fantasy

Better Writing Through Tabletop RPGs

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This post by Claire Ryan originally appeared on her Raynfall blog on 5/9/15.

Everyone asks, how can I become a better writer?

The answers are usually something like: read more books in the genre you’re writing, write as much as you can, get feedback from other writers and readers. Yes, you should do all those things, and they will make you a better writer in general. But something that’s often overlooked (perhaps because it’s incredibly nerdy) is tabletop roleplaying.

RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons are amazing tools for focusing the mind on the process of storytelling. By running and playing in an RPG, you’ll develop skills and habits that will make your writing better – or at least easier!

 

Worldbuilding
Being a GM, or gamesmaster*, for an RPG is an interesting experience, and it has a steep learning curve to it. It starts with the setting of the game, which could be D&D, the various White Wolf games, Call of Cthulhu, or oldies like Rolemaster. You’ll get to grips with a setting and run games within it, but eventually, once you’ve got some experience and confidence, you’ll want to make your own setting.

*Publetariat Editor’s note: in the U.S. we call them “Dungeon Masters”

This is where things get crazy – and useful. Worldbuilding for a novel and worldbuilding for an RPG setting are exactly the same thing. You create the setting from the top down, laying out the land, races, magic or technology, and politics at a macro scale before you ever get to cities, groups, and individuals. As a GM, you never need to make the characters – those are your PCs – but you’ll have everything surrounding them locked down and ready to go long before the story ever begins.

 

Read the full post on Raynfall.

 

In Fantasy Worlds, Historical Accuracy Is A Lie

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This post by Tanya D originally appeared on BoingBoing on 3/23/15. Note that while the author is discussing video game world-building specifically, the same kind of argument applies to Fantasy novels as well.

The mythical realms of Dragon Age grow beautifully with the telling, including their representation of Earthly minorities. Even so, something’s missing…

I’d like to welcome you to Thedas, a fantastical place lots of us have lived in since BioWare’s Dragon Age: Origins launched in 2009. The borders of this lush fantasy world have sprawled ever outward through the release of Dragon Age II, and welcomed ever more players. With the most recent game, Dragon Age: Inquisition we can end up a leader, whether we’re a human, an elf or a dwarf.

But though almost anything’s possible within Dragon Age‘s beloved world of Thedas, something feels off. Although Dragon Age is a fantasy roleplaying game, Thedas is overlaid with a faux-European sociopolitical landscape — and that means there are few people of color among its citizenry. Why do the sinister old arguments of “historical accuracy” still apply to this fantasy world?

Elves, magic, dragons, shapeshifting and ancient powers of world destruction are somehow totally believable, but the idea that brown people might exist is somehow not. My colleague MedievalPOC‘s blog uses art, history and other resources to regularly debunk the broad but rarely-questioned misconception that only white people were around in medieval times. So if we know brown folks definitely existed in actual Medieval Europe, why are they absent from a made-up fantasy world only loosely inspired by Medieval Europe? Where are the brown folks in Dragon Age‘s Thedas?

 

Read the full post on BoingBoing.

 

2014: The Year When Science Fiction And Fantasy Woke Up To Diversity

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This post by Damien Walter originally appeared on The Guardian on 1/2/15.

A year of unprecedented success for women writers was matched by a flood of new voices from the self-publishing scene

Looking back at 2014, you can sum it up in one word: diversity. The world of science fiction and fantasy saw diversity not only in the voices that found success, definitively turning the page on 2013’s chainmail binkinigate, but also in the means of production. While the metaphysical themes so vital to SF continued their conquest of the mainstream, it was the year when independent digital publishing changed the genre for good.

One book dominated the awards in 2014: Anne Leckie’s Ancillary Justice. This debut novel evokes a future world in which gender is unimportant, a transformation Leckie renders by exclusively referring to characters with the pronoun “she”. Its unconventional take on gender politics helped Ancillary Justice make a clean sweep of the Hugo, Nebula, Clarke and BSFA awards, a rare and deserved achievement.

 

Read the full post on The Guardian.

 

Earthsea Revisited and Visited Anew

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This post by Alan Baxter originally appeared on his Warrior Scribe site on 4/1/14.

I mentioned a while back that I was embarking on a reread of Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea novels. It was, in fact, only a part reread. There are six Earthsea books, that Le Guin likes to refer to as either the Earthsea Cycle, or the two Earthsea trilogies. Until now I’d only read the first trilogy. (There are also two short stories in the collection The Wind’s Twelve Quarters, but I’m not including those. I’ve got that collection and will get around to it at some point.)

I came across the first trilogy – A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan and The Farthest Shore – when I was 10 or 11 years old. I devoured them and absolutely adored them. They bent my tiny mind and I read them over and over again. I had no idea there were more books in the series (back then, there weren’t). The next trilogy – Tehanu, Tales of Earthsea and The Other Wind – came out much later. The first trilogy was published in 1968, 1971 and 1972. The second in 1990, 2001 and 2001, respectively. Having loved the first trilogy so much, it’s amazing it took me this long to get around to the second, but there you go. So I recently reread the first three and then went on to the “new” three.

Even though I’d read them so many times, it’s been a long time since I last read the original trilogy. I was desperately hoping it wouldn’t turn out to be a disappointment. Within a few pages, my fears were quashed and I was back in Earthsea and remembering just why I loved it so much.

 

Click here to read the full post on Warrior Scribe.