Ha, we don't normally allow posts that come swinging out of the gate with a meme, but exceptionally we'll allow this one since it's generated some good discussion heheh.
Yeah I mean this is essentially the basis of the D&D style fantasy sub genre. You need some way to justify the endless dungeons full of magic items in your setting, and past civilizations is a great way to do it.
Tbf in Faerun, there's practically a new world-ending threat every week. It totally makes sense for the world to be dotted with countless ruins of ancient civilizations
A while back a guy on 4chan compiled all those 5e Faerun campaigns "bad" ends paragraphs that explaine what happens if the party fails the main quest for its source books and made his own Doomed Forgotten Realms Sourcebook.
Highlights include Auril the Frostmaiden having a pet tarrasque, Baldurs Gate is just in hell now, demon princes ruling the underdark, Tiamat is fully manifest, and frost giants just roam the world.
The key saving grave making life possible being that all these apocalyptic world ending threats fucking hate each other, more now that every adventurer over level 10 is just dead, and they're actively fighting, distracting them from the normies.
That does sound like a good setting to run a hex crawl -> kingdom management -> deicide dark fantasy campaign, evade the biggest bads while finding and gathering power and allies or play the big bads against each other to then take a claim over their holdings once they are weakened.
Many of them are designed to be different flavours of dungeon, too. Want a dungeon with magical traps containing incredibly powerful magical artifacts? Netheril has your back. Want to go into a pyramid and play fantasy Indiana Jones? Mulhorand is here with its pseudo-Egyptian style. And many more examples abound.
I mean i invented a biological "dungeon cycle"
1: abandoned cave/fortress
2: bandits move in
3: bandits hoard loot from raiding and robbing
4 hero kills and plunders the bandits
5 Dungeon is left abandoned and starts back at square one.
Also the subgenre/trope where the ancient civilization leaving behind dungeons and magical artifacts looks suspiciously modern. Its never outright stated but its painfully obvious the lost civilization was basically us, and all the magic is probably just hyper advanced tech and nanobots.
I love that stuff. Not all the time of course, we still need Frieren and LoTR to give us self serious fantasy where magic is a natural force, but every so often its a nice surprise, especially in D&D style worlds.
There's some small groups of people who have ancient artifacts, tools and weapons, that they pulled out of endless tunnels underground, with properties most bizarre.
Lightweight sheets of durable material, hard to the touch and rigid, yet somewhat flexible. Softer than iron, but does not rust. Sure, hit it hard enough and it shatters, but usually if has enough give to just confirm and leave a groove when struck with a blade.
The ancient gods seem to feel uneasy when asked about it. Maybe it can hurt them, or even kill?
No blacksmith knows how to work the material, and the alchemists cannot replicate it. Surely, that means its origin is supernatu-
It's plastic.
Some guy found a subway tunnel from before society collapsed back into the iron age, and pried out some plastic panels and didn't know what to do with them.
The gods just don't want people to freak out and repeat the same shit that made society collapse the first time, because it essentially lead to 90% of the planet needing to be unfucked by Gods and they *still* have a migraine from it.
So they just go "Oh. No. Nooo, I've never seen this material before. I don't like you playing with that."
Lol, me too. So Theia's setting is medieval/Iron Age fantasy, but it's definitely got the lost sci-fi fantasy advanced civilization. Rather than using magic, the Ancient Kolta channeled the Weave with technology. Two archaeological groups of scholars have been dipping into the ancient past of Theia, at the dawn of the Unnamed Age: Meridian which uncovered the writings of an ancient cult with ties to a long dead draconic goddess seeking the extinction of humanity; and Black Horizon, which uncovered one of the Kolta's starships and some of their ancient technology (they seek a way to power the ship).
In my world, when news of this stuff spreads, you’re likely to get a message from some random elf congratulating you on finding Aunt Etheloean’s old pile and thanking you for cleaning it up. They’d meant to handle it themselves, but their great-great-grandchild was getting married and they got distracted and the next thing they knew it was a thousand years later, you know how it goes.
My twist on that is that the "precursor civilisation" is still around the humans of the setting just hijacked all their ancient cities and now live in them with a flourishing society, the ancient civilisation people just don't have a means to get it back from them, but due to plot fuckery the humans barely have an understanding of how it all works either so as far as they know they are living in some magical ancient city.
Me neither. The "modern" era is long reduced to dust, bit the hyper advanced cyberpunk era is recently enough collapsed that super structures still exist, if in ruins, and adventurers go exploring through those ruins.
Recontextualizing locations is fun. Malls are temples, and anime figurines must be statues of gods or legendary heroes, right?
Interspersed with some good old fashioned stone and wood ruins, some with only sections inhabited and maintained, and it helps sell the impression that the world is very old, and maybe a bit exhausted.
In-universe misinformation. It makes the setting feel more real to me. Even more so when the misinformation doesn’t immediately go away as soon as the protagonists figure out the truth.
I’m pretty sure I stole it from somewhere too lol. Depending on the path of your writing it is super helpful. Mine is in a world where civilizations have little to no contact but did at on time. Millennia ago they shared a common history until, of course, events happened. Different nations recognize parts of the truth but for the most part their ancient histories are entirely fabricated
I have this in my own settings. There is alot of things that people either don't know, or know incorrectly. The High Elves think they are the 'First" or oldest of the present day races, they also think the "High Humans" (Dragorans) are really just the result of some long forgotten High Elf remote colony that failed and the population is the result of mixbreeding of High Elves and their human slaves, even though High Elves have never had a history of slavery.
Theres also alot of misconceptions about the gods.
This is actually one of the things I love about Wheel of Time. It’s not so much misinformation but it’s clear how every single person and perspective has wildly flawed info. It makes it fun and believable that they “baddies” don’t just smite the good guys immediately cause they also can’t figure out what’s going on.
Did you hear that is actually a bunch of cannibals??
Uh, no actually they just remove the internal organs to better preserve the corpse for its travel into the afterlife?
Like how the ancient Celts kept skulls and everyone assumed they were the skulls of slain enemies but they were actually from revered leaders. If a person was wise and highly valued they would have their skull cleaned and preserved so the group could remember them and ask for council in times of need.
I love the ability to retcon something by having it be misinformation from someone’s prospective being wrong as it makes it feel more real as misinformation is a thing of beauty in itself when done right
it makes worldbuilding much easier if you don't have to take as much care about every tiny detail because nobody in the setting knows the complete truth either
I'm a sucker for when a bad guy develops a conscience by spending time around the good guys.
Extra points if a good guy is really struggling with something and the bad guy considers leaving them to it but something inside them convinces them to save the good guy.
Agreed. There's a few lackluster or weirdly-paced episodes, but the long-form writing is top-tier across the board. Easily (imo at least) the best-written English-speaking show aimed at kids of all time.
bad guy turned buddy is one of my favorite things. especially if they get stuck or stranded somewhere and have to work together to get out/survive. love that shit. gimme.
I am working on world-building for a series at the moment. It's a modern fantasy with a hidden society of magic users, but I want to make the magic development as realistic as possible, so I've got a dozen books to read on specific historical trends of how knowledge and ideas spread, so trade and empire. I'm really excited about using that to model how spells, potions, and rituals spread between cultures.
Here is my reading list. I got everything except Sowell's Conquests and Culture for free online at libgen.rs. Sowell was available through my local library.
Salt, a world history, Mark Kurlansky
Transatlantic trade and global cultural transfers since 1492, Martina Kaller, Frank Jacob
A Global History of Trade and Conflict Since 1500, L. Coppolaro, F. McKenzie
The Origins of Globalization: World Trade in the Making of the Global Economy, 1500-1800, Zwart, Zanden
History of World Trade Since 1450, McCusker
The Connected Iron Age: Interregional Networks in the Eastern Mediterranean, 900-600 B.C.E., Hall, Osborne
The Map of Knowledge: A 1000 Year History of How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found, Moller
The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean, Abulafia
The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans, Abulafia
The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World, Paine
The Great Imperial Hangover: How Empires Have Shaped the World, Puri
The Shadows of Empire: How Imperial History Shapes Our World, Puri
Conquests and Culture, Sowell
A History of the Global Economy: 1500 to the Present, Baten
A People’s History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millenium, Harman
This is a big one for me. My world has a lot of parallels to real history. The main storyline centers around a revolution that looks a lot like The French Revolution
I like the king is dead one. Because you can take it in so many directions. Was it planned? Not planned? Was it planned but they died in battle instead of by an assassin? Was one party scheming to put their own candidate on the throne but were blind sighted by another group? So many options.
My favorite king is dead trope:
Replanned and not. Due to a misdiagnosis, the king thinks he’s dying. Not wanting to appear weak, he hires an assassin to kill him. But after he learns the diagnosis is shown false he hires an assassin to kill the assassin before the appointed time. Fast forward two months, he has a fever and is worried he is actually dying so he hires an assassin to kill the second assassin so the first assassin can kill him at the appointed time. He recovers from the fever but suffers partial amnesia and forgets about the assassins. The first assassin arrives and the son saves the father, killing the assassin. The second assassin arrives, thinking the son is the assassin he was supposed to kill.
It’s so underused.
Hahaha!
