stand offish and aloof, because they see the world in a different way than your average human would.

An elven adventurer is probably a couple hundred to five hundred years old and has had more of a chance to hone their craft. For elves, the reason that they do go adventuring, often, is because they want to leave their mark on the world. They have hundreds of years to do that, but that also means that their mark on the world is going to be more permanent. It also means that something that might be bad for a human, because it affects their short life, might not seem as pressing for a elf. If, for example, a goblin horde was threatening an area, it might be easier for an elf to just leave that area for a little bit and let the natural infighting and breakdown of goblin society happen through a couple of generations before returning, because the elves live so long, they can simply outlast the issue. Needless to say, that view might annoy your other party members.

That long view and ability to see the larger picture are useful in dealing with some situations, but it also is going to cause issues in other situations. You aren’t going to be able to relate as well to your shorter lived companions, and you might not become attached as easily. This is another reason that elves tend to be aloof. So think about that as you play as well, as you want to have a balance and not just be the outsider who is observing everything. It might also mean that you are more apt to overlook a more pressing issue as you’re paying attention to the expected longer term outcome.

Another thing to consider, based off of the age of your elven adventurer, is how they are treated in both elven and non-elven society. In a human society, an elves knowledge when they are one hundred is going to be considered impressive. In elven society, an elf who goes adventuring at one hundred is going to be considered an impetuous youth. So even though human society might treat them differently, an elf who is one hundred is still probably going to show respect and defer to the human elders.

Let’s talk a bit about the other thing that is often taken from Lord of the Rings, and that is the elf and dwarf rivalry and mistrust. This is something that still shows up fairly often in games, and is something that you want to handle fairly carefully. What you’re trying to avoid is the racist elf and dwarf interactions where they hate each other and just pick at each other. In Lord of the Rings, Legolas and Gimli don’t trust each other at the start, and it comes out in rivalry in battle, because they have a central focus they can both get behind. In your game, you can certainly play to that, and you can certainly have the characters poke fun at each other as well. But try to avoid open hostility or combat with another PC or even with dwarves in general, as that’s not something you really want to bog down a game with.

Finally, let’s talk a bit about the mechanics of an elf. Obviously, we’ve talked about their age, but there are a few other components. First, elves start out by getting dex bump. That means your elves are going to always make good rogues, monks, and rangers who focus on the light or dexterity based weapons. They also have darkvision (most races do), but they have a couple other big things. Fey Ancestry means that they can’t be magically put to sleep and they are harder to charm, aka they have advantage to being charmed. They also don’t sleep, elves trance. In Mordenkainen’s Tome of Foes, they really go into what trance means for an elf, and why that happens, but what it means for mechanics in the game, it means that they only need four hours of rest to refresh each night, and are not as oblivious to their surroundings as someone who is asleep would be. They can’t be the lookout (or they’d be a bad one) while trancing, but it makes setting watch easier.

So let’s come up with some elven character concepts and backstories.

As a member of the royal household you thought that your position and life was going to be set and simple. You lived for a couple hundred years in the lap of luxury before your younger sibling decided that they wanted your spot. When your parents died, you prepared to take on added leadership and responsibility that was expected for you, however, you had missed that your sibling had been planting lies and distrust around you in the community. They decided that your sibling was more fit to rule and you were exiled from the tribe. After thirty years of living off of the land and plotting your revenge, you feel like you might have an idea, you just need a few things first.
Class: Ranger
Background: Noble
Alignment: Chaotic Good

You were sent away by your parents to the wizarding school in a neighboring nobles lands. It was a great school, and since you’ve always had aptitude for learning, you dove into your studying. After fifteen years, you started teaching introductory classes, but you mainly did that so you could stay around and continue your own studies and have access to the library. Your teacher, who has other responsibilities than just teaching you, eventually got fed up with you after another ten years and told you that you were going to be kicked out of the tower and your library card suspended until you got some practical experience in your life and maybe had an adventure or two. You took the opportunity to visit another wizarding school, but your teacher was one step ahead of you, and they knew to send you on your way. Now you’re looking for an adventuring party to give you some simple experiences, just enough so you can get back into the school and to the library to learn some more.
Class: Wizard
Background: Sage
Alignment: Lawful Neutral

