When you’re going to do some creative storytelling, sometimes it can be good not to get too wrapped up in tweaking the fine details when a larger change could improve the whole thing.

Whether you’re writing a fictional story, a role playing game scenario or setting, or some fan fiction, it can be very easy to make assumptions, take certain aspects for granted, and settle for being creative ‘in the margins’ instead of taking the reins firmly in hand and making something your own unique vision.

“What the bloody heck is this idiot talking about?”, I hear you ask.

An example of someone whose creative work was so profound, it changed everything?

Back in the day, our lord and master Tolkien wrote a brilliant piece of fiction, including detailed histories of dwarves and orcs and elves and such.

His work was so detailed, it brought those races so vividly into life, that most folks that have written fantasy fiction afterwards have had to take that into account.

Many simply took those ideas and built them into their own work, lifting them as a whole and building uopn what has come to be lasting stereotypes in fantasy fiction.

You say ‘elf’ or ‘dwarf’ and the people listening have a pretty damn good idea what you’re talking about, without regards for Celtic, Germanic or Scandinavian folklore.

Okay, so you want to write something yourself. You don’t want to plagiarize others, and you want to have fun.

But elves and dwarves are cool.

What to do?

Well, one thing you can do is take a close look at those races (still using an example) and deconstruct them. Break it down and figure out what is an elf in your mind? What is a dwarf? Longevity? Gruffness? A long lived culture of hippy tree huggers at one with nature? A group of short perpetually pissed off badasses with battle axes? What?

Take a look at what it is that you love… and or what it is that you need a race or culture to fulfill in your vision… and build it up from there.

In the end, it becomes your vision, something that heart and soul you understand.

Far better than adding ‘elves’ to your story, and then tweaking them to fit.

Sometimes, though, you start with a well known story element whether you like it or not. You might not have the luxury of building your own. You have to use a setting or follow certain lore conventions… but that doesn’t mean you have to be a lemming and be too afraid of the integrity of the setting to change things. 

As an example, still using elves, in the game world which I have sometimes published play by email turns here, it all started with a Dungeons and Dragons game. I was forced from the start to incorporate Dwarves and Elves because the scenario I was writing was part of an ongoing campaign.

So there were elves right from the beginning, and I worked with it, using cultural differences among isolated tribes.

Nowadays, with the massive distance the project has from it’s roots, they are still elves in name, and they still share certain physical similarities… but they are not elves like Tolkein would have recognized. Not culturally, not by a long shot. And certainly not spiritually. 

Culturally, they more closely resemble the Roman Empire as an organizational structure, albeit with a tradition of working with and living in tune with nature, being aware of and respectful of the circle of life rather than working with stone or being expansionistic and rapacious such as the true Roman Empire. With their long lives and reduced birth rate promoting an isolationist and contemplative worldview, a love of learning and study, a strong understanding and realistic outlook at national defense against aggressors, and a deep tie to a living spirituality and an introspective nature, they have all the capability to be the deadliest force on the planet… but don’t have the desire or the will to impose themselves or their culture on others.

In the world of my creation, humans encountered elves for the first time when the first human empire, ruled by a former king that had united a land of rough feuding warlords rampant with casual brutality, chose to relieve the political pressures of his own land by focusing attention on expansion and conquest of the apparently empty and verdant lands to the north. He gathered together the majority of peoples that would have caused the most strife if left to their own devices in the various fiefdoms, and organizing them into massive armies, sent them across the channel to explore, pacify and colonize.

Unfortunately for him… the fields gave way to dense forest… and invading the forest drew the attention of a force beyond their wildest dreams. A force singularly lacking in humor when it comes to violent invading armies. They were not amused. <crunch>

The second human empire, once it got past a certain point, held certain… beliefs when it came to elves. Beliefs that have proven quite long lasting, and, depending on how much of your ancestor’s family tree survived… strongly held.

Chief among them, don’t fuck with elves.

It’s one aspect of how things can be different… it is a game world whose roots are in D&D, and yes there are elves… but scratch beneath the surface, and the similarities to widely known elves in popular literature are only skin deep.

There is a race in my world that does bear a closer spiritual resemblance to traditional elves. They are actually on a different continent entirely, have never been encountered (as far as I remember) by Manny or James, and are covered in fur. Heavy fur. Very heavy fur. When first being described, the person meeting them is not going to think “oh, an elf, I can guess how they might react.” Nope, instead, they might very well wonder if they’re about to become lunch.

Depending on the circumstances, that could be a valid concern.

Things need to fit together, cultures grow in certain ways for a reason (even if the reason is “I said so”, or “Because I like it that way”).

I’ll use a WoW related example of questioning the assumptions, and taking a step back to look at how things are when you are writing your stories.

We all love World of Warcraft. This blog is about Druids in the game. So let’s use the druid design as an example.

The Druid class rocks as is. There is a reason we love it and have played it for so long. Being able to shapechange into various animal forms is pretty amazing, and is an impressive programming feat on the part of the designers.

When the game was first developed, Blizzard had to make some serious choices about what they wanted to do, balanced against what they had the time and programming resources to develop and implement in time to go live.

What we have now is very similar to what went live. Two races, Tauren and Night Elf, one race per faction, can choose to be Druids.

Each race can shapechange into an aquatic form, a cat form, a bear form, a travel form, and later on the moonkin, tree and bird forms were added.

Since that time, we have happily played this class, no matter who we are, and one of the most common refrains heard is “I wish we had more attractive skins, or even slightly better models, so the graphics of our forms looked better”.

Now we are getting those models and skins, at least for cat and bear.

But we are still talking about tweaking and adjusting the given, without looking at the underlying framework.

Now, I love our class, and I wouldn’t want things to change at this point.

But, if I were designing the classes for my own story or for a role-playing setting, I would not have gone with what we have.

I’m not saying my choices would be any better, they just wouldn’t have been mine.

For example, Tauren are big, massive, strong and feel imposing; their presence carries a weight that dominates the world around them.

Night Elves are lithe, fast, nimble and fit in with and slip through the world around them.

For Druids of these races, Druids who would transform into animals, or the forms of animals, I would have kept to animals that evoked in some way their overall feel, as well as the geographical regions they are normally found, considering those to be the areas they are most familiar with, and thus the animals they would have the most comfort and experience with.

 I would of course have kept cats, panthers as a melee DPS form, very feral and powerful, coiled muscle and claw. For speed, honestly I probably would have gone with a deer, a gazelle, some other kind of fleet long limbed herbivore. Cheetah is cool, but doesn’t fit in with my mental image of the region. And for a form that would keep enemy attention and survive, I likely would have chosen a mongoose, super fast harrying attacks and insane agility to dodge.

For Tauren, on the other hand, in DPS I would have probably chosen a wolf, huge and beefy across the shoulders, like the creature from Brotherhood of the Wolf, and colored brown or tan. A hyena style form instead of a wolf would have worked as well. For travel, this is the one that would have the cheetah form, and for tanking, I would have been likely to go with a rhino.

Totally different thinking, and choices made because of my own taste for how they would fit in my mind onto the story. A certain internal consistency.

My end point is, never be afraid to challenge preconceived ideas or established wisdom, pick at things and dig into why. Why should it be that way, why would it work that way, why would they do it that way?

Make your stories your own, and have fun!

This entry was posted on Monday, June 22nd, 2009 at 1:52 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.