Portal Fantasy

Hi, folks and folkettes!

OK, I need some help. I'm thinking about writing a Portal Fantasy where the hero gets trapped in a Low Fantasy world, but I'm not sure my ideas qualify. For one thing, I have more than one idea for a fantasy race, and for another, at the moment it's a typical "Summon Everyman Hero so that they can battle and defeat the Big Bad before returning home" plot. So, how can I make that Low Fantasy?

Oh, and in case anyone's interested, here's my ideas for the fantasy races that live alongside humans -

• Animalas, human-animal hybrids that look a Little Bit Beastly
• Selkies
• Oni
• Elves with succubus elements
• A walking tree-like creature with plant manipulation powers

Yeah, not very Low Fantasy at the moment, is it?

Why do you want the world to be low fantasy? The term is vague enough to encompass all kinds of stories, so it'd be useful to know what elements of a low fantasy setting appeal to you.

Well...to be honest, I just thought it'd be something different.

Worth noting is that there are plenty of Low/Portal Fantasies with exactly the broad plot you rattled off above ("Summon Everyman Hero so that they can battle and defeat the Big Bad before returning home"). Heck, I wrote one of them! Likewise, there are plenty of Low Fantasies that have fantasy races.

The defining feature of Low Fantasy is simply that it's not High or Heroic Fantasy. That list of traits on the trope page? They're indicators, not rules.

Now with all that said, "I want to do something different" is never a good reason to use a trope — and this is coming from a guy who LOVES to write with tropes. In my experience, the best way to use a trope is to say "I can do something interesting with this!" because, as has been drilled into our heads simply by being on this site, Tropes Are Tools.

Go out and use those tools in new and inventive ways! I believe in you!

I will second that advice. Writing specific tropes in a specific way can be good when writing prompts for practice, because then it's about writing something and you will basically run out of a prompt before running out of ideas, but it's been proven by hapless tropers here, time and again, that when people attempt to write full-length stories for the purpose of using a specific trope in a specific way, the usual end result is that they don't have any ideas how to implement said tropes into anything they are attempting to write and the whole thing flops.

Tropes are tools, but even more so, they are descriptive tools. This means that you use tropes in order to easily describe what a work contains, but they are very much not a checklist for a writer; in fact, it is probably better to forget that tropes exist when you are trying to write anything.

Thank you for the advice, and I'll certainly take it into account.

Ignoring what TYPE of fantasy I want the Magical Land to be for a while, I was considering these for the protagonist's travelling companions -

• A green-skinned female lizard-girl who looks like a normal human female, but has green skin, scales, a forked tongue and a long tail, and wears her hair in braids
• A Gentleman Thief
• A harpy cowgirl (or at least the fantasy world equivalent)
• A pirate selkie
• The fantasy world equivalent of a samurai

Hmmm...looking at the last four, I'd say they'd be better suited for Gaslamp Fantasy instead of Low Fantasy.

Well, that sounds fun. My own story doesn't have most of those (different fantasy, different worlds, characters are based on my friends' ideas and their personalities in order to make them more different, and as such most of the party characters are definitely human because biases or lack of ideas), but I do have the last one and with some work and planning it resulted in glorious things. It did require me to sit down and work out what is "honour" as far as the character sees it, because fantasy culture means I cannot just copy-paste some real person's or country's or group's understanding of it, but it resulted in very nice things without the addition of the dreaded Honor Before Reason trope so I am satisfied.

Moving on, I don't have a Gentleman Thief, but I do have a comrade thief. As in, it's that world's equivalent of a dwarf, and his country is basically a communist kingdom (as in, it has a ruling king, people don't earn money for normal work, but any basic necessities and stuff like healing and housing are free) which somehow works, and as he is in a different country he'd decided to do a Robin Hood thing and spread the communism a bit, he's just supplying himself from rich people and not necessarily legally. He's a secondary character, though, rather than a party member.