Your family was a lesser known one in your elven community. People didn’t look down on you, but it had been generations since anyone in your family had done something that people really appreciated and remembered. Otherwise you were just kind of there. Your parents weren’t content with that, however, and they sought more for you. Eventually reaching out to an Archfey to see if they could help your family. Knowing fey creatures, that wasn’t that great an idea, but it did help their standing to have that connection. For you, when you were born, there was already a claim on you, and your parents didn’t treat your like your sibling, but you were kept separate. When you were seventy-five, you were sent off to work for the archfey as they had agreed upon before you were born. The work there was interesting, and they sent you out adventuring. In your mind, though, you feel slighted, you feel like you haven’t head the real life you were supposed to have, and you are looking for a way, and trying to hide the fact you’re looking, to get out of the deal that your parents made.
Class: Warlock
Background: Urchin/Outlander
Alignment: Chaotic Good/Chaotic Neutral

Elves can really work for any class and background combination as they live such long lives they can study a lot of things and try a lot of different professions. I tried to come up with things that seemed particularly elf like for each of the backstories, but I think that, because of their long life, a lot of these stories also work for other races.

Have you played an elf before, do you lean into their age or their aloofness when you play them?

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For the Dresden Files series, the world of the stories might seem easier than some to describe. After all, as an urban fantasy, it’s set in modern times, in a real place. Then again, I’ve never been to some of the places in Chicago that are mentioned in the books — in fact, besides driving around it once, the longest I’ve been in Chicago was a long weekend, over a decade ago. So, in describing these new-to-me places, what does Jim Butcher do that I appreciate? In an example from the book Small Favors, the characters go to an aquarium to hold a meeting with some monsters. Instead of spending much of any time describing what the aquarium looks like, Butcher lays out the reasons why it is a good spot for the character’s meet-up (despite all appearances to the contrary). With how these details are described, you get an idea for why the aquarium was picked, not what the aquarium looks like. And there isn’t a reason to describe what it looks like — most readers will have a solid idea of this already, so there’s no need to describe the outside as you drive up, because it doesn’t matter for what’s happening in the scene. Even though Butcher used an aquarium that actually exists in Chicago, it doesn’t matter if my mind’s picture of it isn’t exactly right. In fact, this covers for him in case he ends up not having every detail right in his description, because someone would likely complain if he got something wrong. And if someone knows the location well enough to catch that, they don’t need a picture of it painted for them anyway.

So, what was done differently overall in this series that sets it apart from a lot of others? In short, it doesn’t infodump — I’ve read most of the books in the series, and I still haven’t run into any long scenes of world-building; nor have there been any grand, overarching segments describing every piece of magic, lore, and landscape that’s going to be important later. There are a number of reasons why it’s good to avoid this as a writer. An example of infodump occurs in Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One — the author spends most of the first three chapters world-building. He goes through a ton of 80s references and nuggets of information about the characters, their society, and their world that go on and on forever. There are a couple of issues with this; one is that it ends up telegraphing a ton of things. For most of these instances in Ready Player One, it wasn’t so much a Chekhov’s gun as it was a Chekhov’s machine gun, with the way everything was jammed into those first few chapters. It’s also frustrating because it ends up meaning that not much happens in a story full of infodump. Ready Player One is one of the few non-fantasy examples of this — authors of epic fantasy are often the worst offenders of using infodump or overly detailed description. George R.R. Martin is a bad one for this, tending to include too many details that don’t advance the plot. It also happens in Lord of the Rings (yes, I went there), in which things are described to a level well beyond what the reader wants or needs.