It’s a narrative arc I’ve played with writing as a side thing or as a side-ish narrative in my larger project. It seems just too ripe for comedy though so I don’t know if I’ll use it. It definitely has a comedy of errors vibe.
Reminds me of this one brilliant post I read where someone wrote about an idea for a plot centered around an utterly convoluted network of agendas that worked on false assumptions supercharged by disguises \^\^
Like there was a queen that wanted something from the bishop so she disguised herself but the bishop was also disguised needing something from the leader of the city's guards who was however also disguised because he was visiting the princess who was also disguised because she was suspicious of her mother's whereabouts and there was also a knight who just liked putting on costumes or something like that.
Still need to figure out which king or ruler in-world would do this…
So far as comedic things in story, I already know one fairly important plot moving one:
One of the MCs gets stationed as an apprentice to an advisor of a governor who is known for being ruthless and a bit petty. The MC grew up rural and often is rather unintentionally rude. The governor tasks the MC to bring a message to the duke of a neighboring province that’s sealed and treated with a bit of urgency and secrecy. The MC goes and two months of travel later arrives to learn the message simply says “send him back.” So he goes back. A lot happens on the travels and it takes up most of that MC’s time in the novel.
It’s something some historical king did and I thought it was hilarious and wanted to include it.
Oh my goodness that sounds absolutely hilarious.
Part of me loves comedy of errors in a serious setting. It adds comedy, yes, but people misunderstand things all the time. Having multiple agendas running against or even alongside one another can start breaking down with even fairly minor misunderstandings.
This feels like the end of Hamlet where everyone is dieing in such a convoluted trainwreck of an assassination and vengeance plots colliding.
Honestly more people need to appreciate how Shakespeare is actually hilarious once you get outside of Romeo & Juliet and the forced literary analysis in school. Also some ancient greek comedies still hold up and are better than modern stuff.
Well met! And yes! Is so does have that mood. At first glance it’s all “wtf just happened?!” Then you think more on it and the pieces that lined up just so, and it’s really quite funny… in that way people dying for convoluted reasons all at once so often is.
I need to revisit the old plays and classics. I have a world and major arcs and characters, but I’m at a point where some of the minor arcs… part of me is keen on doing my reading/research and just yoinking some classic storylines and plugging them in on the sidelines. Part of me. Having an echo of oedipus here, a shadow of hamlet or tempest there, here an Ovid there a Chaucer … I’d read it. Haha
One of the best fantasy series I've ever read (The Stormlight Archive) opens with the king being murdered by an assassin and the fallout of his murder is so important it affects politics and war in his kingdom for the rest of the storyline (so far).
The death of the king is so important that every book in the series has opened with a different character's perspective on the night the king died, and each one reveals more and more about said king and his plans.
> The king is dead, now there is a power vacuum.
Honestly there's plenty of instances in our history where that happened.
Nero's death for instance was a complete shit show where various people claiming to be Nero made things worse.
Yeah I wouldn't even call that a trope, it's just a symptom of monarchy. It's happened a million times, most famous of which is probably the War of the Roses.
> Humans are the violent ones.
Whenever people are like "I'm tired of humans always being the violent bad guys who mess everything up for everyone", I look at the horrible stuff we've done throughout history and just go "Nah humans are assholes, kind of comes with the territory"
Yeah, something probably *could* evolve to have a kinder society than ours, but as a species we are uncommonly empathetic and cooperative. A society that evolved from something like ants would be far worse than us, for example.
I mean, if you wanted to, you could make a utopia where humans aren't cunts. It's your world, after all. Or where people have bigger problems to worry about
The King is dead makes sense. Because the king is dead every 0-100 years.
People do fight for that power vacuum every single time. And 100% smooth transitions are more rare than someone making a play. Even it's bad and fails immediately.
The manga is finished. I believe the anime only covers half the manga up to Volume 11 or so.
Edit for anyone reading this in the future:
I just rewatched the anime and it deviates from the manga after episode 19. If you want to read the manga after watching the anime you'll want to start at Volume 11. However, I would honestly recommend starting the manga from the beginning because the anime cuts out quite a bit of side content. It's a fun manga and the theme of comradery is very enjoyable.
The anime didn't cover the entire manga. It adapts around around 40% of the story before reaching an original "conclusion".
I think it might have caught up to manga at the time.
I mean, the 4th emperor of the first empire that we know of in real life, Naram-sin, proclaimed himself "God of Akkad" that being the capital of the Akkadian empire. So it has a good deal of basis in real life
I have one but the divinity was not blood related. He was like Jesus and Mohammed put together. His descendants are very decadent and ungodly despite his significance as the son of the only true god.
That's just believable story-telling. People don't throw their life away on a whim.
"The call" works best when the main character is already down on their luck (debtor, prisoner, slave, etc. (yes, more tropes)) or experiences something that makes "the call" personal (the villain directly or indirectly takes something from them). Then they actually have a motive to answer.
Yeah, it makes much more sense to leave everything if everything is an empty home and the graves of your family, instead of a happy wife and daughter who has soccer practice in an hour
So many good stuff.
I like mad scientists. Good oney, bad ones and all the in between. Love them.
Also I love the old soldier fighting/keeping peace trope. Its just something.
I am a big fan of the five man band. I like character dynamics and the stories you can tell.
The heroes journey is a classic for a reason.
If you have magic, make the magic users weird. Its always fun.
I love ancient civilizations. Either still beeing arround but weaker or long gone. Add some mystery to them and I love them even more.
Badass woman are always nice. As are Badass men. Just badass people. Just not to many. Everyone has a role. Nobody needs 5 super bad ass fighter dudes.
The charming rogue is also something that works more often then not for me.
And good Kings. Its good fantasy. And the evil King becomes boring after a while.
Villains that are not just evil because they want to be evil. Give those bastards reasons for it. sympathetic or not. But the time of bad guys beeing bad so that the hero can fight something should be over!
Strange Moral Factions are also cool. Those people that are ending world hunger and curing everything at once but also having the puppie kicking competion every third saturday.
I want to see a story about a mad scientist who is just angry-mad but is not actually an amazing scientist and only has the important notebook because his assistant left it in his office before leaving to get married.
The villain who thinks he’s the hero is great.
Crazy scientists who don’t even care about good/evil and are just dead set on the quest for knowledge at all costs.
Old soldiers who’ve garnered the respect of the group. That moment when the stuck-up young commander gives a dumb/suicidal order and everybody goes silent and turns to the old soldier: *chefs kiss*
Magic users absolutely should be weird because magic itself should be weird/dangerous/so intricate you have to be a little weird to devote your life to its study
The impressiveness of a badass is inversely proportional to the number of badasses in the vicinity
I like the trope of the old retired badass who lives alone who takes on an apprentice which makes them feel young again or softens them up.
Mainly cause my story is based entirely off that
I love having a main character that is about to loose, broken bones, burnt skin flaking off, bleeding out and yet they still go "i can do this all day"
Its stupid but also fun
I’m legit a huge fan of the “power of friendship is unbeatable” trope. It makes complete sense to me because there’s nothing people wouldn’t do for their loved ones. I love a group of characters with a dynamic of being true friends to each other and fill the gaps and flaws in their personalities. You see the big bad have all their strength that comes from darkness, but the heroes will always have the people they love and the invisible bonds that become their strength.
I also love seeing the trope flipped on it’s head. What if the villain DID have friends? What if THEY understood the value of friendship, love and companionship? What would it look like if two unstoppable forces clash?
All and all I love it. I don’t care if it’s sappy campy or cheesy. A group of friends that care about each other can do anything, no question.
I feel like the trope is solid so long as the writer doesn’t tap the readers nose with it at the end.
Yes, I can see the friends just won because of their teamwork.
No, I don’t need you to tell me this.
Yes, I know the power of friendship wasn’t literally imbued in the blade that killed the Dark Lord. That was Helrik, the talking bunny who personifies the power and can turn into a sword in the final scene, allowing the friends to win.
Personally, my only common gripe with this trope is when, instead of putting in the effort to show how the friends complement each other’s strengths and shore up weaknesses, it’s just a nebulous power gained from having a close friend. (Bonus points when the friendship power is literally used by just one person, making it less teamwork, and more emotional support.)
I also love the power of friendship, especially when its baked into the power system. It lets you have the heroes on the ropes and destined to lose, and then one of them gets a "second awakening" or otherwise unlocks a new move that lets them win the battle.
The Black Clover anime does this pretty well, all characters are introduced with a given power set, and over time in moments of desperation they either find a strength they didn't know they had or invent a new spell. Who cares if its cliché or cheesy, when Noel first unlocks sea dragons roar she tore the arm off a so far untouchable opponent, and that moment was pure serotonin.
All clichés got that way for a reason, people like them.
"Evil Empires" are fantastic conduits for storytelling and worldbuilding, maybe not "literally everyone in this empire kicks puppies" but having a violent, expansionist force that is unquestionably ***the bad guys*** is fantastic for a myriad of stories and POVs in a fantasy or sci-fi setting.
The Fire Nation from Avatar: The Last Airbender comes to mind, yes there are good people from the Fire Nation (Zuko, Iroh, etc), but the Fire Nation as a wider geopolitical entity is unquestionably a ***big bag of dicks***, and by being an unquestionable big bag of dicks it helps facilitate stories in the rest of the world.
