/fg/ - Fantasy General

J. R. R. Tolkien vs George R. R. Martin edition.

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>J. R. R. Tolkien vs George R. R. Martin edition.
As disgustingly offensive as a "Christianity vs Dianetics" thread would be. Only a diseased American mind can be this degenerate.

...

Tolkien won.

What kind of argument is "he wears hat all time time" ???

*the

Veeky Forums I need your help.

I'm trying to remember the name of a fantasy novel that was posted about in one of these threads last summer. If I recall correctly, the title was "the" followed by one word. I think the word may have started with a "v," but I might be remembering incorrectly. The novel had a reputation for having somewhat complex prose. It was not part of a series, and I believe it was either published in 2014 or 2015.

I've looked just about everywhere for it, but I can't find any novels that fit that description.

DELET THIS

YOU CAN'T HAVE THE FANTASY WITH JUST THE SCI-FI

The Vagrant fits the bill.

why is Boromir on the opposite side? How could the artist make such a simple mistake

How do I get into Terry Pratchett? What are his best works?

The Vobbit

That does fit my description, but I don't think that is the book I'm thinking of. The title was a fantasy-sounding proper noun. It sounded like it was the name of a place or a creature.

Tolkien hands down. His prose are meaningful, powerful and endlessly descriptive. His world building is bar-none, his tales are truly epic, coherent and actually finished without needing 7 1000 page novels.

>tfw you'll never read that passage about Gimli losing his shit in the darkness on the paths of the dead for the first time ever again

DELET THIS

Small Gods.

Shitty book

Nice meme

>J. R. R. Tolkien vs George R. R. Martin edition.
The only people who can possibly think those two are comparable are those who only watch the movies/shows. Martin is a terrible writer, even for a fantasy writer.

I love this

>Epic rap battles

That's the most unfunny shit on youtube. It's terrible and stupid.

Tolkien is better and more prolific than Martin is in every single way. The man practically invented high fantasy.

This thread fucking sucks, and isn't worth this reply. I guess you got what you wanted.

GRRM no question and it's not close

the vorrh

>tfw too ADD to write anything but short stories
>tfw my best short stories will never be finished

Fun fact: I was the first person to call for this battle back in season 2. Glad to see my tax dollars at work.

The Varry potter

DELET THIS

...

Stop being a faggot and write it down already.

I can't even focus long enough to write a short story.

I actually kind of like the hat.

Besides that, completely accurate.

Is there anything good with a little girl protagonist?

That was it! Thanks user.

Mistborn

that image is so terribly drawn

Thanks man

Please recommend me a book

Love swords n sorcery fantasy books.
My favorites are probably Sword of Truth series and Words of Radiance are pretty good.

Really must focus on a hero(s) with a quest.

Dislike ones that are focused around armys and huge battles and not a fan of zombies/apocalyptic at all.

TY

Holy shit! What shitty Tumblr artist did they hire to make this awful cover?

>Love swords n sorcery fantasy book
Elric of Melniboom
Conan
Fafhrd
Legend, Imaru

I can't seem to into the top 4.. not the sort of sword and magic wielding heroies I can love - also I despise really short books and short stories. Gotta have 2-3+ books at least

Not sure what legend imaru is, can't pull anything on google

Legend


Imaru

The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson

Should I continue to read Earthsea? The entirety of the first book is pretty "meh", and the second doesn't look much better.

no its a meme

>
>le guin

I warned you about female authors being shit.
They're never good.
At most they're slightly below Sanderson. (shit)

It's not that bad to be honest, I liked all of them, very quick to read..

Seems very.. conceptual though more than anything - A lot of "and then this happened, and then he did this" rather than actually being told as it happens

Nigger it's got nothing to do with ADHD, real or memetic. You're just an uncommitted faggot, one way or another.

WoT > ASOIAF

Robert Jordan is the "American Tolkien" not that diabetic sack of shit

Wait are we breaking off from the SF? I can understand it but I don't think either of these genres have enough following here for their own threads.

Fantasy have, Sci-Fi doesn't :)

SF unironically cucked itself into non-existence with their identity politics, we had to purify them.

who /bakker/ here ? recommend me a more inteligent book. protip,you can't...

How do I into balancing magic?
I don't want it to be grossly overpowered, but at the same time, it's really fucking difficult to do that without a bunch of arbitrary rules that make no sense or have no real logical lolmagiclogic point to them. I have the basics figured out so that one rando with magic can't just one-shot an army, but when it comes to people combining magic power, I don't know how to make that not-OP without making it virtually inaccessible.

>tfw burned out

I can't read more than 10-20 pages in one sitting. Taking breaks don't help. What do?

The Varnia

ASOIAF is trash and Martin is gutter tier compared to Tolkien. Malazan book of the fallen is a MUCH better read.