The question is, then, how do you balance it so that you aren’t pulling a fast one, but not putting in so much detail that it stops your story in its tracks and gets people to put down the book? I enjoy Dune quite well, for example, but I have trouble getting through it, especially early on, as Frank Herbert spends so much time developing his world, all the politics, and all the other different facets of the series. For that reason, I don’t read it in book form; I listen to it on audiobook, because that’s how I can make it through those opening chapters. But instead of just talking about how some books get it wrong, how about some ways you can do better than the big names I’ve mentioned who don’t always do it right?

(If you aren’t a writer, just think about who might do these things from the stories you’ve read or watched.)

First, I think it’s good to ask yourself as a writer/creator, does the reader/viewer need to know this? You put time and effort into coming up with all the details for your world. That is awesome, but some of those details are only meant for you. When you crest a hill and look down on the plains of Fargath, you don’t need to tell everyone about the river in it, unless the river is really important and unique. I already know what a plain looks like, so I don’t need to know the basics. The example below about the plains of Fargath is what you want to avoid:

As your band of weary travelers crested the final hill, they looked down on the plains of Fargath. Before them stretched miles of open grasslands that were turning golden in the autumn sun. Off in the distance, you could see a stream with a couple of trees standing next to it, but beyond that and a few small rolling hills, there was nothing for the eye to see. You turned to look at your traveling companions. They turned to look at you, sweat beading on their brows after a long days’ work. The horses looked tired, and didn’t appear to want to continue.

Let’s break that down. First, what I’ve described is a pretty standard plain. It’s actually a pretty boring plain. We probably already know I’ve been traveling all day, so it’s obvious that everyone is going to be pretty tired. The only useful pieces of information in the paragraph above might be that it’s autumn and that the area is called the plains of Fargath. It could be cut down to something like the following:

As your band of weary travelers crested the final hill, they look down into the plains of Fargath. The autumn air did nothing to stop the heat, but had already begun to turn the grass a golden color.

Two sentences — that’s all you need to describe what took way longer before. Now imagine traveling all the way to Mordor describing everything like the first example.

Next, unique is cool. In the example of the plains of Fargath, what sort of detail could be unique?

As your band of weary travelers crested the final hill, they looked down into the plains of Fargath. The autumn air did nothing to stop the heat, but had already begun to turn the grass a golden color. Off in the distance, you could see the head of the giant. The thirty-foot-tall stone head was clearly broken off from a giant statue, but none was to be seen.

Okay, that’s pretty cool. A thirty foot tall stone head, clearly broken off from a statue — how did that get there? It’s a detail that is probably going to be important, and that is definitely unique. Maybe they just camp by the stone head for the night and something happens there — even if it’s just an important conversation, now people are going to remember the plains of Fargath. But look at that compared to the first paragraph. It’s more interesting, because heads of statues lying on the ground are interesting. It’s still shorter, and the reader isn’t getting bored, because thirty-foot-tall stone head.

That’s one way to keep things more interesting — another would be to describe the function of the place or the reasoning for going to this place as you travel. This is what Harry Dresden did in Small Favors when going to the aquarium. He said it was off of peak season. So we now know to imagine the aquarium as being pretty empty. He talked about how unless people can see something, they don’t really know what happened or think that it happened the way it did, hence meeting indoors. We now have a clear purpose and functionality for picking the location of the aquarium. How would that work in an example that isn’t written by a prolific author?

No one went to the plains of Fargath for anything more than a novelty visit to the thirty-foot-tall head of a statue. It would be a quiet location for planning to be completed, and a place for plans to be set in motion for getting back the kingdom.