That said, for as long as you can write the actual characters and make them distinct, and for as long as they aren't ridiculously unlikely characters (a six-person party with four chosen ones does not smell good, to put it that way), whatever you put in the party should work.

Well, I'm not planning on having any dwarves - at least not in the fantasy sense. If they DO show up, they'll probably just be short human people.

Regardless of whether or not I decide to have more than one fantasy race, however, the lizard-girl's definitely going to be part of the group (I figure she's one of those Animalas I mentioned earlier). I'm thinking, maybe she's a slave-girl who the hero accidentally frees, and tags along out of gratitude and this whole I Owe You My Life life-debt thing. And maybe she and the hero end up in an Accidental Marriage (or at least an Accidental Engagement).

Oh, speaking of the hero, I'm thinking of making them a girl named Kendra. What do you think?

Well, they aren't actually dwarves in my work either, but that's the closest I can get to what they are without going into it in-depth and making it all weird; going from "I want something dwarf-like" to what I got was quite a fun trip, actually.

Whatever you choose to be the reason for the character to join the party, be it slavery or marriage/engagement or anything else, any of those can be suitable for as long as you handle them properly, meaning that it's an actual part of the world you create and, if you choose to go for something that changes the relationship between two people, you don't railroad the relationship and instead let it play out naturally. Mind you, this can be a bit of a pitfall if you have no experience writing certain things or even experience of any kind with those things, as not railroading the relationship, be it a husband/wife one or a master/slave one or any other forced one really, can eat up a lot of words; honestly, assuming that it actually is a thing in your story's world, slavery is probably the easier option to write, because just take a look at the average "romance" novel and tell me the people there feel like people and their emotions feel genuine, and those things are supposed to be about feelings so it says something about how hard it can be to write that.

As for the name, when I read it I immediately thought that it's good for the lizard girl, so that's that, but that merely means that it's not a bad name so it may very well fit the hero too.

edited 23rd Aug '17 5:14:45 PM by Kazeto

Thank you!

By the way, I've been thinking it over, and I think I have the perfect idea for my fantasy land:

It's similar to our 18th century world, but there's at least one nonhuman species and a few fictional gods and a bit of magic here and there (such as the summoning ritual), and there may or may not be 18th century technology and a few medieval elements, such as weaponry.

So basically, it's borderline Low Fantasy meets Gaslamp Fantasy, if I can make it work. Although...re-reading it, I think I may be crossing into Historical Fantasy territory.

edited 24th Aug '17 7:48:20 AM by fruitstripegum

Slight quibble, here: Historical Fantasy takes place in real historical eras. There's plenty of invented worlds that take design cues from historical eras while not being Historical Fantasy. It's the difference between "this work is set in this time period" vs "this work resembles this time period."

(And I just realized that by extension, Urban Fantasy will, over time, become Historical Fantasy! Huh!)

edited 24th Aug '17 8:06:30 PM by AwSamWeston

Well, if you say so.

Oh, and I meant NINETEENTH-century Earth.

By the way, I've been thinking it over, and I think I've managed to refine my idea somewhat:

Ordinary High-School Student Kendra is pulled from her mundane life to the magical world of Ithoria, which resembles a slightly less technologically advanced 19th-century Earth in nearly every way - apart from the absolute monarchies and the Animala species which lives alongside humanity. Upon learning that she will be only able to go home after defeating the tyrannical despot who is attempting to conquer the entire world, Kendra reluctantly sets out to do so. Along the way, she gains the alliance of an Animala lizard-girl she freed from slavery, a Gentleman Thief, a cowgirl, a samurai and a pirate.

So, what do we think? Doesn't that sound more impressive than what I've written so far?

