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This is just Fantasy Main Menu This is Just Fantasy Preface Intro Enlarging Your World Bringing your setting to life What's Up People? Creating your races So You Want to Play With Magic? Developing and refining magic systems What Makes Us Who We Are Creating your main character All Together Now Final project-combining all the parts to make a scene Metacognition Works Cited

Choose Your Fantasy

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The first step to building a fantasy world is choosing what type of setting the world will be in. The options of what it can be are only limited by your imaginations and desires. However, that doesn't exactly guide you much so let's go into some of the main types (that I've read):

Epic Fantasy. This is the setting that Tolkien started and is still huge today. Medieval-ish setting with castles and knights, brave heroes and hidden mystical villains. While usually these include elves, goblins, gnomes, and trolls, they don't need to. Magic is usually a huge deal permeating the world but this is most definitely your choice as well. While radically different in many ways, Game of Thrones also falls under this genre. Game of Thrones has everything that I said in the first sentence with no dwarves except Tyrion, and doesn't have much magic.
Urban Fantasy: Urban Fantasy is the opposite of Epic Fantasy in many ways. Instead of being Medieval, it's set in modern-day Earth (usually, might be in worlds that have technology and mimic modern Earth, Earth-Adjacent worlds that are connected to Earth like Bordertown or Nightside, or future settings like Dante Valentine or Age of X). When something is called Epic Fantasy, you know to expect a lot of tropes. However, as the exceptions I've already given show, Urban Fantasy is so much broader than that, with only real thread is its modern setting. Quite often however the Urban Fantasy genre has books that fall into the paranormal mystery genre. Examples I've seen:
- A world where magic comes from the city not nature
- A world where all the Gods exist along with vampires and werewolves and various other unique things
- A world with the Fae from Celtic myth (and others) in San Francisco
- The story of a Chicago wizard who engages with Gods, vampires, fae, demons, Native American evil spirits, and much more
Dark Fantasy: mixture of fantasy and horror. While this is listed as a genre for books unlike the two before this it's more about a mood than a setting (though it's really good to label stuff this so people know what they'll be getting into). My favorite series that has ever fallen into this trope has to be the trilogy of trilogies Age of Misrule/The Dark Age/The Kingdom of the Serpent by Mark Chadbourn which I reviewed all of them here.
Paranormal Romance: often recognizable by some dude's bare chest on the cover (maybe they have an open shirt, maybe no shirt, there are...a lot of these that look the exact same), romance novels where the guy might be a werewolf or a demon or some sort. I'm obviously biased against this, quite often the other genres do have romance in them which I do enjoy, but self-labeled paranormal romance novels are just not my thing whatsoever. That said, if you choose this you won't get any judgement from me.
So many more as this list of genres show (clicking on each genre provides the levels of magic, grand ideas, characterization, plot complexity, and violence)
Or...your own ideas! While there are so many established paths to go you don't need to care or follow about any of these. I want you to think of these as potential paths that you can take not the only ones that exist. This is your world, your imagination, and you can do whatever you want if you have something in your head.

Activity: Tell me your genre and the concept of your world. This doesn't need to be incredibly specific, just brainstorm what mood the world is going to have. I'll give both the world as a whole and the scene I'm sampling as examples, most of the time books aren't as complex.
Example:
Genre of overarching story: Mythic Fantasy. Gods of old are returning to Earth to take over as a part of an ancient organization's plot to rule the world, with only 5 heroes as the hope of defeating them both.
Genre of scene: Celtic Fantasy. Three of the heroes get trapped in a city in Faerie and have to rely on the treacherous fae to ever escape to save the world.

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This is Just Fantasy Garrett Winters
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What Makes Us Who We Are We're almost to writing, but there's the slightly large detail of who your main character or characters are going to be. I'm putting this last because all of the other parts matter in creating your character. With a grasp of everything else, let's sit down and figure out who they are and their purpose in this scene of your story (if you need to refresh yourselves about what the task was or your answers, each part's title is a note, clicking on it will pull up the text on that slide, pressing go to note on the bottom will bring you back to that part so you can review your activity).
In Choose Your Fantasy, you chose the mood of their journey and lives.
In Enlarging Your World, you figured out the location and description of this place which helps determine their purpose being here.
In What's Up, People, you figured out their culture, appearance, and roots (for the purpose of this part if you did a different race there because you're using an actual human race and aren't creating anything for your main character, do focus on your main character to describe them).
In So You Want To Play With Magic, you created the magic system and how a magic user would wield it or how a non-magic user might respond to people who do use it.
Now let's combine all the info that we put together and describe our characters.
Activity: Basing off of all the data put together a description of your character (later on in the semester we'll put much more focus into character development, this is just to build within the scene).

Example: Alex is a seemingly stereotypical muscle man from Greece with a dark past. In Greece he was a sailor with his partner as part of a fishing crew. However, out in the seas they ran across the sirens, whose enchanting song lured everyone to their deaths except Alex who remembered how Odysseus and his crew were told to plug their ears with beeswax. Lacking beeswax he put his earbuds in and blasted music at max volume so he couldn't hear the sirens...only to watch as all of his friends and the man he loved jumped off the edge of the boat to follow the song and drowned. After seeing how the presence of the Gods and their monsters caused such death, when Atsa came telling him of an opportunity to seal them away again he jumped for the chance so nobody else would suffer like he did. Because homophobia is rather rampant in Greece he doesn't reveal he isn't straight, so being tall, tan, and muscular from hard work sailing leads to women fawning over him which makes him deeply uncomfortable. He's trapped in Ceo because after Jon, a character who had most of his mind erased by the force opposing the Gods that Alex thinks they should ditch to be able to better save the world, said fae once which brings their attention Alex decided in his rather rash nature to say fuck it and repeat the word multiple times leading to the fae picking them up because they were actually willing to forgive Jon and not take them but Alex basically made them want to teach him a lesson. Because his first exposure to mythology coming back to the world was death of the guy he loved he's highly distrustful of the magic and everything else that came back with the Return.

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