Tell me how to write an original medieval fantasy novel without dragons, elves, and dwarves

Tell me how to write an original medieval fantasy novel without dragons, elves, and dwarves.

Gnomes nigga

Fairies neighbor

>learn to write
>write a fantasy novel
>don't include dwarves, elves or dragons
>???
>profit

Manlet dwarves.

Metrosexual elves.

Do new races with their own gimmicks that are loosely based on the archetypes like Zelda.

Centaurs
Dryads
Beast-men

Fuck it. Cat people it is.

>write a fantasy novel
>don't include anything fantastical in it
>basically just medieval fiction in a made-up world

Kobolds
Trolls
Orcs
Ogres
Magick
Cyclops
Witches
Vampires
Zombies/ Necromancy
Come on OP use your imagination. I could keep going forever here.

This. With a lot of historic research. Maybe add a little magic as a plot device.

have humans of other ethnicity. if you still want to have magic make shit up like sanders or use less popular lore

>Maybe add a little magic as a plot device.
That is just asspull

Elder scrolls already did cat people.

Invent new races like draegyns, aelfs and thwarvs.

>fantasy

I'm writing a fantasy story, and I'm really struggling with the concept of magic. Like, how the fuck can you have credible melee fighters, when magic should rationally blow everything else out of the water? How can anyone non-magician fight a magician? Even the simplest of spells should give an overwhelming advantage. Where do you draw the limits? It's just bullshit. Unless you have the melee fighters also use magical skills, in which case it becomes bullshit against bullshit and the ideas of skill, training and strategy evaporate.

Use any mythology other than the Indo-European.

Magic might be really hard to do, perhaps it would takes a few decades to learn just a simple spell that cant hurt anyone, perhaps theres people who has been working on hiding magical knowledge so that its extremely hard to find the neccesary information.

Make the magicians weaker. Make spellcasting extremely complex. Make spellcasting extremely accessible and write battles where everyone fights with magic. There's a billion ways to balance this stuff, be creative a little bit.

Don't use dragons, elves and dwarves.

The Western canon has no shortage of magic and miracles and melee fightan, it never was a hindrance to good writing.

Fuck off, Veeky Forums. Read a fucking book.

Athena OP pls nerf

>Athena OP
Indian epic poems say hi

That's why having everyone able to do magic is rpg bullshit. Magic is powerful because it's literally someone forcing their will to the world, you can't just have a farmboy learn magic. Magic is for the Big Bad Evil Guys or the Big Good Guys, ie Sauron and Gandalf. Gandalf knows magic because he's literally an agent of god, how stupid would it be if Aragorn knew magic as well.

wrtie a story where a nation is gripped by fear of small people, gaunt looking people, and large lizards.

fantasy is usually shit because the authors just copy other established fantasy settings.
go back to your roots and look up fairytales for inspiration. local folklore, ancient folk tales, foreign legends and other myths.

Invent some non-cringe magick system. I mean without sparks coming from wand.

Do one based around the Black Death, with Mongolian wraiths haunting a local village

Maybe doing something small scale would be pretty refreshing. Fantasy is often about huge scale wars and saving the world and shit.

>Make the magicians weaker.
There aren't a whole lot of ways to do that. I mean, either a fireball burns or it doesn't. You can't have it "burn just a little".

>Make spellcasting extremely complex.
Then no magician would be dumb enough to fight in the frontlines in the first place, but be surrounded by waves of guards, making direct confrontations altogether nigh impossible.

>Make spellcasting extremely accessible and write battles where everyone fights with magic.
Which changes the whole fundamental nature of the story, rendering swords and spears irrelevant in the setting.

>There's a billion ways to balance this stuff
Not really, depending on your goals.

The only reasonable options seem to be either limiting magic to the chosen few divine agents, like said. Which then forces you to establish contrived bullshit rules on why these chosen few can't just fight their own wars with their OP hocuspocus. "Destiny", "prime directive" and so on.

...

Write it about poor people and have their qualms manifest as christian mythological figures.

Straight out of the (late) Middle Ages, and into the Western Canon.

Doesn't get any more medieval than that

>I don't know, about every definition of magic in the existence?
What? Did medieval peasants think witches could throw fireballs?

>instead of saying anything constructive
My comment was perfectly constructive. You're defining fantasy in an incredibly narrow way which means 'dudes with swords fighting wizards who shoot lightning out of their hands'. You're ignoring the fact that fantasy doesn't have to be about that at all, which makes it pretty bizarre when you then say
>that really does not promote the idea of fantasy as a genre of creativity and infinite possibilities

It's also an example of how you shouldn't be afraid to both use and abuse old fantasy tropes. Nobody bitched about elves and dwemer in Morrowind because they felt fresh.