I assume you're writing a book and not some video game so here's some advice from some user with nothing to his name:

a)Magic systems are generally YA stuff. 'Magic system' is kind of an oxymoron but we've become so jaded to magic that it's normal to 'cast a fireball' or 'do a spell'. The magic I enjoy reading about comes from knowing the turnings of the world, a feat out of reach for almost everyone. If every random can do a magic alla Harry Potter I lose interest in the magic itself.

b)Figure out some rules for your system if you're going for it anyway. Make them consistent and change them depending on the story you're telling. If you want to write about magic that can one-shot an army, that's cool, but now wars are not fought with armies but with wizard duels. If you make fireballs less powerful then consider why people would train archers instead of wizards. You're doing fantasy, the more impact your made-up things have in your world the better.

c)Stay away from the video game mana cliche. Even if you're writing a fanfic, reading that someone is out of mana is boring. If you want to limit spellcasting there are a thousand better alternatives than mana (scrolls, brainpower, metals, blood).

Why don't you just take a page out of Sandersons book?

1) It's inherited through genetics
2) It's absurdly expensive
3) It's limited in range and power

or Jack Vance

1) Good fucking luck trying not to mindwipe yourself trying to force more than 2 spells in your brain

No, it's a forced meme by this one OP. Regular service will resume.

IT'S LIVE

youtube.com/watch?v=kSabeGChdAI

god bless this man

shoo shoo American politics

T-Thanks senpai, I guess.

>The magic I enjoy reading about comes from knowing the turnings of the world
This is literally the most popular "magic system" out there, "I-It's not really magic, It's not!science proceeds to list medical jargon, mathematical formulas etc."

...

I'm confused, what are you trying to make fun of?

At least it's a dank maymay, unlike sci-fi

Just bought the Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks
how pleb am I?

B-but muh Baxter/Reynolds teamup!

Objective Terry Rankings:
Goodkind

he wears hat ALL time time

Thanks for the advice. Appreciate it. Those are good points. Though, I'll disagree with having a system for magic being YA. Without some rules or limitations, it becomes extremely easy to say "Well, this worked out because the guy used magic." In what I'm working on, everyone has the potential to use magic. So I want to set heavy limitations on how strong it can be in the hands of your average Joe, so when someone that's exceptional at it comes along, it makes everyday magic seem inconsequential. Basically, I want magic to be relatively common, but the focus of the stories to be on its incredible users.
Stuff like Eragon from my childhood always annoyed me because it became very broken very fast. With essentially zero effort, someone could just wreck an entire army, which was really unappealing to me.
Harry Potter was also a bit "eh" because magic was so commonplace and there was nothing that would set one person above another. Voldemorrt was supposed to be powerful, but there was nothing that actually set him above others. Everyone had access to the same spell library, so why was he so strong compared to everyone? It was underwhelming.
I'm trying to hit a reasonable median. Something where magic is interesting, makes sense, but has reasonable limitations so as not to invalidate, as you say, archers over wizards.
Where I'm at right now, it isn't a rule-heavy system. A lot of it varies between individuals and the amount of training put into it. As it stands, magic can be incredible, but not for zero effort. However, I also want to have a system of people combining their power together that exponentially increases magic potential. The thing is, right now, this could really easily be exploited and broken, which is what I'm trying to avoid.
And yeah, I agree. Screw mana.

Oh good
I also read the first 73 pages of Erikson's Gardens of the Moon
so maybe that counters it

The Vord of the Rings?

>I'm confused, what are you trying to make fun of?
Kingkiller, Christopher Stasheff, David Weber etc.

Magic actually being magic and not technology/science is becoming increasingly rare.

...

You're acting like it's easy to force yourself to force yourself to work every day on a 100+ page novel for months at a time without losing interest or slipping up or realizing that a plot point makes no sense so you need to go back and change it

RITALIN BRUH

It is a blatant point-for-point ripoff of Lord of the Rings. It's obscene.

Well I've never read LOTR so it can be a new experience!

I'd read that desu, sounds pretty fun.
>I also want to have a system of people combining their power together that exponentially increases magic potential
This stands out to me the most, reminds me of the Bondsmagi in the Gentleman Bastards sequence. In most novels, magic teamwork is just everyone casting their spells at the same time so that's a nice change.

Terry's Shannara books are bland, yet filling.
I own the first two trilogies :3

Thanks. I've been skirting around the details for years now. I've been slowly developing it in the sense of basic concepts but I've only very recently written them down in a concrete sense.
It's somewhat limited in the sense that people have to be synced up on an intent and mental level. The catch is that the more in-tune people are, the stronger the magic. As it stands, a group of five or six people with strong feelings towards a common goal that know each other pretty well could topple the government with relative ease. That's the real problem here.

Assign arbitrary rules, even if you don't tell the reader. In the end, physics itself is just a series of arbitrary rules anyway.

From there, decide if you want the mysterious kind of magic that no one knows about, or if you want clearly defined magic that's essentially treated just like normal technology to the world's denizens.