That’s really short, but again, without going into great detail about the plains of Fargath, we now have an idea of what the place is like. It’s quiet, it’s empty, there’s nothing there. We also know why we’re going there — probably something the reader would know already by that point, but a nice thing to clarify form time to time. We also know that this is going to be their base of operations. That tells us a lot about the place and why they are going there instead of just what the place looks like. Using this method also cuts down on a planning session ahead of time. It literally cut two scenes way down, potentially. It also has a sense of action to it that you lose in just a purely descriptive scene. Sure, there are plenty of ways to make description more active, but generally that adds to the length of the description. See the plains of Fargath example below:

As your band of weary travelers crested the final hill, they looked down on the plains of Fargath. Before them stretched miles of open grasslands that were turning golden in the autumn sun. The grass twitched in a breeze that barely cooled anyone. Off in the distance, you could see a stream babbling slowly across the plain with a couple of trees standing next to it, but beyond that and a few small rolling hills, there was nothing for the eye to see. You dropped out of your saddle and looked at your traveling companions. They turned to look at you, sweat beading on their brows after a long days work. The horses hung their heads and didn’t appear to want to continue.

It’s a little bit longer, and while we now have sense of motion with the grass twitching in the breeze, cresting the hill, the stream babbling, and the sweat beading, it’s still pretty much a long descriptive paragraph. If you felt like my two sentences above about reasoning weren’t enough, we can even add a little of the detail back in while keeping it very short:

No one went to the plains of Fargath for anything more than a novelty visit to the thirty-foot-tall head of a statue. Even fewer people came to see the statue as the autumn days grew shorter. It would be a quiet location for planning to be completed and plans to be set in motion for getting back the kingdom.

Now we know the season and also sets up more why the plains of Fargath will be empty. It’s probably not needed to add that, but maybe the shortening days will matter to the plot later, or that will be a trial they have to overcome. It only adds in a sentence, and not a long sentence at that.

The final way to make interesting world-building is on-demand world building. This basically means that you only add a detail to the world when you need it. Patrick Rothfuss does this in The Kingkiller Chronicle series. His narrator, Kvothe, only tells the parts of the world that are interesting to him, and only when they are relevant to the story. That does mean that information is sometimes sprung on you, but not often, and as a writer, that would be something to try to avoid if the piece of information is important for a later plot twist. What Kvothe does is about the opposite from what Wade Watts does in Ready Player One. In both cases, you’re dealing with a narrator who is the star of their own story, but Wade Watts gives you all the information to start, whereas Kvothe sprinkles in what is important where it’s needed. In Ready Player One, however, I don’t know that it could have been information dumped a ton better. As I said above, it was a Chekhov’s machine gun in that information dumping, so how do you avoid springing a surprise on the reader with that? It could have been cut down some, as there was a plethora of information and details given that weren’t needed, and that likely would have been the best solution.

With on-demand world building, it’s something that you just don’t have to use in writing or in shows or movies. I’m actually doing that with season two of Dungeons and Flagons (Found Here) where the players are helping me create the town of Bresson on the fly as well as NPCs. As a Dungeon Master, this can be a little bit scary to do, but it’s also a lot of fun, they are giving me the cast and location for this adventure, and I get to see the places that are interesting to the players and really get to be along for the ride with them. All of the suggestions above are great ideas for pulling into your RPG as well. Giving information on demand, or keeping descriptions short for a theater-of-the-mind game, or even just describing why a place is a good spot for the characters to go can all make for an interesting story.

What are some of the best and worst books that you’ve read or movies or shows you’ve watched in terms of world-building and information dumping? Is there someone who really stands out to you as being a great world-builder?

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I’m starting off with my Top 5 Books.

Now, I’m going to add a disclaimer — when I say books, I mean top 5 books or book series. Some series are just too good to split up into single books, and I expect that more often than not you’re going to see series on my list.

Let me say that creating this list was harder than I thought; getting criteria in my head as to what should make my list was tricky, and there’s always something nagging in the background like, “but there’s probably a book you’ve forgotten.” Hopefully I didn’t make a glaring miss on my list. When choosing, I thought about the number of times I’ve read the book, if I’d want to read it again, and how much I’ve enjoyed the book, and I think I’ve come up with a pretty solid list.

