Juho Pohjalainen's Blog: Pankarp - Posts Tagged "rule-of-cool"
Impossible cities, impossible justification, realism and what it means
I've been looking at a lot of fantasy city artwork lately - purely because a friend posted something, I complimented it, and decided to look for more. It's gotten me thinking.
Look at this city! A magnificent view, yet from a practical real world standpoint, it should never have come to be. It's an engineering impossibility (at least for the medieval folk), requiring generations of work even if they did figure out how to do it. If those support pillars can handle all that weight, and any catapult stones thrown by particularly persistent hosts of assholes, they'd have better served the walls of a fortress. And there's little tangible benefit in reaching out into the valley like that, other than making its inhabitants constantly feel like they're standing on top of nothing maybe. And what's up with that tiny bit at the very end?
But it does look really nice. You really would want to have it in your setting, or your D&D game, anyway. So how could this thing have come to be?
"It's magic!" is the usual justification, and it's almost always a cheap and unsatisfying one. Not because there's anything wrong with magic in itself, just that it's only the beginning of the explanation - pretending to be enough on its own, and as a consequence, being worse than no explanation at all. It raises many followup questions: who did the magic, and why, and how? Maybe the wizard was a bit crazy and vain, and wanted to show off his colleagues by conjuring his demons and elementals and djinni to build something other than a yet another boring tall tower.
Or maybe it was all divinely-inspired? You've got a goddess of art and architecture, her devotees starting up this sort of a mad project to impress her, and she's now blessed it and won't let anyone mess with it without provoking divine retribution.
Or it could have been built in the ancient past, when man had the means to mold steel and minds and traverse the stars in great shining ships, and when they could afford to let loose a little and build something because they just liked how it turned up.
Or you could have a closer look and realize that there is already a rational explanation to it: look at the pillars, their colouration, the architecture, and it starts to look like they'd once been underwater. This valley was a river in the distant past, perhaps even a lake or a sea. This is the beginning of a great bridge - but the construction work was abandoned for some reason, the sea level receded much lower... and then at some point, probably led by local economics and politics, people found it a fine place to settle down on - entirely unrelated to why it was originally built. Rich history and worldbuilding without needing to bring in magic at all!
You see? It's so easy to dismiss these things right at first hand, because you want to write about something more realistic. But realism is about far more than what can exist in our world. It's about how well grounded it is within its setting and surroundings, how well it seems to fit there. Not about how real something is, but rather how real it feels.
It's not about cities, either - that's just the thing I was thinking about and the justification for this long rambling. This line of thinking applies to everything. My whole setting is probably the sort that should, by laws of physics as we understand them, be incapable of sustaining any kind of life. So I often end up asking this stuff of myself, and coming up with reasons how it could all have come to be in the first place - and ways for the local folk to have survived as they have, their own way of living and things they've come up to adapt.
Such thought exercises bring colour and excitement and depth to your worlds, and help you improve your craft and imagination as well. Never hesitate to think them through.
Look at this city! A magnificent view, yet from a practical real world standpoint, it should never have come to be. It's an engineering impossibility (at least for the medieval folk), requiring generations of work even if they did figure out how to do it. If those support pillars can handle all that weight, and any catapult stones thrown by particularly persistent hosts of assholes, they'd have better served the walls of a fortress. And there's little tangible benefit in reaching out into the valley like that, other than making its inhabitants constantly feel like they're standing on top of nothing maybe. And what's up with that tiny bit at the very end?
But it does look really nice. You really would want to have it in your setting, or your D&D game, anyway. So how could this thing have come to be?
"It's magic!" is the usual justification, and it's almost always a cheap and unsatisfying one. Not because there's anything wrong with magic in itself, just that it's only the beginning of the explanation - pretending to be enough on its own, and as a consequence, being worse than no explanation at all. It raises many followup questions: who did the magic, and why, and how? Maybe the wizard was a bit crazy and vain, and wanted to show off his colleagues by conjuring his demons and elementals and djinni to build something other than a yet another boring tall tower.
Or maybe it was all divinely-inspired? You've got a goddess of art and architecture, her devotees starting up this sort of a mad project to impress her, and she's now blessed it and won't let anyone mess with it without provoking divine retribution.
Or it could have been built in the ancient past, when man had the means to mold steel and minds and traverse the stars in great shining ships, and when they could afford to let loose a little and build something because they just liked how it turned up.
Or you could have a closer look and realize that there is already a rational explanation to it: look at the pillars, their colouration, the architecture, and it starts to look like they'd once been underwater. This valley was a river in the distant past, perhaps even a lake or a sea. This is the beginning of a great bridge - but the construction work was abandoned for some reason, the sea level receded much lower... and then at some point, probably led by local economics and politics, people found it a fine place to settle down on - entirely unrelated to why it was originally built. Rich history and worldbuilding without needing to bring in magic at all!
You see? It's so easy to dismiss these things right at first hand, because you want to write about something more realistic. But realism is about far more than what can exist in our world. It's about how well grounded it is within its setting and surroundings, how well it seems to fit there. Not about how real something is, but rather how real it feels.
It's not about cities, either - that's just the thing I was thinking about and the justification for this long rambling. This line of thinking applies to everything. My whole setting is probably the sort that should, by laws of physics as we understand them, be incapable of sustaining any kind of life. So I often end up asking this stuff of myself, and coming up with reasons how it could all have come to be in the first place - and ways for the local folk to have survived as they have, their own way of living and things they've come up to adapt.
Such thought exercises bring colour and excitement and depth to your worlds, and help you improve your craft and imagination as well. Never hesitate to think them through.
Pankarp
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