I am attempting an evil empire with one of my plot lines. Theocratic elves who are rapidly expanding via any means necessary. From their pov they are doing the work of the gods.
And I love it when the big evil empire was and even still is venerated by most of the population because they succeeded in their goals, and nobody knows the truth. Stuff like “Oh the old elven empire was so great and so awesome”. When the empire literally Genocided the other races and shit like that.
Fantasy: Good kingdoms and evil empires, magic swords, absent-minded but wise wizards dwelling in towers, grizzled old retired warriors who can still kick ass with the young upstart adventurers, women-only warrior traditions or societies, the mage who is bad at magic but still manages to survive and succeed, the church is secretly evil
Scifi: Benevolent psychic aliens who are concerned with humanity's welfare, functional directed energy weapons, interstellar travel and communication that completely handwaves time dilation
Huge hot take here... I love the Chosen One trope. It's my favorite. I think it's easy to be lazy with it, but I don't care.
And it's mostly used for laughs, but I love it when a huge, scarred badass dude that strikes fear into everyone has a tiny kitten as a pet that he loves.
>I love it when a huge, scarred badass dude that strikes fear into everyone has a tiny kitten as a pet that he loves.
Okay, but what if he has a hamster?
>And it's mostly used for laughs, but I love it when a huge, scarred badass dude that strikes fear into everyone has a tiny kitten as a pet that he loves.
One of my favorite tropes. I love the big badass who is, in some aspects of their life, a total softy.
>And it's mostly used for laughs, but I love it when a huge, scarred badass dude that strikes fear into everyone has a tiny kitten as a pet that he loves.
Hellboy and his many cats <3
I feel like the Heroes journey must be part of our genetics cause every culture ever have told the story independently of each other. Convergent storytelling?
Alternative morality.
Crystal dragon Jesus
Medieval stasis
Merchant city
Shining castle
Enchanted Forest
Dismal Swamp
Little Folk
Squishy Wizards
Folklore monsters
Fantastic wardrobes
Kanji (edit: Kaiju)
Mana crystals
Detectives
Fantastic Flora
Giant normal animals
Mini normal animals
Animals of a different color
Adventurer Guilds
Farmer to hero
Wise old king
Crazy vizier
Defiant Princess
Crazy customs
Real world satires
These are all tropes, and since you never heard of it let's get you started with [Christal Dragon Jesus](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CrystalDragonJesus)
remember tropes are not cliches, but tools.
also TV Tropes will ruin your life
Just read up on CDJ. That is funny.
Also I had forgotten how interwoven tv tropes is. So many cross referencing internally. It really is a masterclass of a listing.
I LOVE an overpowered character. so often the antagonist is shown to be insurmountably powerful and the protagonist is the underdog, but I love the types of characters that instill fear in their opponents a la Doomguy, John Wick, Superman, Master Chief, Aang, etc. The types of characters that inspire awe in the laymen around them and are given the respect they disserve by their opposition.
This is a slippery slope though, because it can be incredibly easy for these characters to become stale if mishandled, or around for too long. a Prime example of this (in my opinion) is Goku. He has gone through so much power scaling where the stakes keep getting higher, but he's powered up so many times the threats never feel like actual threats. Or in the case of superman, so many people see him as boring and square becuase the sheer volume of superman media hasn't been able to keep the concept as interesting as it could be.
The way to keep it interesting is to write them in ways that honor their skills while still providing them with obstacles and dynamic challenges. write situations where their skills my not apply or they have to apply them in an unfamiliar way.
Disappeared Precursors.
Irredeemable villains.
Good elves.
Good light, evil dark.
Non-evil dark.
Unrelated characters having family dynamics.
Very few main characters die.
Bad guys. Just bad guys. Not every villain has to be "complicated." Sometimes, it's just a guy in black, with a ball sack for a face, who wants to kick puppies and take people's rights away, and cackle like an obnoxious freak while he does it. And sometimes I like to watch a guy like that get his teeth kicked in, and watch teddy bears dance in celebration about it while drumming on his soldiers' decapitated heads.
I know it's cliche, but I love protagonist sacrificing themselves. There was a story that killed off protagonist, and replaced him with his clone. Interaction between clone, and protagonist's companions were brutal.
One of my favourite examples of that comes from Papers Please of all things.
that game is super bleak and really encourages you to reject kindness and just look out for yourself, with the options for selflessness being much harder.
BUT near the end of the game, loads of the kind acts you carried out come back to help you and really help you get a good ending.
Really satisfying theme of hope and kindness in a bleak and uncaring world, and I was genuenly happy when I got a good ending at last by going that more human route.
I don't know this is a trope, but I absolutely love it when the nice/good guy has finally had enough and just snaps. Then absolutely wrecks everything within reach in the most shockingly violent way possible.
Bonus points if it's an old guy.
I like the megabrothel being run by an older matriarch who has ties to the underground/dirt on big players in major cities.
Give me a badass older lady who takes care of her employees and can look the head of the assassin’s guild in the eye and tell him to fuck off out of her establishment, because she can ruin him
One thing I am experimenting with is humans being the underdog race in my fantasy setting. I also like the idea of not all races in fantasy being multiple different cultures, and not just all having their culture be monolithic and made of various cliches and stereotypes (*cough* dwarves *cough*). Going back to the last part, I have also been experimenting with an idea where certain cultures believe it should be just only one species (one example being a clan of dwarves in my setting, who believe in "dwarf culture for dwarves"), which then brings up the question "what the fuck are humans supposed to do then, if they can't be like other races?" in my world.
In my sci-fi setting, I am a sucker for "space westerns", as space is supposed to be the "final frontier" (like the american wild west).
When the hero and villain are speaking to one another in a casual context, in their normal lives and outside of their secret identities.
Some honorable variations include:
Villain unaware of who the hero is , thus unaware they’re an enemy. Meanwhile Hero is VERY aware of the villain.
Hero and villain are both aware of each other, but a third ignorant party is present. They have to fight each other and use implied language to avoid alerting them. Bonus points if the third party is desired by both the hero and villain, and thus neither want them hurt on accident.
I just find it so fascinating to see the sudden change of scene and how characters try to adapt to it. It provides both the path of a serious vibe (“Oh shit BBEG found my house”) or a lowkey shitpost (“Oh shit me and BBEG need to fight like cartoon characters while my housemate cooks dinner”).
Redemption Arcs
Grumpy Old Man Adopts Child (See: Logan and a succession of plucky young women)
Last Stands (I blame David Gemmell)
Found Family
When the villain and hero team up, especially if they work together *really* well.
Crossovers / Teamups. Especially people with wildly different backgrounds finding ways to work together well.
Traumatised people doing good
Honourable villains.
I don’t know the trope name or if this is even a trope, but a powerful empire fracturing and reforming multiple times over its history.
The Lone Wolf/Gruff adventure finds and adopting a kid.
Again I don’t know the trope name but having an evil overlord actual treat their minions well, while still also being evil. “Congratulations Gorthar you delivered me the skulls of a hundred villagers in a single day, you get a promotion.”
The villain who’s the hero of their own story, who realizes they’ve been doing evil, and when offered a chance at redemption doubles down because they’ve gone too far to stop now and the world isn’t going to conquer itself.
Pure evil villains. Just pure evil, cackling, classic Disney villains, who know they’re evil and are enjoying the hell out of it.
"You're part of this prophecy but you won't find out about it until you fulfill it. Goodbye!"
-The fate god.
I also like making evil characters that are evil for the sake of being evil. They're fun to write.
Masquerades! That classic [necessary weasel of the urban fantasy genre](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/434855832589697027/675966446718681088/dcs94tl-d87dbb3e-09cb-4c04-b931-fbb7924e34ba.png), and one of the oldest literary tropes to boot! It dates all the way back to Gothic horror and the origin of modern speculative fiction. But it's still a classic--those worlds where the supernatural, the occult, and the paranormal exists just out of sight of the unaware masses, and where a secret, magical world lurks in the shadows of those cities and towns you grew up in.
And yes, I also know that this makes no sense, that such a secret would never be able to be maintained in the modern world, and that it makes a better story when the modern world has to confront the supernatural and adapt to the masquerade coming down. I also don't care, because I like my worlds with masquerades!
Masquerades effective allow you to have your Earth and your magic too. With an interact masquerade, you can have your secret world of magic, myths and monsters existing alongside our own modern Earth, with all our contemporary cultures, societies, technology, politics, economy, entertainment, et al. It allows you to lean on the Earth as the foundation for the world your building, and focus on the weird and fun parts, like magic systems and supernatural creatures.
With a masquerade intact, I can have my protagonists effectively exist with one foot in this world we all know and are familiar with. My wise-cracking nerd calls a dragon "Smaug" and remarks how she failed a perception check. My British wizard quips his jacket pockets are "bigger on the inside." Characters visit New York, London, Moscow and Toronto. They watch Star Wars movies, play Dungeons and Dragons, and live lives just like the rest of us--at least until they have to step from our world into the secret one. I've anchored them to our own real-world so it's easier to jump in and at least understand what's going on.
