I always wanted to try and make a "modern" fantasy setting. I really like the visual themes of stuff like Fable 2/3 and Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, and those bleeding further through time from western > World War > Modern settings seems like it's just begging to be done right. The problem is I don't know how to start that kind of thing.
On the one hand, I don't care for the trope of "magic just suddenly came back" i.e., Shadowrun, or Bright being "literally just the real world but Orcs are Black people and Will Smith is racist". On the other, I like the idea of God of War's settings where everything is true, but the gods of Greece rule Greece, Egyptian gods rule Egypt, the Norse Northern Europe, etc., but then that instantly feels like it just spirals out of control before I can even start moving the timeline forward.
What about all these different pantheons/cultures across the world that I've got no idea how they work nor the interest to do a deep dive just for this sort of thing? They may not play a major role right now, but even halfway through they're going to eventually be one. Not to mention all the variations of the ones I do have a handle on because of which specific place and time I base them off of.
Or let's ignore that for a moment, and try something more directly D&D based:
I'll just plop Dwarven, Elven, etc., kingdoms down. What do I do with the people actually there? I mean, I could go WAAAAY back, but otherwise. we're everywhere pretty quickly. Are they just gone? Do I just make them Elves? neither of those feels satisfying.
And obviously I could always just go high-fantasy and make the magical world of Zar'dynax, but it feels like that quickly loses any tie to what would make it actually "modern" without just going Bright and smashing random parts of the two settings together.
IDK, maybe this whole thing is why it's not usually done well unless it's some kind of secret world setting.
urban fantasy is not good sorry
so how do you fix it?
the best you can do is have a secret world hidden in the underground of the real world type situation like with vtm or whatever
>secret magical world
I fricking hate this so much because it just gives you two settings where one is normal and another is backwards-ass and magical, because you can't have science and magic together for some ungodly reason. Secret magical worlds are fricking moronic.
they do suck but its legitimately the best you can do with urban fantasy, and they still suck less than magic iphone tier shit
Science and Magic work by different principles as the old Arcanum model would say.
I mean, Arcanum did it pretty goddamn good! There's a good fricking reason it's opposite for once, and it doesn't even need a contrived wizard illuminati
VtM has vampires using tech and adapting to modern society, mixed with old gays viewing the world from their old-gay perspective. There is no "two separate worlds" ala Harry Potter.
>you can't have science and magic together for some ungodly reason
Something about science being the study of physics and nature, and magic breaking the laws of physics through supernatural forces. I dunno, it only gets brought up about a hundred times a week, here; there's no telling for what ungodly reason this is the case.
>the best you can do is have a secret world hidden in the underground of the real world type situation like with vtm or whatever
Let's be real. Fantasy means the act of using mythology as a writing element, there is nothing to forbid people from using the mythologies of modern sects or conspiracy theories.
But most such mythologies involve psychics or aliens, so I guess that modern day fantasy is swiftly reassigned up by the 'science fiction' moniker, much more marketable than 'urban fantasy'.
sc-sc-sci-fi!
it's totally not fantasy
it's just things that haven't happened yet
you're just uncreative
You just have hilariously low standards.
It's a lazy subversion, and like all lazy subversions, tops out at awful.
your point is seeing subversion in anything
Rian Johnson does suck, anon, but he's not representative of all subversion.
i don't care that its subversive its boring and gay and even steampunk is cooler at this point
>Bright being "literally just the real world but Orcs are Black
Except, yknow, Bright was some kind of modern day LotR and the orks are faux latino standins.
>modern day LotR
I mean, they SAID it was, but that never really did anything. You take out the two minutes or said anything about that and I don't think anything changes.
A very important thing to start with when making modern fantasy is the technological need of a society that has magic. Telecommunication, would most likely be nonexistent in high fantasy magic world, cause you'd just simply go to your local telepath and send a message that travels lightning fast. However, industrial revolution could happen, but the industrialists could find that the use of elementals or imps would be much cheaper than hiring workers.
....or you could just do it Arcanum style and show that technology, which works on bending the laws of universe, are incompatible with powers that are breaking said laws
As for the cultural change of modern world, I have no fricking idea, but be sure to not be as moronic as whoever wrote bright
That's always the hurdle with modern fantasy. You either handwave it to say that history is identical despite magic existing, you have a sudden return of magic so you only have to rewrite a small chunk of history, or you go full autism and plot the course of history from the bronze age under the assumption that gods, magic, and fantasy races are all real, which is obviously a massive undertaking that is dependent on countless factors for how much it actually resembles a modern period.
If you want a slightly less drastic undertaking, you could potentially have some magic be more localized. Say for example only the Americas have magic, therefore Eurasian history plays out as normal until the colonial period, where you can have a shake up in the 1500s. If you set it around that time period, then you don't have to account for too much, and if you continue further to the 21st century, you only have to rewrite 500 years instead of several thousand. In many ways that's similar to just having magic arbitrarily reappear though.
The reason it's not usually done is because doing it right would require a vast amount of research and alt-history writing to the point where it is a lot easier to take the Final Fantasy angle and just make an entirely fictional setting with fancy crystal reactors and whatnot.
I'm making one but its just not going to be "modern world but secret world with elves n shit". The world is going to be an original fantasy world with technology that ranges from 60's to 80's with a touch of sci-fi and magic. Gods do exist but for the most part they do not have a hand in things that are obvious to such an extent it is reasonable to encounter atheist cultures. I'm doing away with the classic fantasy races only keeping fey and my not goblins. They are being replaced by plant people are robots.