Of course, I still need to come up with some more ideas, like whether or not the Big Bad should use magic, and if they should, HOW that magic should work. I HAVE, however, come up with an idea for some weapons for the group:

• A set of knives which return to the wielder when thrown - all the wielder has to do is whistle
• A pair of flintlock pistols which shoot green fireballs
• A magical axe - whoever wields it is undefeatable in battle

Of course, I'll have to figure out how I can prevent the axe from becoming a Story-Breaker Power. And I'm still unsure whether to give the knives to the thief or the lizard-girl - on the one hand, the thief needs to defend himself, but on the other, why would a thief need knives?

A bit late, because yay for not having free time, but I will say this: whatever you create your world to be, it will be fine for as long as it is unique and internally consistent. The first one is easy, just don't copy-paste anything, if you like what you see somewhere else then create your own version of it. And the second one is a bit harder but not too bad either, just use common sense and keep notes.

I am not the one to judge you on any of those points, that is for you to do as you write, but I could try to advise on the latter if you want it.

Thank you! That would be very helpful!

Alright then, so internal consistency ...

The key thing to remember is that you don't always have to get it perfect and explain it in full. Depending on a few factors—how likely or unlikely it seems, how important it is to the plot and/or the protagonist party, and how long the story and/or series is—your readers will pay more or less attention to it and be more or less believing of it by default. A few-pages–long story can get away with more in terms of ambiguity and having unlikely plot elements than a novella, a novella more than a novel, and a novel more than a multiple-book series; take a look at the Harry Potter series, as single books it does not have too many things that make one scratch their head, but when you put them into a whole series people start paying more attention and cross-referencing things from one book to another. Likewise, if a plot element is used on a passing background character then it is more likely than the readers will simply not pay enough attention to it to notice any irregularities unless you make that plot element important by applying it to an important character at some other point. And the first one, as it is, is rooted in two facts: the fact that it is harder for people to accept an outcome they know is statistically unlikely (so showing them something that is so out-of-it that they have no obvious frame reference as to what is likely to happen can cause them to pay more attention to it), and the fact that the more unusual something is the more it pulls attention to itself.

Now, the penultimate of those things (statistically unlikely outcomes) is not an issue in itself, because if something is unlikely but possible then that only pulls the readers' attention onto itself but does not cause any issues unless you've broken the rules you've set for it; and you can usually somewhat diminish the amount of attention the unlikely thing gets if you have some character lampshade on how it was unlikely for this particular outcome to happen. The last one is ... a bit more of a problem, usually, because people forget about it surprisingly enough.

The last one means that if you have something unlikely in your story it will get some attention and thus will get investigated a bit. The way to counteract this is, all things considered, fairly obvious, just establish the thing as normal in your story which will cause most to focus not on the occurrence of it but rather on the explanation you've given for why it is normal. However, I am aware that this is not always possible for one reason or another (maybe the thing actually is unlikely in the story's world), and as such it is a good habit to focus (though not to the exclusion of everything else) on the more unlikely plot elements when you are checking them for consistency. For an example, a mercenary existing in a medieval setting will be taken as normal and not thought of much, a character being enslaved will be somewhat unusual unless you establish that slavery is normal in the setting in which case it will be normal, and a character getting into a forced marriage will be considered unusual if not highly unusual and establishing this as a normal, or even just less unusual, thing may or may not be a possibility at all; as such, between the three scenarios, assuming all are in the story, the last one is the one to focus on the most.

As for the part about checking things for consistency, you can approach it in two ways: either write down all the rules of how and why something works and check if it is consistent with those, or write down the things you are revealing with each showing (things that the readers can look at what is happening and deduce to be guaranteed to be true) of that plot element and then check that you aren't breaking those. The first one is more tedious, but you will want to go that way for anything the rules of which, actual rules and not just characters' speculations, will be revealed for the readers to know for any reason; likewise, the second one may not be as ... in-depth, let's say, as the first one, but if you are sure that the whole thing will be kept ambiguous enough that the readers will not know the details, it saves you the effort that could be spent on something else.