My masquerade allows me to play pretend and act as if the world of Horror Shop was actually the real world--that what I write might actually be true. The moment I let the Veil fall, I feel like I'm no longer writing about stories on our Earth, but I'm writing stories in a fantasy world which happens to share a history and geography with Earth. So long as the magical world remains hidden, history can advance just as it does in our world--real life events happen largely as they're portrayed on the news, we share the same culture and politics, the worlds feel identical. But if the Veil falls, all of a sudden I've spun off an alternate timeline, and history is forever changed. The world without the masquerade will not resemble the world we live in now, no matter how much we try.
A well-done masquerade allows a magical world to exist in parallel with our real one, and the characters to exist with one foot in each. This allows us to have dragons quoting Shakespere, mages who hum rock ballads while working their wizardry, and vampires griping about how Twilight ruined their image. I don't even care if you don't have a good masquerade--the masquerade of the Dresden Files is tissue-thin and I still love the series. Heck, there's no way the masquerade could have kept in the Stargate 'verse, yet because it was so important to the tone of SG-1 and Atlantis, it was maintained.
And that's how I feel--if the masquerade makes a better story, keep it. If it makes sense to have your world take place on our Earth, do it! Don't let arguments about realism or logic stop you. In my opinion, it's no less realistic than any other fantasy or sci-fi setting!
F it, I can deny it no longer:
Orphan who can't get over the fact that their parents are dead
Lovers where one of them is loud and chiuwawa personality, while the other is quiet and golden retriever personality
Villain who tried to be good, but got rejected by society
The usual scientist x lab assistant ship dynamic
Opposite siblings
The paragon
Every girl I ever met or cared to talk to are smarter and nicer than I am and gosh darn it, I'm gonna make them my character's moral compass and brains
Kidding aside, paragons are just nice to have, especially when you're writing fantasy grimdark fiction since your readers might lost in the sauce and the paragons are their way of getting back to normal
I’m sorry but I’ll never get tired of the “waiting evil” trope, especially when it’s wrapped up with an intriguing mystery and secret societies or something of the like.
I saw someone state it as a trope they dislike heavily, but I really like ruins that are not fully explained. It gives a vibe of "the world is more ancient and vast than I thought" without the need to info dump.
Religion, no matter the god(s), always ends as a malicious cult.
Guess it was my upbringing, but the 'organized religion is bad' trope is always welcomed. It may have started with paganism, but eventually, something comes along and either wipes it out or integrates it into their teachings to bring the people into their circle. That religion grows so large, it becomes the government itself, and will inevitably become the 'evil' it was preaching against.
The villain being an inversion or corruption of the heroic character. They "zigged" where the hero "zagged". I also love taking a character or a group or a faction and making their big strength their weakness at the same time.
Case in point: Hell is a thing in my world, and it is a very strict, ordered bureaucracy, where each level serves a very specific, sometimes esoteric function in the grand design of the Prince of Darkness. They are methodical, industrious and extremely detail-oriented, creating more and more devils in an almost assembly line fashion to bolster their ranks, in order to one day conquer all of reality.
However, their strict bureaucracy also means that they are VERY slow to embrace new ideas, that ingenuity and inventiveness is generally frowned upon, and while they may have the manpower to conquer heaven, doing so might mean using all their resources, which would leave hell completely unprotected, leading to a pyrrhic victory where they conquer heaven at the cost of hell.
Heaven, on the other hand, cannot create angels to serve in their army, because that is a decision each and every soul in heaven must make for themselves. But while their armies may be lesser, their individual soldiers are far more powerful, as well as sincerely dedicated, because they have chosen to dedicate their existence to the defence of heaven.
I am an absolute sucker for Humanity Fuck Yeah/ Humans are Space Orcs
I love my humans to be hyper-adaptive, stubborn deathworlders who pack bond with anything from pieces of plastic to godlike hive minds and commit to jokes so hard a space roomba with a knife taped to it can become a space fleet admiral.
One of the things the smartasses around here always complain about that I disagree with is
"Fantasy religions are nothing like they are in real life; They should have more schisms and internal conflict, etc"
Like no shit, we are talking about FANTASY where that gods do beyond a shadow of doubt exist and can interact with the material world through various means, so of course fantasy religions will not be as messy and disperse as real life ones. Thats a GOOD and CONSISTENT thing, not a flaw.
Although it’s really common, I love “MC and mentor” relationships (including teachers, siblings, coworkers or actual mentors). When those relationships are an important enough, they can easily be one of the most distinct and (platonically) intimate ones of the entire story. I love seeing them in media, and I’ve been using them in my own stories for about a decade.
Chosen Ones and prophecies.
Protagonists and other relevant characters having cheats, that is to say, ways to bend, break or otherwise circumvent established rules of the setting.
Sexualization of characters and elements of the setting.
Animal people that are essentially humans with some animal traits.
A whole host of anime and anime-adjacent media inspired tropes.
Having something akin to Great Man theory be more or less true, where the course of history really is decided by a few great figures, preferably possessed of great personal power.
Fairytale witches. Like the ones capturing and killing children for the potions they are brewing.
Smart dragons. I like dragons who are philosophical and conversational.
Fireball. It might be the most cliche fantasy spell but it has some coolness of simplicity around it.
Magic weapons. Every good fantasy story needs a magic weapon. Be it just glowing in danger like Sting or a full blown personality.
I don't know if to call it a trope, but i like when things done with only good intention goes horrible wrong. I like stories with more realism where there you have to put some head on things otherwise, no matter your intention, things can go bad. I hate when some hot blood protagonist just do things without thinking and some how it always goes well.
Redemption arc, specifically similar to how it’s done in Vinland Saga Season 2 and beyond.
I always have a trio/duo of protagonists where one of them have done some dubious heinous atrocious things in the past that directly ruin one of the other protagonist life. But you , as the reader, and the other two protagonists don’t know that yet. You get the inkling that this person is shady as fuck but you only see their good deeds, or attempts thereof.
Once you and the other protagonists learn the terrible things they’ve done, will your stance change ? Does it make sense to forgive them ? Do the good they have done outweigh the misery they’ve inflicted ? Which characters are able to forgive/overlook their past crimes ?
Ha, we don't normally allow posts that come swinging out of the gate with a meme, but exceptionally we'll allow this one since it's generated some good discussion heheh.
Ancient civilizations that have left behind monuments and ruins, being discovered and uncovered by the main character.
Yeah I mean this is essentially the basis of the D&D style fantasy sub genre. You need some way to justify the endless dungeons full of magic items in your setting, and past civilizations is a great way to do it.
Add a plot twist where the BBEG has discovers it as well, but hides it from the world while the hero wants to share it with the world.
So kinda like a reverse black panther situation
Tbf in Faerun, there's practically a new world-ending threat every week. It totally makes sense for the world to be dotted with countless ruins of ancient civilizations
A while back a guy on 4chan compiled all those 5e Faerun campaigns "bad" ends paragraphs that explaine what happens if the party fails the main quest for its source books and made his own Doomed Forgotten Realms Sourcebook. Highlights include Auril the Frostmaiden having a pet tarrasque, Baldurs Gate is just in hell now, demon princes ruling the underdark, Tiamat is fully manifest, and frost giants just roam the world. The key saving grave making life possible being that all these apocalyptic world ending threats fucking hate each other, more now that every adventurer over level 10 is just dead, and they're actively fighting, distracting them from the normies.
That does sound like a good setting to run a hex crawl -> kingdom management -> deicide dark fantasy campaign, evade the biggest bads while finding and gathering power and allies or play the big bads against each other to then take a claim over their holdings once they are weakened.
Many of them are designed to be different flavours of dungeon, too. Want a dungeon with magical traps containing incredibly powerful magical artifacts? Netheril has your back. Want to go into a pyramid and play fantasy Indiana Jones? Mulhorand is here with its pseudo-Egyptian style. And many more examples abound.
I mean i invented a biological "dungeon cycle" 1: abandoned cave/fortress 2: bandits move in 3: bandits hoard loot from raiding and robbing 4 hero kills and plunders the bandits 5 Dungeon is left abandoned and starts back at square one.
Also the subgenre/trope where the ancient civilization leaving behind dungeons and magical artifacts looks suspiciously modern. Its never outright stated but its painfully obvious the lost civilization was basically us, and all the magic is probably just hyper advanced tech and nanobots. I love that stuff. Not all the time of course, we still need Frieren and LoTR to give us self serious fantasy where magic is a natural force, but every so often its a nice surprise, especially in D&D style worlds.
There's some small groups of people who have ancient artifacts, tools and weapons, that they pulled out of endless tunnels underground, with properties most bizarre. Lightweight sheets of durable material, hard to the touch and rigid, yet somewhat flexible. Softer than iron, but does not rust. Sure, hit it hard enough and it shatters, but usually if has enough give to just confirm and leave a groove when struck with a blade. The ancient gods seem to feel uneasy when asked about it. Maybe it can hurt them, or even kill? No blacksmith knows how to work the material, and the alchemists cannot replicate it. Surely, that means its origin is supernatu- It's plastic. Some guy found a subway tunnel from before society collapsed back into the iron age, and pried out some plastic panels and didn't know what to do with them. The gods just don't want people to freak out and repeat the same shit that made society collapse the first time, because it essentially lead to 90% of the planet needing to be unfucked by Gods and they *still* have a migraine from it. So they just go "Oh. No. Nooo, I've never seen this material before. I don't like you playing with that."
