562 – Designing Urban Fantasy Factions
Description
Everyone knows that werewolves and vampires hate each other. It’s just a fact of urban fantasy life. But… why, exactly? For that matter, why are any secret magical factions in conflict with each other? And when they do fight, why doesn’t the one with more powerful magic just auto-win? You would think that wizards could just drop orbital strikes on everyone else without leaving the sanctum. Do we have suggestions on how to handle those issues? You’d better believe it.
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Lady Oscar. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast, with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle.
[Intro Music]
Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren.
Chris: And I’m Chris.
Oren: So I’m putting the final touches on my urban fantasy setting. I’ve got a faction of mages that keep magic locked down real tight, so there are no rogue casters. And also a faction of werewolves that spends all of its time hunting down rogue casters. I don’t see a problem with this. I think this will be fine.
Chris: Hmm. Maybe the rogue casters are coming from inside the house.
Oren: Inside the werewolf house.
Chris: Werewolf house. [laughing] Werewolves just hunt themselves down.
Oren: It’s fine. Yeah. So today we’re talking about planning urban fantasy factions. Why do urban fantasy factions need their own episode? Because I felt like it. And also because…
Chris: We can do what we want!
Oren: Yeah. You’re not the boss of us! [laughing] Partly because we watched The Order recently, which is one of this crop of two season Netflix shows that was urban fantasy. And it had a lot of problems, and one of the problems was that its worldbuilding was real garbage.
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Oren: But I also just think that there are some differences in how you think about urban fantasy versus, like, high fantasy, or scifi, or steampunk or whatever. And partly it’s because they tend to be all mixed together, because there’s usually a masquerade, and so what you have are factions that exist within or alongside human society. And so you have to think about how that makes things different. And then at the same time, they also tend to have a more kitchen sink approach to worldbuilding. Which is not a hundred percent, right? There are examples we can talk about that don’t just throw everything at the wall, but there’s sort of a default expectation that, you know, if you’re gonna have some kinds of magical creatures in the modern setting, that sort of implies you have all of them.
Chris: I mean, I think when people think about urban fantasy, often their expectation is, if magic is real, then it must be linked to all of the folklore that we have about it.
Oren: Or in some cases the pop culture, right? Like, a lot of urban fantasy tropes are really, really divorced from any folklore, but…
Chris: What we think is folklore, right? [both laugh] And I think obviously that’s very eclectic and comes from all of these places. It’s not like we crowdsourced, like, tidy worldbuilding.
Oren: Right.
Chris: And so it just results in a very kind of eclectic world with lots of different magic users that work in different ways.
Oren: And lots of different creature types.
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Oren: If I’m making my own fantasy world from scratch, I can sort of decide what types of creatures I want to be there, and I can limit the magic more easily. But if I’m making an urban fantasy setting, it would be kind of weird if I was like, the only kind of mages are elemental mages. That’s all there is. It’s like, really? That’s all.
Chris: Yeah. I mean, you could have – some urban fantasy settings have a very specific, there’s a door to another world that’s where magic comes from. It’s not like you have to go with all the folklore. It’s just popular. I think the other issue is, you can exclude a faction if you have a nice tidy theme that makes it intuitive what is included and what is not included. But that is rarely combined with our typical urban fantasy. The closest I think I’ve seen, or at least one of the closest, is Teen Wolf. At least in the first seasons.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: Because you know, originally it’s like, okay, just werewolves. Alright, just werewolves, also druids and banshees. I’m like, okay, that’s… a little random, but we’re still going with a kind of werewolf nature theme. And then they add other types of shapeshifters that shapeshift into other types of creatures, so they’re kind of werewolf-like. And we still have no vampires, you know, like we add kitsune, for instance…
Oren: Mm-hmm.
Chris: Okay. And then they bring in steampunk mad scientists and like, what? [laughing] What are the steampunk mad scientists doing here?
Oren: They’re here. Don’t worry about it.
Chris: And then later we get ghost cowboys.
Oren: Everyone loves ghost cowboys.
Chris: [both laugh] And so eventually it’s just, okay, well why not vampires at this point?
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: But for a while there, we had a pretty tidy urban fantasy setting where it was just, you know, people shape-shifting into creatures for the most part, and that kind of kept it together. But if we had several different types of creatures from a wide variety of pop culture-ish folklore, folklore-ish pop culture, and then didn’t have vampires, that would be weirder.
Oren: Right. And a lot of it is gonna come down to what are you choosing to show, and how long is a story going for? Like, it was weird to me watching The Order that we have mages and werewolves, and that’s it.
Chris: And nothing else.
Oren: Right.
Chris: Right. I kept expecting vampires to show up.
Oren: Yeah. And that seemed strange to me, but at the same time, the storylines were so narrow that I was like, all right, I guess we aren’t really exploring the world at all. Maybe there are other magical things that…
Chris: Oh, there’s also a golem.
Oren: Yeah, they do make a golem once.
Chris: Best character.
Oren: Yeah, we love that golem. The one that really got me was in the Kate Kane books. They have werewolves and mages again, odd. Odd that that happened twice. But the mages are all necromancers, which again, okay, sure. But they have vampires, but the vampires are, like, undead…robots…
Chris: Harsh!
Oren: …that the necromancers pilot around. That seems, yeah, that seems mean.
Chris: Why aren’t they zombies?
Oren: Yeah, I don’t know.
Chris: Why not make them zombies? That’s what zombies are for.
Oren: Like if someone picks this up and he’s a vampire fan, it’s like, oh…sad. The vampires in this setting kind of suck.
Chris: I mean, we always do tell people to add your own spin, right?
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: Maybe we should have given a caveat there. Okay, “Add your own spin, but please don’t make it disappointing.”
Oren: Yeah. It’s like, I don’t know, “Be creative except when it’s bad, then be less creative.”
Chris: Be creative, but if you use a creature, try to retain what people think is cool about the creature. I mean, I have talked a bit about, like, at what point should you not call it the same thing?
Oren: Mm-hmm.
Chris:</s
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