Something to also remember is that when you introduce a new plot element that supposedly existed before (if it's a completely new thing that just got researched then this isn't an issue), you should ask yourself “why wasn't this used before, rather than whatever was” and shelf it until you can actually give a decent answer as far as the people whose usage of it it is about are concerned (so, if something existed before but was thought up by an evil empire and the character only found out upon infiltrating it, it's not an issue that the character's country doesn't have it, but if it's used throughout the country but not in the character's village so that he has a way to shine and you can't give a reason for that, nope). This is to prevent new plot elements from making plot holes in the earlier part of the story with nothing more than their presence.

Now, let's talk about exceptions to the rules. Exceptions are funny things, as someone called Kinoko Nasu could tell you (of the most important and thus most visible characters of his stories' worlds, most are in one way or another exceptions to the world's rules). While exceptions by themselves are not intrinsically a bad thing, you need to remember that as soon as the readers realise that something is an exception for some reason, even if they find out not because the character broke the established rules but rather because someone else in the story commented on how they are unique because they can do this-or-that, it will immediately go into the “outright weird” normality category (can't be any more unusual, that is). As such, if you don't want any hiccups, you have to be ready to answer, even if just to yourself, why is it that there is nobody else who can do the same thing, and if the explanation is nice enough and you can do it without info-dumping then you could even reveal it to the readers, just remember to not stack exceptions like a Jenga tower because in serous stories people tolerate only so much rule abuse from any single character.

Well, that's it for now, if you have any specific questions then feel free to ask and I'll answer when I next have time.

Well, I DO have one question, but I'm not sure if you'll think it's important.

Here it is anyway:

If magic in my world is limited to magical objects and the summoning ritual, does it still qualify as Low Fantasy?

It depends on how common and easy to get those magical items are and how easy/common the summoning rituals are. One of the defining features of Low Fantasy is a low, if not close to nonexistent, amount of all the things supernatural, with what is there often being quite dark, and that does not manifest by it being limited in how many ways there are to use it (twenty million schools of magic, as per D&D), but rather by it being subdued in scope: you are very lucky if you come across a magic item in your life, and the item you get is guaranteed not to be an epic item with an effect that will be visible across the continent and give all the people hope. Basically, if every warrior has a magical sword (or shield, or axe, or bow, or corset, or whatever) and you can buy them from a merchant if you are rich enough then no, it's not Low Fantasy, at least not in that regard.

Or, to give you an example: A Song Of Ice And Fire (which had started out as Game Of Thrones, I believe) has magic, and some of the effects of that magic are majestic enough (the wall), but in your everyday life you don't *see* magic, nor can you hear it, touch it, experience it in any way. Whatever magic is there is weakly understood, not necessarily fully controllable, dangerous both to fight against and to use it on your own. The magic items as they are, the blades that can fight against the undead, are rare and coveted by those who collect trinkets of an age long past. Sure, right now it's getting closer to being not fully Low Fantasy, but as it is right now it is still there.

That said, I don't see why it would matter if it's Low Fantasy or not. Pratchett's works often were a mix of low and high fantasy and they were great, Tolkien's world was also a mix of low and high and epic fantasy (magic exists and stuff and you have elves and magical items, but surely but slowly the magic is dying) in the stories he told and those were also great. And then there's the great many good, if not great in some cases, works in both the Low Fantasy and High Fantasy section. Unless having the world be a low-fantasy one is a requirement someone else put on you and you have no idea where to even begin, it really shouldn't matter to you.

edited 1st Sep '17 2:13:05 PM by Kazeto

BUMP.

Just had another idea I wanna throw out there:

In Ithoria, creatures that existed during the nineteenth century are live and kicking - the potaroo, the thylacine, the passenger pigeon, the quagga, etc.

Also, I came up with a new character - Cassia, a Mostly Normal Animal thylacine who serves as the Team Pet. For the most part, she appears to be a normal thylacine, but there are occasions when she shows great intelligence, leading to speculation that she might not be what she seems. She also serves as an Evil-Detecting Dog.