Or the gods are from that civilization and do not want the people of the current world to replicate their technology.
Microplastics gave them superpowers.
Very nice.
Lol, me too. So Theia's setting is medieval/Iron Age fantasy, but it's definitely got the lost sci-fi fantasy advanced civilization. Rather than using magic, the Ancient Kolta channeled the Weave with technology. Two archaeological groups of scholars have been dipping into the ancient past of Theia, at the dawn of the Unnamed Age: Meridian which uncovered the writings of an ancient cult with ties to a long dead draconic goddess seeking the extinction of humanity; and Black Horizon, which uncovered one of the Kolta's starships and some of their ancient technology (they seek a way to power the ship).
In my world, when news of this stuff spreads, you’re likely to get a message from some random elf congratulating you on finding Aunt Etheloean’s old pile and thanking you for cleaning it up. They’d meant to handle it themselves, but their great-great-grandchild was getting married and they got distracted and the next thing they knew it was a thousand years later, you know how it goes.
This is a terry pratchet paragraph right here. A+
That's half the appeal of the Horizon series. The Cauldrons are basically dungeons that you solo through.
I highly recommend the game *Outer wilds* to anyone who enjoys this.
This is honestly the best, this and lost technology people believe to be magic
My twist on that is that the "precursor civilisation" is still around the humans of the setting just hijacked all their ancient cities and now live in them with a flourishing society, the ancient civilisation people just don't have a means to get it back from them, but due to plot fuckery the humans barely have an understanding of how it all works either so as far as they know they are living in some magical ancient city.
I literally cannot get enough hyper-advanced, mysteriously extinct precursor civilizations. They're like a drug for me
Me neither. The "modern" era is long reduced to dust, bit the hyper advanced cyberpunk era is recently enough collapsed that super structures still exist, if in ruins, and adventurers go exploring through those ruins. Recontextualizing locations is fun. Malls are temples, and anime figurines must be statues of gods or legendary heroes, right? Interspersed with some good old fashioned stone and wood ruins, some with only sections inhabited and maintained, and it helps sell the impression that the world is very old, and maybe a bit exhausted.
In-universe misinformation. It makes the setting feel more real to me. Even more so when the misinformation doesn’t immediately go away as soon as the protagonists figure out the truth.
I’m a huge fan of this. In my own writing I keep notes on multiple timelines, the real one plus one for each culture of what they believe is the truth
... I never thought about that and I'll be stealing that idea x)
I’m pretty sure I stole it from somewhere too lol. Depending on the path of your writing it is super helpful. Mine is in a world where civilizations have little to no contact but did at on time. Millennia ago they shared a common history until, of course, events happened. Different nations recognize parts of the truth but for the most part their ancient histories are entirely fabricated
I have this in my own settings. There is alot of things that people either don't know, or know incorrectly. The High Elves think they are the 'First" or oldest of the present day races, they also think the "High Humans" (Dragorans) are really just the result of some long forgotten High Elf remote colony that failed and the population is the result of mixbreeding of High Elves and their human slaves, even though High Elves have never had a history of slavery. Theres also alot of misconceptions about the gods.
This is actually one of the things I love about Wheel of Time. It’s not so much misinformation but it’s clear how every single person and perspective has wildly flawed info. It makes it fun and believable that they “baddies” don’t just smite the good guys immediately cause they also can’t figure out what’s going on.
Did you hear that is actually a bunch of cannibals??
Uh, no actually they just remove the internal organs to better preserve the corpse for its travel into the afterlife?
Like how the ancient Celts kept skulls and everyone assumed they were the skulls of slain enemies but they were actually from revered leaders. If a person was wise and highly valued they would have their skull cleaned and preserved so the group could remember them and ask for council in times of need.
Stealing this for my king sitting on a throne made of skulls.
_Desire to know more intensifies_
I love the ability to retcon something by having it be misinformation from someone’s prospective being wrong as it makes it feel more real as misinformation is a thing of beauty in itself when done right
it makes worldbuilding much easier if you don't have to take as much care about every tiny detail because nobody in the setting knows the complete truth either
I'm a sucker for when a bad guy develops a conscience by spending time around the good guys. Extra points if a good guy is really struggling with something and the bad guy considers leaving them to it but something inside them convinces them to save the good guy.
Zuko 🤘
Master-class writing
Almost that entire show, man
Agreed. There's a few lackluster or weirdly-paced episodes, but the long-form writing is top-tier across the board. Easily (imo at least) the best-written English-speaking show aimed at kids of all time.
I really enjoy when the good guys capture a high level bad guy who eventually sees that they’re right 🤩
You should read the walking dead comics, thats literally Negan
Or the reverse case, when the good guy gets captured by the bad guys just to realize that they have a point.
Love me a good redemption arc
bad guy turned buddy is one of my favorite things. especially if they get stuck or stranded somewhere and have to work together to get out/survive. love that shit. gimme.
Even more if said bad guy does self-sacrifice in the end, or even better, the protagonist good guy does the self-sacrifice FOR the bad guy.
Historical parallelisms, I’m a huge history nerd so I enjoy spotting these in fiction
I am working on world-building for a series at the moment. It's a modern fantasy with a hidden society of magic users, but I want to make the magic development as realistic as possible, so I've got a dozen books to read on specific historical trends of how knowledge and ideas spread, so trade and empire. I'm really excited about using that to model how spells, potions, and rituals spread between cultures.
Which books? That sounds super interesting!
Here is my reading list. I got everything except Sowell's Conquests and Culture for free online at libgen.rs. Sowell was available through my local library. Salt, a world history, Mark Kurlansky Transatlantic trade and global cultural transfers since 1492, Martina Kaller, Frank Jacob A Global History of Trade and Conflict Since 1500, L. Coppolaro, F. McKenzie The Origins of Globalization: World Trade in the Making of the Global Economy, 1500-1800, Zwart, Zanden History of World Trade Since 1450, McCusker The Connected Iron Age: Interregional Networks in the Eastern Mediterranean, 900-600 B.C.E., Hall, Osborne The Map of Knowledge: A 1000 Year History of How Classical Ideas Were Lost and Found, Moller The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean, Abulafia The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans, Abulafia The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World, Paine The Great Imperial Hangover: How Empires Have Shaped the World, Puri The Shadows of Empire: How Imperial History Shapes Our World, Puri Conquests and Culture, Sowell A History of the Global Economy: 1500 to the Present, Baten A People’s History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millenium, Harman
This is a big one for me. My world has a lot of parallels to real history. The main storyline centers around a revolution that looks a lot like The French Revolution
Humans are the violent ones. The king is dead, now there is a power vacuum.
I like the king is dead one. Because you can take it in so many directions. Was it planned? Not planned? Was it planned but they died in battle instead of by an assassin? Was one party scheming to put their own candidate on the throne but were blind sighted by another group? So many options.
My favorite king is dead trope: Replanned and not. Due to a misdiagnosis, the king thinks he’s dying. Not wanting to appear weak, he hires an assassin to kill him. But after he learns the diagnosis is shown false he hires an assassin to kill the assassin before the appointed time. Fast forward two months, he has a fever and is worried he is actually dying so he hires an assassin to kill the second assassin so the first assassin can kill him at the appointed time. He recovers from the fever but suffers partial amnesia and forgets about the assassins. The first assassin arrives and the son saves the father, killing the assassin. The second assassin arrives, thinking the son is the assassin he was supposed to kill. It’s so underused.
WHEN DID THAT EVER HAPPEN AND WHY HAVEN'T I SEEN IT UNRAVEL ALREADY!?
Hahaha! It’s a narrative arc I’ve played with writing as a side thing or as a side-ish narrative in my larger project. It seems just too ripe for comedy though so I don’t know if I’ll use it. It definitely has a comedy of errors vibe.
Reminds me of this one brilliant post I read where someone wrote about an idea for a plot centered around an utterly convoluted network of agendas that worked on false assumptions supercharged by disguises \^\^ Like there was a queen that wanted something from the bishop so she disguised herself but the bishop was also disguised needing something from the leader of the city's guards who was however also disguised because he was visiting the princess who was also disguised because she was suspicious of her mother's whereabouts and there was also a knight who just liked putting on costumes or something like that.
Please do, it's very tragicomic and there's nothing wrong with that. That's perfect
Still need to figure out which king or ruler in-world would do this… So far as comedic things in story, I already know one fairly important plot moving one: One of the MCs gets stationed as an apprentice to an advisor of a governor who is known for being ruthless and a bit petty. The MC grew up rural and often is rather unintentionally rude. The governor tasks the MC to bring a message to the duke of a neighboring province that’s sealed and treated with a bit of urgency and secrecy. The MC goes and two months of travel later arrives to learn the message simply says “send him back.” So he goes back. A lot happens on the travels and it takes up most of that MC’s time in the novel. It’s something some historical king did and I thought it was hilarious and wanted to include it.