Well it's my reward for finishing kafka's Amerika in german

Treating myself

>physics itself is just a series of arbitrary rules anyway.
"No." Physics is joined at the hip to mathematics, which dictate certain absolutes (no creating or destroying energy for example).

That's not a bad thing in itself. That means the power shifts to the devout or the fanatics. Some group in nowhere might be really pumped about toppling the government but if the world works that way, the government is a silver-tongued emperor with a devout 30-something close friends that no one can overthrow, or maybe religion makes fanatic soldiers that can go toe to toe with mages. Point is, if you scale up the challenge you can still have interesting conflict while keeping the MCs powerful.

Energy conservation is violated in General Relativity.

what are you talking about

I have a bottle of adderall that I tried using last night but it didn't do shit. I had it for 2 years so maybe it was expired

So in Foundation and Earth, is it a safe assumption to believe that the Solarians were extra-galactic aliens?

Eh. Later books are better. Elf-stones of Shannara was okay from what I remember and I liked the book where Walker Boh fought the 'Four Horsemen', also that trilogy where Walker & Friends go to an island and fight an AI system.
And Shannara is actually post-apoc Earth, specifically North America.

In General Relativity, energy is destroyed since spacetime itself is evolving (that is, there is no translationally invariant background).

Doesn't Dark Energy fix that?

This is what happens when we kick the SF guys out.

To clarify what user means, we know as a fact that space is expanding, not out from a central point but in every space at once everything is getting more distant from everything else.

This is kind of a problem since an object's postion relative to everything else has different potential energy. For example, as two planets get further apart they exert less gravity on each other and the potential energy between the decreases. Normally they need to increase speed to do this, getting an equal amount of kinetic energy, but when spacetime expands there is no increase in velocity. The energy is just lost

Oh god, this story was going so well until I had to start writing human interactions. This is fucking painful

>“Thank you for your generosity,” she spoke with a thick Thracian accent, “can you tell me how long I was asleep?”

>“Only a day,” Polybius replied as he poured her a bowl of lentil soup, “you’re quite fortunate to recover so quickly.” It was a rich broth made from onions, garlic and green olives. Sheep’s milk cheese had been crumbled into it, a favorite of the family. While the boys drank heartily from their bowls, the girl dabbed at it looking guilty with a hunk of barley bread in her shaking hand. “Are you cold?” Polybius asked. “I’m certain we have another chiton about the place.”

>“No,” she replied, “thank you but I’m warm enough already.”

>“You’re shivering,” Anthousa chided.

>“Missus, uh-”

>“-Anthousa,” Anthousa said, “and this is my husband, Polybius.”

>“Thank you, Anthousa, but I am not at all cold. I broke my wrist many years ago and it has not been the same since.”

What threw me off the most is when the lady replies to Polybius in

>“I’m certain we have another chiton about the place.”
>“No,” she replied, “thank you but I’m warm enough already.”

instead of having the lady build on that, trying to dismiss the notion that she's cold, maybe have her thank Polybios for his hospitality and that he's done so much already. Just don't do the 'You're cold" "No I'm not" "Yes you are" thing. Have each line diverge from the previous thought track.

Also the

>>“Missus, uh-”
>“-Anthousa,” Anthousa said, “and this is my husband, Polybius.”

part is kinda cringe. Since you're writing a Greek-esque thing you could get away with the Thracian lady calling Antousa 'kind hostess' without introduction.

Just my two cents (OR DRACHMAS AMIRITE).

>Doesn't Dark Energy fix that?
No.

Mathematics is also arbitrary, user.

Because it makes presumptions

Need a good space marines series. Not 40k, and it must have AIs

thank you, is this better?

>“Eat,” Anthousa, said as she poured the guest a bowl of lentil soup, “you must be starving.” It was a rich broth made from onions, garlic and green olives. Sheep’s milk cheese had been crumbled into it, a favorite of the family. While the boys drank heartily from their bowls, the girl dabbed at it looking guilty with a hunk of barley bread in her shaking hand. “Are you cold?” Polybius asked. “I’m certain we have another chiton about the place.”

>“No,” she replied, “thank you but I’m warm enough already.”

>“There’s no need to lie girl,” Anthousa chided, “you’re not burdening us, you’re a welcome guest at our table.”

>“Thank you ma’am,” she replied softly, “but this is much warmer than I’m used to.”

>“You’ve been shivering since you woke. Honestly, it’s no wonder considering what you went through.”

>“Dearest-” Polybius interjected. It was Anthousa’s way to meddle, but he imagined this might not be the sort of thing the girl would like to speak about.

>“My dear husband Polybius dragged you out of a riverbed! How in the names of the gods did you end up there?”

>“You are Polybius?” she said looking at him. He nodded. “I should thank you for saving my life, I can’t imagine many would have done what you did for me, but the truth of the matter is that I didn’t intend to be saved. I was trying to kill myself.”

Mathematics is the only objective thing in that exists. Whether or not its truths can be applied to reality, or whether they have been properly is another discussion entirely, but the math itself is a law of logic