Some books that were close but didn’t quite make it are Inkheart by Caroline Funke, Douglas Adams’ Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, Stardust by Neil Gaiman, and The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins.

But what other books do you think I would enjoy? What are your five favorite books?

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Protagonists

These are the good guys, the main characters of your story — for that reason, they are generally more developed than most other characters. But it still takes some work to write a compelling protagonist. It comes down to a bunch of questions that you have to ask about your character.

Let’s take the example of the “nobody-to-hero” story; it’s a great one for asking these questions.

Why is this character going on their quest? Is saving their town enough of a reason? Are they avenging their family? Or is there some other reason? Why do they continue? Look at The Lord of the Rings — Frodo’s journey was to the Council of Elrond. He didn’t know that, and he didn’t have to continue after that point — so why did he? What inspired him to continue to Mordor? Anything that the protagonist does needs to have more reasoning behind it than just that they are the protagonist. Good guys are never just good guys for the sake of it. The reasoning doesn’t have to be perfect all the time, and you can hand-wave once in a while and say, that’s just the way it is. But if you develop a world where the characters have reasons behind what they do, we’ll be more forgiving as readers.

Also, along with why the protagonist is doing their good thing, you also have to ask, what are their flaws? For an example of how this is done poorly (not in fantasy), we’ll look at Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. The main character in the book has no real flaws. The author offers him one part way through the book, saying that the protagonist is claustrophobic, but it is dealt with almost immediately, so that it isn’t an issue. While claustrophobia is a problem, it’s not a true character flaw, and the story needed to have more character development for and more issues with the main character than that. Another example of what not to do is in Divergent. The main characters flaws of the protagonist are generally that she’s small and clumsy. Those don’t have anything to do with her character, and they can hardly even be seen as flaws. So when you are writing a story, ask yourself, what are my character’s personality flaws?

If you have a character who has issues, and who has a reason for going on their quest, then you’ll start to have a story with real depth. But it can’t stop there. If Frodo had been the only character with depth in The Lord of the Rings, it would have been a really poor trilogy. But every character in the Fellowship goes through their own story and growth. Sam was loyal to a fault to Frodo. Pippin and Merry went from fun-loving Hobbits to making serious decisions and going into battle. As you write, think about your side character’s motivations and arcs as well.

Now, there is an issue that often arises with this. It is very possible and fairly easy to get too far into the weeds. These side characters, while important and in need of depth, are not the main character unless it is truly an ensemble cast of characters. There aren’t that many stories like that, and even in the world of comic books and comic book movies, we mainly see The Avengers as an example of this style. While that is an ensemble cast of characters, it tends to focus in on different characters at different points in time. In Age of Ultron, there was a very strong focus on the rift developing between Captain America and Tony Stark, but Hawkeye was there to bring them all back together. So even if you go with an ensemble of characters, stay fairly focused. Don’t get lost in the weeds making everyone have a massive amount of story. If they have a reason for doing the things they do, that is enough backstory.

And one last piece of advice — don’t be afraid to kill off your good characters. Too often in shows and books, you know early on who is going to die and who isn’t. If it’s a side character who is friends with the main protagonist but you don’t write them as a believable character, we know that they are going to die early on, and the character has lost credibility. Every character, no matter who they are, needs to be a credible character in the world you’ve created. And depending on your world, sometimes you have to show that the world is dangerous. You don’t need to take it to George R. R. Martin levels where you are killing off every character, but making the reader worry about the characters can add depth and realism to your story.

So now that you’ve started telling the story and have an idea for your plot, sit down and think about the reasoning behind your main character’s actions, and why they would jump into the story you are going to tell. What is the important piece of backstory that is going to develop your protagonist into something more than a cardboard cutout?