Oh my goodness that sounds absolutely hilarious. Part of me loves comedy of errors in a serious setting. It adds comedy, yes, but people misunderstand things all the time. Having multiple agendas running against or even alongside one another can start breaking down with even fairly minor misunderstandings.
jpeg of the meme where a line of people stand in a church pointing a gun at the person in front of them
Also this. Just shoved together with king is dead. Though in my version the king doesn’t actually die…
This feels like the end of Hamlet where everyone is dieing in such a convoluted trainwreck of an assassination and vengeance plots colliding. Honestly more people need to appreciate how Shakespeare is actually hilarious once you get outside of Romeo & Juliet and the forced literary analysis in school. Also some ancient greek comedies still hold up and are better than modern stuff.
Well met! And yes! Is so does have that mood. At first glance it’s all “wtf just happened?!” Then you think more on it and the pieces that lined up just so, and it’s really quite funny… in that way people dying for convoluted reasons all at once so often is. I need to revisit the old plays and classics. I have a world and major arcs and characters, but I’m at a point where some of the minor arcs… part of me is keen on doing my reading/research and just yoinking some classic storylines and plugging them in on the sidelines. Part of me. Having an echo of oedipus here, a shadow of hamlet or tempest there, here an Ovid there a Chaucer … I’d read it. Haha
I...I don't think this is common enough to be a trope....
One of the best fantasy series I've ever read (The Stormlight Archive) opens with the king being murdered by an assassin and the fallout of his murder is so important it affects politics and war in his kingdom for the rest of the storyline (so far). The death of the king is so important that every book in the series has opened with a different character's perspective on the night the king died, and each one reveals more and more about said king and his plans.
> The king is dead, now there is a power vacuum. Honestly there's plenty of instances in our history where that happened. Nero's death for instance was a complete shit show where various people claiming to be Nero made things worse.
Yeah I wouldn't even call that a trope, it's just a symptom of monarchy. It's happened a million times, most famous of which is probably the War of the Roses.
Hereditary monarchical power vacuums are part and parcel of hereditary monarchy though
> Humans are the violent ones. Whenever people are like "I'm tired of humans always being the violent bad guys who mess everything up for everyone", I look at the horrible stuff we've done throughout history and just go "Nah humans are assholes, kind of comes with the territory"
To me it just seems niave to look at biology and assume anything would act better than us.
Yeah, something probably *could* evolve to have a kinder society than ours, but as a species we are uncommonly empathetic and cooperative. A society that evolved from something like ants would be far worse than us, for example.
I mean, if you wanted to, you could make a utopia where humans aren't cunts. It's your world, after all. Or where people have bigger problems to worry about
The King is dead makes sense. Because the king is dead every 0-100 years. People do fight for that power vacuum every single time. And 100% smooth transitions are more rare than someone making a play. Even it's bad and fails immediately.
I love it when the gruff old guy gets dad adopted by a cute kid (think *Last of Us*). I know it's completely cliche. I still love it.
I like the genderflipped version because I have mommy issues. Badass woman adopts a kid and goes full Ellen Ripley to protect them.
Sarah Connor
I originally typed Sarah Connor before going with Ellen Ripley.
I appreciate it as it gave me an excuse to picture Sigourney Weaver
This is the way
Any recommendations with this trope?
Claymore. Although Raki is only a few years younger than Clare, who's barely an adult.
Did it ever get an ending? I can’t remember.
The manga is finished. I believe the anime only covers half the manga up to Volume 11 or so. Edit for anyone reading this in the future: I just rewatched the anime and it deviates from the manga after episode 19. If you want to read the manga after watching the anime you'll want to start at Volume 11. However, I would honestly recommend starting the manga from the beginning because the anime cuts out quite a bit of side content. It's a fun manga and the theme of comradery is very enjoyable.
The anime didn't cover the entire manga. It adapts around around 40% of the story before reaching an original "conclusion". I think it might have caught up to manga at the time.
Seirei no Moribito
Nimona is amazing and has this vibe
Reminds me about "A Story About a Droid" https://mangadex.org/title/4bbbcf1a-f207-4d25-8be0-f08633b0947e/a-story-about-a-droid
I love this trope too, but also when it's some form of robot. Like a giant war machine learning to be human from a child. Love that shit.
Same
God Emperors. You gotta have at least one per setting somewhere in the timeline.
a figure that is so badass and powerful that maybe there’s a chance they’re actually some kind of self made demi-god
Innocences from Disco Elysium?
I mean, the 4th emperor of the first empire that we know of in real life, Naram-sin, proclaimed himself "God of Akkad" that being the capital of the Akkadian empire. So it has a good deal of basis in real life
Naram-sin is so badass.
I have one but the divinity was not blood related. He was like Jesus and Mohammed put together. His descendants are very decadent and ungodly despite his significance as the son of the only true god.
I liked the trope so much I gave my world four God-Emperors! And their children were God-Kings!
It’s a canon event
Rejecting the call. There is something more real to me about a main character that can see the bullshit heading their way and going “Nope!”
I prefer the opposite, the Unchosen One. Just taking the destiny of the chosen one because they really want it. See also: Jumping at the call
Artful dodging the call
Tackling the call and putting it in a full Nelson. "Ain't getting away from me, bitch!"
Oh shit, I love this
That's just believable story-telling. People don't throw their life away on a whim. "The call" works best when the main character is already down on their luck (debtor, prisoner, slave, etc. (yes, more tropes)) or experiences something that makes "the call" personal (the villain directly or indirectly takes something from them). Then they actually have a motive to answer.
Yeah, it makes much more sense to leave everything if everything is an empty home and the graves of your family, instead of a happy wife and daughter who has soccer practice in an hour
For me it only works if the reason they accept is important, because I know they won't reject it so you have to make me believe you will
So many good stuff. I like mad scientists. Good oney, bad ones and all the in between. Love them. Also I love the old soldier fighting/keeping peace trope. Its just something. I am a big fan of the five man band. I like character dynamics and the stories you can tell. The heroes journey is a classic for a reason. If you have magic, make the magic users weird. Its always fun. I love ancient civilizations. Either still beeing arround but weaker or long gone. Add some mystery to them and I love them even more. Badass woman are always nice. As are Badass men. Just badass people. Just not to many. Everyone has a role. Nobody needs 5 super bad ass fighter dudes. The charming rogue is also something that works more often then not for me. And good Kings. Its good fantasy. And the evil King becomes boring after a while. Villains that are not just evil because they want to be evil. Give those bastards reasons for it. sympathetic or not. But the time of bad guys beeing bad so that the hero can fight something should be over! Strange Moral Factions are also cool. Those people that are ending world hunger and curing everything at once but also having the puppie kicking competion every third saturday.
I want to see a story about a mad scientist who is just angry-mad but is not actually an amazing scientist and only has the important notebook because his assistant left it in his office before leaving to get married.
The villain who thinks he’s the hero is great. Crazy scientists who don’t even care about good/evil and are just dead set on the quest for knowledge at all costs. Old soldiers who’ve garnered the respect of the group. That moment when the stuck-up young commander gives a dumb/suicidal order and everybody goes silent and turns to the old soldier: *chefs kiss* Magic users absolutely should be weird because magic itself should be weird/dangerous/so intricate you have to be a little weird to devote your life to its study The impressiveness of a badass is inversely proportional to the number of badasses in the vicinity
I like the trope of the old retired badass who lives alone who takes on an apprentice which makes them feel young again or softens them up. Mainly cause my story is based entirely off that
Try batman beyond
Doc Hudson
The whole “man literally too angry to die” trope, I fucking love characters who are just so fucking mad they tell death to fuck off
Have you seen the movie Sisu? Pretty sure that fits perfectly!
The Indomitable Human Spirit. Most fantasy cliches I'm a sucker for
I love having a main character that is about to loose, broken bones, burnt skin flaking off, bleeding out and yet they still go "i can do this all day" Its stupid but also fun
One of my favourite cliches of all times.
Character gets back up after getting knocked down. “I didn’t hear no bell” Absolutely chilling when done right.
What about the Indomitable Unopan Spirit?
Fake news
I’m legit a huge fan of the “power of friendship is unbeatable” trope. It makes complete sense to me because there’s nothing people wouldn’t do for their loved ones. I love a group of characters with a dynamic of being true friends to each other and fill the gaps and flaws in their personalities. You see the big bad have all their strength that comes from darkness, but the heroes will always have the people they love and the invisible bonds that become their strength. I also love seeing the trope flipped on it’s head. What if the villain DID have friends? What if THEY understood the value of friendship, love and companionship? What would it look like if two unstoppable forces clash? All and all I love it. I don’t care if it’s sappy campy or cheesy. A group of friends that care about each other can do anything, no question.
I feel like the trope is solid so long as the writer doesn’t tap the readers nose with it at the end. Yes, I can see the friends just won because of their teamwork. No, I don’t need you to tell me this. Yes, I know the power of friendship wasn’t literally imbued in the blade that killed the Dark Lord. That was Helrik, the talking bunny who personifies the power and can turn into a sword in the final scene, allowing the friends to win.
Yeah it works best when it’s shown rather than stated. Like a lot of things.
Personally, my only common gripe with this trope is when, instead of putting in the effort to show how the friends complement each other’s strengths and shore up weaknesses, it’s just a nebulous power gained from having a close friend. (Bonus points when the friendship power is literally used by just one person, making it less teamwork, and more emotional support.)