Dwarves are awesome though.

Make your own race, or make it about humans vs other humans

This some questions thread?

Is this grammatically correct?
>You pass her feet through the new panties and slide them firmly all the way up to her hips.

For some reason for me it sounds like sliding her feet all the way up.

Help.

if you come from the united states, please dont bother

>My comment was perfectly constructive
"To do something well, all you need to do is not be bad. :^)"

>You're defining fantasy in an incredibly narrow way which means
I'm not giving any definitions to fantasy! "Might&Magic", that is, muscular sword warriors and wise wizards co-existing just happens to be one of the common premises in fantasy literature. If their problematic balance is something I want to examine, and think of new ways to present it, then I obviously wouldn't accept discarding it all as a solution!

And yes, if there's a problem, and you supposedly can have an infinite ways to solve it, then refusing to deal with it at all and doing something else does not exactly demonstrate a great imagination. It's what a kid would do.

This.

I hadn't realised that your aim was to write something strictly within the sword and sorcery genre. I think it's because you're stating things like
>Magic is the power to manipulate reality with your very mind
as matters of simple definition instead of genre conventions.

Before my own goals, the whole conversation started from pointing out the problems magic presents in a setting. A magic-exclusive world is one solution to the problem, yes. There's just no point in me separately arguing about that, because it's self-explanatory.

>Magic is the power to manipulate reality with your very mind
In many cases, that's the way it's essentially presented, and because it's common, I used that definition for the argument. Regardless of the mechanics involved, magic is about making what you want happen in reality. How else would you define it?

Use folklore of an obscure culture.
>in b4 youkai

by creating your own creatures!

Try something like the game Darklands. What the common medieval man thought was the truth it's the truth in your novel. The saints are an active agents in this world. There are miracle workers like Saint Anthony. Divine intervention, prayers, vengeful saints, virgins that can kill Dragons by the grace of God. There is no magic, but alchemy. There are devil worshippers in the Sabath and evil heretics. There are also creatures of folklore, robber barons. Do a research.

I liked how they managed it in Legend of Korra, of all things.

Using technology or knowledge of biology to counter/replicate 'magic' and even the playing field.

For example, hitting pressure points in the right sequence would disable someone's ability to bend the elements for a time.

Furthermore, their 'magic' merely enhanced their abilites at physical combat for the most part, a better fighter would still be able to block/dodge blows.

For example, you have your warrior against a standard spellcaster. A fireball is cast, but a certain steel alloy used in your warrior's shield dissipates the flame, or it travels slowly, giving him ample time to dodge.

Armour could be designed around that metal cage stunt people do, so a lightning spell just circles around them harmlessly, or is redirected by a lightningrod on the armour in to the earth via greaves or somesuch.

High fantasy setting but replace all the races with real world ones. (Jewish conjurers and thieves, Chinese necromancers, African and Pakistani rogues, etc.)

A fantasy world with modern technology. No swords or arrows. More guns and grenades.

Go balls-to-the-wall weird with making up other races. Pull some Lovecraftian shit out of your ass.

Avoid the typical medieval Europe setting and come up with something a little more creative.

If you do magicians and wizards, do them like Joe Abercrombie did in the First Law trilogy. That was a fucking great series.

Magic is as op as you make it. Swords and spears have multiple use but who says wizards can indefinitely shoot fire from fingertips.

Have they no stamina
Have they no culture
Have they no laws
Are they a tiny minority
Are they scattered and alone
Are they a secret community
Are they mentally stable?
Are they failed than regular men

So many ways to spin and balance this. Apply yourself

>How else would you define it?
Achieving results by supernatural means. Historically it's often conceived as doing deals with spirits, carrying out prescribed rituals or using special items. Shooting fireballs from your hands is afaik a modern genre convention which doesn't have a basis in real-world cultures and which doesn't actually appear in several classic fantasy books either.

>asspull

To TVTropes with you faggosaurus-rex

A really good example of what you're talking about is Garth Nix's criminally underrated Abhorsen Trilogy. No elves, or dwarves, or dragons and a cool magic system based off hand sigils and bells.

Neat idea.

Veeky Forums I have a fairy fetish. For some reason the idea of fairies fucking really gets me going. They're so sleek and sprightly and beautiful and have those colorful wings. Plus they probably fornicate in flowerbeds and other neat places.

