marycatelli: (God Speed)
There's a noble in the story.  I finally concluded that being called the Master of the Mountains would class him with the nobles.

So I had the heroine remember how her governess fulminated about odd titles and the difficulty of placing them quickly so you can be properly polite.
marycatelli: (God Speed)
A royal character who does not become a wizard -- and the amount of study means that course is discouraged -- becomes a magical knight.

Does he, or even a noble character, get more say than others in the power set he will get?

Read more... )
marycatelli: (God Speed)
So, who outranks whom? Wizards or knights? The magical knights, of course. . . .

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marycatelli: (God Speed)
Ripping off a story idea and hitting on an issue. It's a nominally feudal land. (Nominally because it's inconsistent.) And the knight has a castle and an estate, both distinctly grand. It's explicitly mentioned that he got them in the original story, but nothing more. Which is one of the flaws that inspired me to redo the idea.

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marycatelli: (God Speed)
Sometimes you need a group of characters.

And then you have to remember that you don't want to make it too obvious that the writer is making them special.

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marycatelli: (God Speed)
ah, world-building. There I was, muddling through a world where there is a standing army with officers who aren't noblemen, and a powerful nobility, and then I decided that the heroine queen has to make two new nobles.

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marycatelli: (God Speed)
Skipping merrily along in a scene and going, err, ummm. . . .

Actually the protocol problems they face do not stem from the fantasy. The heroine is queen at the age of seven, and while there's magic involved in that, and it complicates her life in other ways, it doesn't really affect protocol.

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marycatelli: (God Speed)
It's very important to read primary source for a world-builder in any fantasy or science fiction story. Not even from the era you are ripping off for a story. Just in depth reading of primary source, in order that you do not accidentally write a mash-up of historical eras.

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marycatelli: (God Speed)
Finding places to explain why the children of royalty and nobility do not play with the children of servants, even when they are very young:  because you have to stop the friendships entirely at a relatively young age.

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marycatelli: (God Speed)
So we have a magocracy where the upper classes have the powerful mages. Usually. They work hard at co-opting lower class mages of power, and those born to high rank without great power often marry them to give them the status.
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marycatelli: (God Speed)
In a world where magic power in innately inborn, wizards rise to the top of society. Perhaps the upper class is all wizards. If it's hereditary, it will forms an aristocracy.

But not like we know it.

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ennobled

Mar. 12th, 2018 10:41 pm
marycatelli: (God Speed)
Shortly before the story begins, the heroine's father became a noble.

I've yet to decide whether he was blindsided by an unexpected inheritance, or by the king's deciding to ennoble him. Blindsided is definite, he does not like the duties of the new role. . . .
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marycatelli: (God Speed)
Once upon a time, there were two young men of gentle birth living in a magical city where royals visit but do not reign.  Was pondering why.

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marycatelli: (Rapunzel)
I'm usually as bad at naming cities as any other location -- that is, bad, but one city in particular raises issues.  A magical city.

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marycatelli: (God Speed)
So what is our hero thinking?  About the succession or lack thereof, of course, and I was reflecting on how much history would be needed.

France for a long, long, long time had king after king succeeded by his first-born son.  Some proclaimed it was divine providence, and it worked -- until it didn't, and the last Valois king died leaving his distant cousin his only heir.

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marycatelli: (Rapunzel)
hmmm . . . .hmmm. . . now, let's suppose you want to work your Standard Fantasy Setting with more detail.

On one hand, since you are not suffering from disease and famine on every hand, and your peasants are not thin as posts, hollow-eyed and exhausted and ancient at forty, having buried eight of their ten children, you probably have good solid workable magic that produces a good solid prosperity.

On the other hand, kings, queens, princes and princesses, dukes, counts, and other nobles. . . .
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marycatelli: (God Speed)
Sending the heroine through the landscape, lovely meadows and forest -- uninhabited -- and started to think about what she would notice.

Read more... )

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