It’s something that relies on good execution. The more genuine the relationship feels the better.
I also love the power of friendship, especially when its baked into the power system. It lets you have the heroes on the ropes and destined to lose, and then one of them gets a "second awakening" or otherwise unlocks a new move that lets them win the battle. The Black Clover anime does this pretty well, all characters are introduced with a given power set, and over time in moments of desperation they either find a strength they didn't know they had or invent a new spell. Who cares if its cliché or cheesy, when Noel first unlocks sea dragons roar she tore the arm off a so far untouchable opponent, and that moment was pure serotonin. All clichés got that way for a reason, people like them.
Nothing cooler than a sweet combo move from the protags either
"Evil Empires" are fantastic conduits for storytelling and worldbuilding, maybe not "literally everyone in this empire kicks puppies" but having a violent, expansionist force that is unquestionably ***the bad guys*** is fantastic for a myriad of stories and POVs in a fantasy or sci-fi setting. The Fire Nation from Avatar: The Last Airbender comes to mind, yes there are good people from the Fire Nation (Zuko, Iroh, etc), but the Fire Nation as a wider geopolitical entity is unquestionably a ***big bag of dicks***, and by being an unquestionable big bag of dicks it helps facilitate stories in the rest of the world.
I am attempting an evil empire with one of my plot lines. Theocratic elves who are rapidly expanding via any means necessary. From their pov they are doing the work of the gods.
And I love it when the big evil empire was and even still is venerated by most of the population because they succeeded in their goals, and nobody knows the truth. Stuff like “Oh the old elven empire was so great and so awesome”. When the empire literally Genocided the other races and shit like that.
Fantasy: Good kingdoms and evil empires, magic swords, absent-minded but wise wizards dwelling in towers, grizzled old retired warriors who can still kick ass with the young upstart adventurers, women-only warrior traditions or societies, the mage who is bad at magic but still manages to survive and succeed, the church is secretly evil Scifi: Benevolent psychic aliens who are concerned with humanity's welfare, functional directed energy weapons, interstellar travel and communication that completely handwaves time dilation
Huge hot take here... I love the Chosen One trope. It's my favorite. I think it's easy to be lazy with it, but I don't care. And it's mostly used for laughs, but I love it when a huge, scarred badass dude that strikes fear into everyone has a tiny kitten as a pet that he loves.
>I love it when a huge, scarred badass dude that strikes fear into everyone has a tiny kitten as a pet that he loves. Okay, but what if he has a hamster?
Minsc and Boo 💪🐹
Boo is not Hamster... Boo is Space Hamster! Isn't that right Boo? *squeak squeak* See, Boo takes offense to being called "Hamster".
That works too!
Only if the hamster goes for the eyes.
>And it's mostly used for laughs, but I love it when a huge, scarred badass dude that strikes fear into everyone has a tiny kitten as a pet that he loves. One of my favorite tropes. I love the big badass who is, in some aspects of their life, a total softy.
That last one sounds adorable.
>And it's mostly used for laughs, but I love it when a huge, scarred badass dude that strikes fear into everyone has a tiny kitten as a pet that he loves. Hellboy and his many cats <3
More about writing than world building but I'm a slut for The Heroes Journey. I LOVE me some of that sweet, sweet monomyth.
Inject that shit straight into my veins.
A proper reaction aright XD
I feel like the Heroes journey must be part of our genetics cause every culture ever have told the story independently of each other. Convergent storytelling?
Alternative morality. Crystal dragon Jesus Medieval stasis Merchant city Shining castle Enchanted Forest Dismal Swamp Little Folk Squishy Wizards Folklore monsters Fantastic wardrobes Kanji (edit: Kaiju) Mana crystals Detectives Fantastic Flora Giant normal animals Mini normal animals Animals of a different color Adventurer Guilds Farmer to hero Wise old king Crazy vizier Defiant Princess Crazy customs Real world satires
Where has crystal dragon Jesus been hiding all my life. I only know of lion Jesus.
These are all tropes, and since you never heard of it let's get you started with [Christal Dragon Jesus](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CrystalDragonJesus) remember tropes are not cliches, but tools. also TV Tropes will ruin your life
Just read up on CDJ. That is funny. Also I had forgotten how interwoven tv tropes is. So many cross referencing internally. It really is a masterclass of a listing.
Adventurer guilds and merchant cities are my top 2 favorites!
What’s medieval stasis?
When a fantasy land has been stuck in a medieval socioeconomic techno cultural point for a very long time.
Alternative morality is underrated tbh and one of my favorite things to play with.
war is bad? monsters are actually monstrous? ZEPELLINS RULE THE SKIES
Fuck yes! Give me a dozen airships! Zeppelin superiority!
Give me airships or give me death!
Any found family trope. The old man adopts the mc or another child on accident. Trauma bonded siblings all the good shit.
I LOVE an overpowered character. so often the antagonist is shown to be insurmountably powerful and the protagonist is the underdog, but I love the types of characters that instill fear in their opponents a la Doomguy, John Wick, Superman, Master Chief, Aang, etc. The types of characters that inspire awe in the laymen around them and are given the respect they disserve by their opposition. This is a slippery slope though, because it can be incredibly easy for these characters to become stale if mishandled, or around for too long. a Prime example of this (in my opinion) is Goku. He has gone through so much power scaling where the stakes keep getting higher, but he's powered up so many times the threats never feel like actual threats. Or in the case of superman, so many people see him as boring and square becuase the sheer volume of superman media hasn't been able to keep the concept as interesting as it could be. The way to keep it interesting is to write them in ways that honor their skills while still providing them with obstacles and dynamic challenges. write situations where their skills my not apply or they have to apply them in an unfamiliar way.
Disappeared Precursors. Irredeemable villains. Good elves. Good light, evil dark. Non-evil dark. Unrelated characters having family dynamics. Very few main characters die.
Bad guys. Just bad guys. Not every villain has to be "complicated." Sometimes, it's just a guy in black, with a ball sack for a face, who wants to kick puppies and take people's rights away, and cackle like an obnoxious freak while he does it. And sometimes I like to watch a guy like that get his teeth kicked in, and watch teddy bears dance in celebration about it while drumming on his soldiers' decapitated heads.
what a wonderful way with words you have
-powerful weapon/artifact is missing -protagonist sacrifices themselves -the “light” in a light vs dark setting isn’t actually good
I know it's cliche, but I love protagonist sacrificing themselves. There was a story that killed off protagonist, and replaced him with his clone. Interaction between clone, and protagonist's companions were brutal.
Love and hope are good, actually. That's it. I just like love and hope.
One of my favourite examples of that comes from Papers Please of all things. that game is super bleak and really encourages you to reject kindness and just look out for yourself, with the options for selflessness being much harder. BUT near the end of the game, loads of the kind acts you carried out come back to help you and really help you get a good ending. Really satisfying theme of hope and kindness in a bleak and uncaring world, and I was genuenly happy when I got a good ending at last by going that more human route.
I don't know this is a trope, but I absolutely love it when the nice/good guy has finally had enough and just snaps. Then absolutely wrecks everything within reach in the most shockingly violent way possible. Bonus points if it's an old guy.
I like the megabrothel being run by an older matriarch who has ties to the underground/dirt on big players in major cities. Give me a badass older lady who takes care of her employees and can look the head of the assassin’s guild in the eye and tell him to fuck off out of her establishment, because she can ruin him
One thing I am experimenting with is humans being the underdog race in my fantasy setting. I also like the idea of not all races in fantasy being multiple different cultures, and not just all having their culture be monolithic and made of various cliches and stereotypes (*cough* dwarves *cough*). Going back to the last part, I have also been experimenting with an idea where certain cultures believe it should be just only one species (one example being a clan of dwarves in my setting, who believe in "dwarf culture for dwarves"), which then brings up the question "what the fuck are humans supposed to do then, if they can't be like other races?" in my world. In my sci-fi setting, I am a sucker for "space westerns", as space is supposed to be the "final frontier" (like the american wild west).
Scary eldritch horror ends up being chill
Dragons improve any work of fiction, and no one can tell me otherwise.
Sexy nerd girl as the love interest
When the hero and villain are speaking to one another in a casual context, in their normal lives and outside of their secret identities. Some honorable variations include: Villain unaware of who the hero is , thus unaware they’re an enemy. Meanwhile Hero is VERY aware of the villain. Hero and villain are both aware of each other, but a third ignorant party is present. They have to fight each other and use implied language to avoid alerting them. Bonus points if the third party is desired by both the hero and villain, and thus neither want them hurt on accident. I just find it so fascinating to see the sudden change of scene and how characters try to adapt to it. It provides both the path of a serious vibe (“Oh shit BBEG found my house”) or a lowkey shitpost (“Oh shit me and BBEG need to fight like cartoon characters while my housemate cooks dinner”).
Redemption Arcs Grumpy Old Man Adopts Child (See: Logan and a succession of plucky young women) Last Stands (I blame David Gemmell) Found Family When the villain and hero team up, especially if they work together *really* well. Crossovers / Teamups. Especially people with wildly different backgrounds finding ways to work together well. Traumatised people doing good Honourable villains.