>write an original medieval fantasy novel without dragons, elves, and dwarves.
There. End of thread.
How hard is that?
(Though dragons are always bitching. Why would you NOT want that?)

Fuck Europe and partially fuck the Near East in terms of where to get your inspiration from past culture.

Look entirely to Asian folklore and mythology. It's far better thought out, as well as being far more evocative, and far less used.

That really was a great series.
Looking forward to the last one in the series next month.

Should be fun with the magical political climate changed by the new "Great Charter"...
And the resolution to Chlorr's story.

As much as I want to call you a fucking weeb. You are quite right.

Make the magic be like in lotr. That is, being a voice of command. The weaker mages can command animals, then people, other magicians, dragons, the weather, etc.

>make it be like lord of the rings

This is honestly the worst fucking advice you could give anyone attempting to bleed new life into an otherwise mediocre and tactless genre full of hacks.

Fuck getting influence from Lord of the Rings in any way shape or form, just let the tired crow die.

I'm currently writing something of an Arthurian/Chaucer kind of tale, as in, 'in that setting' of magic and medieval happenings. It's also fairly 'greek tale' inspired with the character's relation to their gods. Their technology at some points is fairly advanced for their time, like some instances of artificial lighting, but its casually explained as technology from an enemy, more advanced, kingdom.

Anywho, I'm simply not adding any other races. The only thing i'm adding are 'Fae' people, a civilization that lives under the rule of the goddess of earth in a remote forest. But they're being wiped entirely in the first book, so they're not central at all to the plot.

Tldr, you don't have to add any other races than human, because all that adds to your story is a sense of 'mystery and unfounded culture' which you can instead impliment with something far, far more easier: unexplained magic abilities.

There ya go, i set you on your path of writing.

>>I'm currently writing something of an Arthurian/Chaucer kind of tale, as in, 'in that setting' of magic and medieval happenings.

I wonder how it feels to have your novel be indistinguishable from everything else in the bargin bin at a Barnes and Noble in Arizona. Or having authors rightly criticize you on being an unoriginal talentless hack.

It must not feel too particularly good.

The Mole People Incident of 1546

I'm actually writing it to be an obvious, or at least i hope it's conveyed that way, recreation of the genre of 'Arthurian tale.' I think that honestly its a very dead area amongst current popular books what with it not being as trendy as, 'My life as a tranny,' or something something I'm a special teenager.

It's something of a spoof, but i kind of hope, that if anything, it brings back the Chaucer-like tales because those were my favorite to read in my classes.

You don't know that

Song of Roland is probably my favorite book of that genre.

I-in case you were wondering desu

You're sex life

Why is his book automatically cliched and talentless just for using an often used setting.
Is it somehow impossible to breath new life into it?
Just because you can't write well enough to do it, doesn't mean he can't

I didn't say what i was writing for you to defend me or anything!

B-but thanks for defending me anyway desu...i guess.

>I'm actually writing it to be an obvious, or at least i hope it's conveyed that way, recreation of the genre of 'Arthurian tale.'

It is obvious that you're obviously trying to appeal to something simple to a fault, with no real motive or moral otherwise besides what's already been done to death.

>I think that honestly its a very dead area amongst current popular books

That's not particularly bad. What is there to say about European myth that hasn't already been said to death. That and you're quite wrong on it not being trendy, for every second you type your idea has already been thought out and shelved out an enormous amount of times within the past 6 years.

And guess what none of them sell or are reviewed particularly well? Why? It isn't because it's a bias against Europeans, it's simply the fact that its gotten old and there is a stigma associated with it.

>It's something of a spoof

Even worse.

I honestly think you should realvuate your literature if you think "Oh that one other race might exist but it dies" is good writing. There's no impact or conflict to it. It just sounds like bad fantasy, "spoof" or not. You aren't doing a work like Song of Roland proud.

If the point is simplicity just have humans

That and there's no real morale today to be gleaned from Arthurian legend. Author's focus now should primarily on morals from isolation.

>Why is his book automatically cliched and talentless just for using an often used setting.

Because to say the setting is often used is an insult for literature that is only just often used. The amount of pages wasted on no name publishers shelving out stories not for artistic merit or the author's perceived artistic merit, but because it might sell well because its fantasy, is heinous.

It's repeating the same idea with the hope it will be interesting enough to get money. There is no deeper moral. It is just, pure, sales. And it's not good literature.

the saints europeans pray to help them in battle as if they were jojo stands

I mean yeah there's reasoning behind why they're going to die, but i'm not going to spill out the entire plot of my book on an anonymous website for anyone to just pick apart.