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But what makes a good plot? What makes a plot that you want to build a story around? It isn’t too difficult — you get a story idea in your head, and you go for it. If you want to tell the epic story of the unsuspecting hero, do it. If you want to tell a story of how the king had to rise up against the evil forces that were without or within, write that story. There are plenty of big picture stories out there — the epic quest, something forgotten coming back, etc., and those are great stories to write.

Now, haven’t most of those stories been done before — and done to death? No, not really — and absolutely, all at the same time. I could write up my reasoning for it, but this quote sums it up well:

Every story has already been told. Once you’ve read Anna Karenina, Bleak House, The Sound and the Fury, To Kill a Mockingbird and A Wrinkle in Time, you understand that there is really no reason to ever write another novel. Except that each writer brings to the table, if she will let herself, something that no one else in the history of time has ever had.

-Anna Quindlen [Commencement Speech; Mount Holyoke College, May 23, 1999]

While the big pictures, the big ideas, have really all been covered, how you tell your story, and the moments, characters, and places that you create, are all yours.

That is what helps separate some fantasy series from others. Books like The Inheritance Cycle series by Christopher Paolini or Sword of Shanarra by Terry Brooks really rip off other book and movie series like Star Wars and Lord of the Rings. But then there are series like A Song of Ice and Fire, in which George R. R. Martin creates an epic story that is purely its own, and breaks down the specifics of the politics, jealousy, and violence that fill it.

This is the hard part of writing a story — the line between borrowing a little, but not borrowing too much. By borrowing an epic story of the unsuspecting or unlikely hero but making the hero’s actions their own, you don’t end up with another Lord of the Rings. But if you decide to make a single spot where the bad guy who is thought to be dead is coming back, and you are spending time adventuring with your group of dwarves, elves, and a mystic of some sort, you might want to rethink how you are writing (p.s. we know it is still The Fellowship of the Ring if you gender swap characters, or make the elves seafaring, or whatever you try to do to hide it).

So, how do you set your story apart? How do you make it so that you aren’t ripping someone off and running with a story that has been told before? Build it around who you are. Now, that doesn’t mean I should go around naming all of my main characters “Peder” or something — what I’m saying is that I have life experiences that other people don’t. I’ve been through things in a different way than other people have. No two people have lived life exactly the same. So write loosely from your life experiences, and pick and choose carefully.

Another thing to do is borrow broadly. If you take from 30 different fantasy books and work the pieces together into your story, you probably won’t get accused of stealing. But when you do this, grab small things. If you like the idea of the main characters narrating his story, borrow that idea from Patrick Rothfuss, but don’t make him a kid whose parents died and who is on a revenge quest. If you want the main character to have a companion, don’t make it a whole fellowship or a gardener with a heart of gold, like in J.R.R. Tolkien’s stories.

So now you have a general idea and you are ready to start writing your story down. How do you keep track of all the details/movement of the plot? The most common answer, and the one that works for most people, is to create an outline. Now, I’ll say that I’m terrible at doing that, so I don’t, so not outlining your plot or blog posts is also a valid option. But some form of written outline is going to be helpful for keeping track of your writing. With an outline, you are going to have to get a feel for how much data you need. Maybe you need general terms about the big events that will shape your story. Maybe you write out what each chapter is going to be about. You’ll see lots of things about how to write a proper outline, but my advice is to go as detailed as you need to — you can always cut things later.

And with outlining and writing your plot, one thing to remember is that sometimes you have to kill your darlings, as they say. The scene that you loved the best and was a good fit at first may no longer work for you. Instead of trying to shoehorn it in, take those pages and set them aside. Literally pull them from the document if you are writing by hand, or cut them from your Google doc and put them in a separate one. However, don’t throw away these scenes; you never know what they might inspire in the future. Just because they aren’t right for one book, doesn’t mean that they won’t fit in somewhere else.

Hopefully these tips on plot creation will get you inspired to start devising a story of your own — and stay tuned for the next article in this series, which will be on characters. Creating characters will really help you flesh out your plot and make a basic plot into something that is uniquely you.

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