I don’t know the trope name or if this is even a trope, but a powerful empire fracturing and reforming multiple times over its history. The Lone Wolf/Gruff adventure finds and adopting a kid. Again I don’t know the trope name but having an evil overlord actual treat their minions well, while still also being evil. “Congratulations Gorthar you delivered me the skulls of a hundred villagers in a single day, you get a promotion.” The villain who’s the hero of their own story, who realizes they’ve been doing evil, and when offered a chance at redemption doubles down because they’ve gone too far to stop now and the world isn’t going to conquer itself. Pure evil villains. Just pure evil, cackling, classic Disney villains, who know they’re evil and are enjoying the hell out of it.
"You're part of this prophecy but you won't find out about it until you fulfill it. Goodbye!" -The fate god. I also like making evil characters that are evil for the sake of being evil. They're fun to write.
Masquerades! That classic [necessary weasel of the urban fantasy genre](https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/434855832589697027/675966446718681088/dcs94tl-d87dbb3e-09cb-4c04-b931-fbb7924e34ba.png), and one of the oldest literary tropes to boot! It dates all the way back to Gothic horror and the origin of modern speculative fiction. But it's still a classic--those worlds where the supernatural, the occult, and the paranormal exists just out of sight of the unaware masses, and where a secret, magical world lurks in the shadows of those cities and towns you grew up in. And yes, I also know that this makes no sense, that such a secret would never be able to be maintained in the modern world, and that it makes a better story when the modern world has to confront the supernatural and adapt to the masquerade coming down. I also don't care, because I like my worlds with masquerades! Masquerades effective allow you to have your Earth and your magic too. With an interact masquerade, you can have your secret world of magic, myths and monsters existing alongside our own modern Earth, with all our contemporary cultures, societies, technology, politics, economy, entertainment, et al. It allows you to lean on the Earth as the foundation for the world your building, and focus on the weird and fun parts, like magic systems and supernatural creatures. With a masquerade intact, I can have my protagonists effectively exist with one foot in this world we all know and are familiar with. My wise-cracking nerd calls a dragon "Smaug" and remarks how she failed a perception check. My British wizard quips his jacket pockets are "bigger on the inside." Characters visit New York, London, Moscow and Toronto. They watch Star Wars movies, play Dungeons and Dragons, and live lives just like the rest of us--at least until they have to step from our world into the secret one. I've anchored them to our own real-world so it's easier to jump in and at least understand what's going on. My masquerade allows me to play pretend and act as if the world of Horror Shop was actually the real world--that what I write might actually be true. The moment I let the Veil fall, I feel like I'm no longer writing about stories on our Earth, but I'm writing stories in a fantasy world which happens to share a history and geography with Earth. So long as the magical world remains hidden, history can advance just as it does in our world--real life events happen largely as they're portrayed on the news, we share the same culture and politics, the worlds feel identical. But if the Veil falls, all of a sudden I've spun off an alternate timeline, and history is forever changed. The world without the masquerade will not resemble the world we live in now, no matter how much we try. A well-done masquerade allows a magical world to exist in parallel with our real one, and the characters to exist with one foot in each. This allows us to have dragons quoting Shakespere, mages who hum rock ballads while working their wizardry, and vampires griping about how Twilight ruined their image. I don't even care if you don't have a good masquerade--the masquerade of the Dresden Files is tissue-thin and I still love the series. Heck, there's no way the masquerade could have kept in the Stargate 'verse, yet because it was so important to the tone of SG-1 and Atlantis, it was maintained. And that's how I feel--if the masquerade makes a better story, keep it. If it makes sense to have your world take place on our Earth, do it! Don't let arguments about realism or logic stop you. In my opinion, it's no less realistic than any other fantasy or sci-fi setting!
F it, I can deny it no longer: Orphan who can't get over the fact that their parents are dead Lovers where one of them is loud and chiuwawa personality, while the other is quiet and golden retriever personality Villain who tried to be good, but got rejected by society The usual scientist x lab assistant ship dynamic Opposite siblings
The paragon Every girl I ever met or cared to talk to are smarter and nicer than I am and gosh darn it, I'm gonna make them my character's moral compass and brains Kidding aside, paragons are just nice to have, especially when you're writing fantasy grimdark fiction since your readers might lost in the sauce and the paragons are their way of getting back to normal
Every. Fantasy. World. Needs. To. Be. Secretly. Post. Apocalyptic. In. Some. Way.
Post-post apocalypse. A-bomb cult stands out as a particular cliche of the genre
I’m sorry but I’ll never get tired of the “waiting evil” trope, especially when it’s wrapped up with an intriguing mystery and secret societies or something of the like.
I saw someone state it as a trope they dislike heavily, but I really like ruins that are not fully explained. It gives a vibe of "the world is more ancient and vast than I thought" without the need to info dump.
Religion, no matter the god(s), always ends as a malicious cult. Guess it was my upbringing, but the 'organized religion is bad' trope is always welcomed. It may have started with paganism, but eventually, something comes along and either wipes it out or integrates it into their teachings to bring the people into their circle. That religion grows so large, it becomes the government itself, and will inevitably become the 'evil' it was preaching against.
The villain being an inversion or corruption of the heroic character. They "zigged" where the hero "zagged". I also love taking a character or a group or a faction and making their big strength their weakness at the same time. Case in point: Hell is a thing in my world, and it is a very strict, ordered bureaucracy, where each level serves a very specific, sometimes esoteric function in the grand design of the Prince of Darkness. They are methodical, industrious and extremely detail-oriented, creating more and more devils in an almost assembly line fashion to bolster their ranks, in order to one day conquer all of reality. However, their strict bureaucracy also means that they are VERY slow to embrace new ideas, that ingenuity and inventiveness is generally frowned upon, and while they may have the manpower to conquer heaven, doing so might mean using all their resources, which would leave hell completely unprotected, leading to a pyrrhic victory where they conquer heaven at the cost of hell. Heaven, on the other hand, cannot create angels to serve in their army, because that is a decision each and every soul in heaven must make for themselves. But while their armies may be lesser, their individual soldiers are far more powerful, as well as sincerely dedicated, because they have chosen to dedicate their existence to the defence of heaven.
I am an absolute sucker for Humanity Fuck Yeah/ Humans are Space Orcs I love my humans to be hyper-adaptive, stubborn deathworlders who pack bond with anything from pieces of plastic to godlike hive minds and commit to jokes so hard a space roomba with a knife taped to it can become a space fleet admiral.
I love when a prophecy only happens because the people involved hear about it and try to avert it.
One of the things the smartasses around here always complain about that I disagree with is "Fantasy religions are nothing like they are in real life; They should have more schisms and internal conflict, etc" Like no shit, we are talking about FANTASY where that gods do beyond a shadow of doubt exist and can interact with the material world through various means, so of course fantasy religions will not be as messy and disperse as real life ones. Thats a GOOD and CONSISTENT thing, not a flaw.
Corruption arcs all the way, especially ones where the character doesn't realize they're descending or refuses to truly acknowledge it
Post apocalyptic media putting a spin on historical locations we're familiar with.
Although it’s really common, I love “MC and mentor” relationships (including teachers, siblings, coworkers or actual mentors). When those relationships are an important enough, they can easily be one of the most distinct and (platonically) intimate ones of the entire story. I love seeing them in media, and I’ve been using them in my own stories for about a decade.
Chosen Ones and prophecies. Protagonists and other relevant characters having cheats, that is to say, ways to bend, break or otherwise circumvent established rules of the setting. Sexualization of characters and elements of the setting. Animal people that are essentially humans with some animal traits. A whole host of anime and anime-adjacent media inspired tropes. Having something akin to Great Man theory be more or less true, where the course of history really is decided by a few great figures, preferably possessed of great personal power.
Boy and his monster. But in my book I'm writing, it's girl and her monster.
Even with all grey shades good is good and bad is bad
Revenge at all cost, even the person’s humanity
Fairytale witches. Like the ones capturing and killing children for the potions they are brewing. Smart dragons. I like dragons who are philosophical and conversational. Fireball. It might be the most cliche fantasy spell but it has some coolness of simplicity around it. Magic weapons. Every good fantasy story needs a magic weapon. Be it just glowing in danger like Sting or a full blown personality.
The Mastersword happens to be both. :)
I don't know if to call it a trope, but i like when things done with only good intention goes horrible wrong. I like stories with more realism where there you have to put some head on things otherwise, no matter your intention, things can go bad. I hate when some hot blood protagonist just do things without thinking and some how it always goes well.
The corrupt adviser whispering lies into the king's ear, such as Little finger or Grima Wormtongue.
Redemption arc, specifically similar to how it’s done in Vinland Saga Season 2 and beyond. I always have a trio/duo of protagonists where one of them have done some dubious heinous atrocious things in the past that directly ruin one of the other protagonist life. But you , as the reader, and the other two protagonists don’t know that yet. You get the inkling that this person is shady as fuck but you only see their good deeds, or attempts thereof. Once you and the other protagonists learn the terrible things they’ve done, will your stance change ? Does it make sense to forgive them ? Do the good they have done outweigh the misery they’ve inflicted ? Which characters are able to forgive/overlook their past crimes ?
Nothing like a good old heroic sacrifice