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This is just Fantasy Main Menu This is Just Fantasy Preface Intro Choose Your Fantasy What's your world? Enlarging Your World Bringing your setting to life 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

What's Up People?

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Ok, you've got the world (or worlds), now who is in it? People and cultures are fascinating, and you can do a lot with them. However, too many can possibly clutter the story, and it's very easy to make them two-dimensional tropes that meet with the main character instead of a people in their own right, and if you're on Earth require a lot of care and thought about how you're going to portray fellow humans. The races can be people like your character or they can represent a harmful/alien force (for an example of the latter, my scene has the fae in it, they are a race but function as a trial that the heroes need to face). You can draw upon mythology, the common Tolkien-esque races, or make your own (and don't feel forced to follow the tropes with myth or the common fantasy races to the letter, sometimes the most unique stories take races that we know already and flip them [first example that comes to mind is Dark Sun].
Activity: As this assignment is going to be focused on a single scene, we don't want to overpopulate it, so we're just going to focus on elaborating one race (pick either the race of the character or if you're doing urban fantasy and your character is from an actual race a different nonhuman race they might encounter or will be relevant in the scene), with the 3 steps here as a guide (link elaborates in detail, check the notes for summaries, depending on what function the race serves all these aspects might not be relevant mine is going to be different in some ways), thinking about the appearance of the characters, the environment and how it affects them, and their culture along with a name.
Example: the race living in my city are the beings from Celtic myth known as the fae, because for my book series especially this specific race I am solely relying on the lore there's...not much in the aspects the article suggests. Traditionally they are wearing ornate Shakespearian garb, are taller and thinner than humans, and have pointed ears.
The fae are masters of their environment and wielders of illusion magic (glamour) and conjuration, they don't have jobs but live as aristocrats who find amusement with human lives which they consider toys, they don't really need to eat and there's never any description of farms or whatever because food is magically conjured at their feasts (feasts which if a human eats from they will keep eating and hungering for the food of the fae forever, character in my book has this happen it's sad), their clothing is glamoured to look like it does...however, the "environment" of Ceo is essentially a trap they use on humans, as it reduces their inhibitions with its narcotic fog and thus makes us easier to play with.
For culture I'll copy/paste the 7 aspects in the article and answer that way

Social Organization (family units and social classes): traditionally the fae seem to mimic the human royal courts (Hence being called the Seelie or Unseelie courts), so you have the Royalty on top, the courtiers close to the throne, and commoners. Family determines class, the fae don't have the same emotional bonds that we do when it comes to family.
Customs and Traditions: Decadence and debauchery are the hallmarks of fae society. Their nature is too fluid for traditions or customs of the sort. In order to deal with the boredom of immortality they crave novelty and fun...and the best source for both of them is playing with humans, wreaking havoc on our lives which seems evil to us, but they consider us like toys to be played with not as actual human beings. In Ceo they lure humans into the city as its fog slowly wears away at the human's ability to resist or control themselves, playing with them until the fog wears away everything in their minds and renders them useless.
Religion: The fae are semi-divine beings themselves, nature spirits. They recognize the existence of the Tuatha De Danaan, the Celtic gods, not based on faith but because they actually interact sometimes, though they usually keep to themselves.
Language: Technically Gaelic however they have the ability to both understand and be heard in every language at once.
Arts and Literature: In Ceo the fae can shape their homes and the materials they use, essentially making the whole entire city a gallery of their art each one of them bringing their strange vision to life.
Governing Systems: Monarchy.
Economic Systems: Don't really have one, no need for one.

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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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