Posted in Nonhuman characters, On gaming, On writing, World-building on Nov 19th, 2008 Edit | 1 Comment »
Yet more for RPG Blog Carnival .
Fantasy worlds and gods seem to go hand in hand; having or hinting at at least one seems to be practically the price of admission.
Now, this is fine. Except for the fact that there’s a lot more variety in the divine than most people give credit for, let […]
Posted in On gaming, On writing on Nov 18th, 2008 Edit | 6 Comments »
More for RPG Blog Carnival: Religion, this time inspired by thinking about the topic itself and the way people have responded to it.
I’ve always been partial to chicken-and-egg questions, particularly within the context of invented worlds. And I always come back to this one: Do gods and religions require each other? Can […]
Posted in On gaming, On writing on Nov 17th, 2008 Edit | 2 Comments »
Another post for this month’s RPG Blog Carnival. A little religion goes a long way.
The first thing most people think about religion in speculative fiction (…okay, after they review the whole “Church is evil” cliché and the holy objects vs. creatures of evil thing—but really, what more do we need to do with those?) is […]
Posted in On gaming, On writing on Nov 14th, 2008 Edit | 3 Comments »
Because most of us are young, and because so many stories are from the point of view of the Teenage Hero Out to Save the World, we tend to deal with the mentor-student relationship primarily from the student’s side. As such, we probably have a rosier picture of the student.
But we need to bear […]
Posted in On gaming, On writing on Nov 13th, 2008 Edit | 4 Comments »
Mentor figures are popular in our kinds of stories, but they always create one major question: If Teach is better or more experienced, why isn’t she the one solving the problem at hand? Sure, we all know the plot-reason is that she’s not the main character, but there needs to be a reason […]
Posted in On gaming, On writing on Nov 12th, 2008 Edit | 1 Comment »
As I noted day before yesterday, many of the ways mentors aid in dramatics require a strong connection between the mentor and the student. It begs the question: How does one cultivate such a relationship?
One thing that helps a lot, particularly when the student is someone else’s character, is choice. Having the […]
Posted in On gaming, On writing on Nov 11th, 2008 Edit | 8 Comments »
Teachers teach. It’s pretty much a given, and a matter of definition.
But what this means for us is that when we’re characterizing our mentors, we’re going to have to think about their teaching styles, as those are going to be connected to their philosophies, their relationships with their students, and, of course, how well […]
Posted in On gaming, On writing on Nov 10th, 2008 Edit | No Comments »
Because of the relationship between the mentor and the student, it is very easy to use a mentor as a plot device of some sort. Certainly, there are plenty of ways to do it; the difficulty is just setting them up. Writers take note: Anything a GM has to set up for […]
Posted in On gaming, On writing on Nov 9th, 2008 Edit | No Comments »
If friends are the family you can choose, mentors are the parents you have an option on.
As a result, the mentor-student relationship is quite possibly the most common one used in fantasy. It makes sense—after all, all these bright-eyed hero-types have to learn their skills from somewhere, right? So the bumbling recruits have […]
Posted in On gaming, On writing, World-building on Nov 7th, 2008 Edit | 5 Comments »
Inspired by this month’s RPG Blog Carnival. The carnival topic may be religion, but at the core, both religion and superstition are beliefs.
There are a lot of terms whose definition becomes fuzzy when brought into a fantasy world, but none go quite as gray around the edges as “superstition”. So what, in such […]