So jeez laweez goose, give me a break

And of course I'm appealing to something to a fault. I'm writing for a setting that I dont belong in, trying to be in the leagues of those who were. Yeah, I'm going to be at fault, anything that I would write that I'm not immediately familiar with is going to be at a fault, but that's getting into another subject.

I mean, fuck, Harry Potter was decent considering that Rowling isn't a spell flicking wizard but damned if she's not a best seller.

For starters, you're assuming user's only in it for the money, which he established in his first post, is not true.
Secondly, so what if there's an extra book on the market? If you treat books in such a way that taking an artistic risk is disrespectful to the arts, you're taking your literature a little too seriously

>>For starters, you're assuming user's only in it for the money

I didn't suggest that. I suggested that people who publish it aren't publishing it for the reasons the author might otherwise respect. Marketing also factors into this.

And the fact is we have enough fucking fantasy novels with knights and dragons and castles on them at this point.

But you stated that it was cliched and pointless because of people in it for the money.
Are their boring and uncreative works somehow going to taint his book due to being in the same genre?

>But you stated that it was cliched and pointless because of people in it for the money.

Yes for all the people but the author. But the author is somewhat at fault for putting their story in such a setting, if it isn't used within the realm of mature YA genre fiction, that isn't handled with care.

What you do if you ever want to respect the material you're using, you don't automatically go for the setting in order to respect it. You use its morals, and I would say even then this would be a novel more suited to YA fiction. A good example of YA genre fiction that actually has a point to instill would ironically be The Hobbit. I find myself leaning towards Secret of Nimh, with its setting unfamiliar to that of castles but original enough to be relatable in a separate context

But the thing is it doesn't have to be. You could have the same themes set in rural 1937 Alabama with characters who are farmers. There's no reason to have fantasy tropes to get the message across. It works far less for it.

That said I would find it more of a challenge as a writer to create fiction that would have the same themes, but not have a fantastical setting that is otherwise uneeded, and otherwise cliche and hopelessly tied to sleezy publishers who pump out garbage and market it worse. It associates you with it.

Try to not go for the obvious, challenge yourself to adopt it into something new.

>The setting doesn't matter as long as the morals and theme are good.
>But if the setting happens to be one that I think is used too much it's automatically cliched and pointless.

>But if the setting happens to be one that I think is used too much it's automatically cliched and pointless.

That isn't why I said it was cliched and pointless. I said it was cliched because it was cliched to a fault, and there being consequences stemming from that to the author.

Do ancient roman based fantasy instead senpai.

I think one should only use magic if it serves at least two purposes besides plot. For example to set tone, themes or characterization.

You guys are mean. You're going off on a tangent far from what the OP intended. If it's my fault for getting you both so off topic then I'm sorry.

My main point was that you don't necessarily need to add multiple races into a medieval setting, rather just something as equally intriguing and mysterious because that's a fairly central theme in the genre. My example being the presence of magic--something that nobody reading knows or has experienced and thus innately intriguing.

Or, fuck, just create a world very similar to our own, such as politics and government systems, but add in your own ideas such as kingdom identities, religion, and interactions.

they're better fantasy writers than Veeky Forums

>Or having other authors rightly criticze you on being an unorginal talentless hack
Sure ya didn't

This thread has gotten hilariously off track

Perhaps...someone was meaning to through...shitposting...?

I am of the opinion that shitposting has become the dominant mode of post production

>You guys are mean.

Tbh senpai I was being a bit harsh but for a point. I was trying to be helpful to explain, why that setting isn't a good idea if you want to be a professional author.

I was trying to present an idea to challenge you in writing a bit. Try to separate the themes of the novel you're writing into another setting entirely. I'm saying this because it's challenging and challenge always allows you to adapt. You can create a spoof of arthurian fantasy fiction without the context of fantasy within it, say have it set in a different historical time period altogether, and you have an interesting novel. Albeit it isn't as exciting as you might like, you give it heart to make your ideas otherwise come across.

I'd rather nobody have Microsoft come to them asking them to write the new Halo or Gears of War novel.

Everybody's a snob jerk here when it comes to their ideas. People exaggerate. That said I agree to a degree, I mean there's no reason to blatantly use ideas within the timeframe and context they were in. Sure that makes it easier and more simple, but it also loses ideas along the way adapting it in the process. This leaves the material in such a state it has been done too many times to count before.

>ctrl+f "demigod"
>no results

Come on, OP, think on this. There's more than enough stuff to draw on if you want superpowered beings. You don't need elves or dwarves or dragons at all.

That's soooo 100 A.D.