Just do it and don't be bound by sacred cows.
Shadowrun is the only urban fantasy setting that I can really get into, so just riff of of that. Magic doesn't exist in any recorded history until some magical BS happens to introduce to the modern age.
if magic was actually real and even a small portion of the population could use it I don't think it's likely that the modern era as we know it would be reached at all. You'd have to come up with everything that was possible to do with magic and extrapolate what would likely happen from the stone age onwards regardless if it's Earth or a fantasy world.
Or you choose one specific aspect you want to focus on and ignore everything that doesn't relate to that, either not explaining how it would work or lampshading specific parts to best serve your needs.
Depends on how powerful the magic is.
Regardless, societies would be even more authoritarian than they used to be. moronic mage rulers would be born and frick things up, causing uprisings by either other mages or commonfolk allied with mages. The cycle would of course repeat until some form of democracy was established to balance the powers that be in such a society.
jesus fricking christ, don't say horrible things you'll regret
>jesus fricking christ, don't say horrible things you'll regret
The problem Urban Fantasy runs into in all its iterations is that Fantasy traditionally has relied on/entertained people with cultural and geographic diversity (Elves, Magic, etc) and in modern times Capitalism has basically served as a kind of acid that dissolves everything distinctly human or entertaining about the world into some grey homogenous soup.
What makes fantasy entertaining is that there's always some kind of adventure just over the hill. You'll have characters interact with, as an example, strange and foreign races of people, dwarves that live under the earth, Elves that live in trees, Demons, Faeries, so on. They can explore lost temples or the ruins of ancient civilizations. There's different people and places they can run into, different cultures to encounter. And, importantly, their character class is inspired in part by the artisans of Medieval Europe, it places more value on the individual, individual skill, and individual achievement.
The thing with modern Capitalism is it melts all that away. No one expects Elves, for example, to still retain their "mystique" as Elves if they're working behind the counter of some Godforsaken Starbucks coffee joint. Mass production which formed our modern world eliminated the old journeymen and artisans of yesteryear: you wouldn't see "Wizards" in modern times be a major "thing" just like you don't see "Blacksmiths" today as a major component of our economy.
That's the problem: you can't really pull off an urban fantasy setting that well because urban fantasy comes with modern problems: paying rent. Those "wise, stubborn old Dwarves" would likely be working at a fricking Home Depot like the rest of us. It's why most urban-fantasy settings rely on some "secret world" type deal where for one reason or another all the magic in the world is hidden and the MC and friends are some of the few "special" individuals who can use it.
It could work in a setting with a different economic system maybe.
And frick it, 'cause I'm sick to my stomach and bored, lemme go further.
Capitalism can't produce anything these days beyond the same boring goddamn business offices. And the novelty of having those offices run with Halflings or Demons or whatever inside of them wears off quickly, because these people would be doing the same shit everyone else is today: wage slaving to make a living. No amount of inborn nobility is going to make an elf act like an elf if he was born in some goddamn suburbs, eating the same garbage fricking food as the rest of us and watching the same mass produced slop as the rest of us.
The only way urban fantasy could "work" I'd say is under some kind of Socialist Economic system. Where the McDonalds and Amazons of the world are completely annihilated by the fact that the economic system itself isn't about profit-seeking via labor exploitation. Under such an economic regime you could see the return of cultural specialization which makes fantasy *fun*: Elves would build towers that touch the sky and are home to more varieties of plant than anything else on earth. Demons would haunt the old rotten urban jungles of cities that took the wrong side of the class war. Vast swathes of the world could be returned to nature and regain some mystique as Suburbs would be gone. At least then you'd have some variety rather than the omnipresent Hell of Capitalist Dystopia.
I think only shadowrun has really melded the two into an effective whole, and then really only on the large scale. The shadowrun universe is generally hostile, but the mix of magic and cyberpunk offers what little hope the setting has. No matter how terrifying the magical abomination, there's always the chance that bleeding edge tech will be able to beat it. No matter how dehumanizing and evil the tech, you can always hope for a deus ex machina. That doesn't work if the world isn't a grimdark capitalist hellhole mindlessly chasing innovation.
Shadowrun worked because they went at the problem with Urban Fantasy the other way, and introduced the magic into a future timeline. No need to rewrite previous history or worry about secret world bullshit.
You'd probably want to set it far enough after the initial reintegration to make things 'common knowledge', at least +5-20 years, unless you'd want to focus your campaign on reintegration itself
I think you're kind of missing the fact that the VAST majority of urban fantasy is escapist fantasy crafted from the ground up to offer the reader a familiar modern character who gets to interact with a more meaningful, fulfilling world through the fantastic. Urban fantasy is western isikai-style storytelling where you get your magic powers and elf waifu but you still get the benefits of modern culture and tech. Can you think of any urban fantasy series that actually focus on the humdrum mundanity you're b***hing about? I'm sure there's some, but they're definiteky a minority.
I'm more or less basing my critique off shit like "Bright" on Netflix and its "What if Orcs were in hip hop gangs?" Genre of Urban Fantasy.
I think another big problem is a sense of danger. I mean part of the reason medieval fantasy works so well for games/rpgs is that literally as soon as you leave the bounds of the village, all bets are off as far as your own personal safety goes.
In the era of strip malls and suburbs and gated communities, that same sense of danger and mystique just doesn't exist as much. If at all. And the cool factor that comes from having an elf waifu or learning magic is undermined by the knowledge that Elves aren't their own "thing" off in some ethnic enclaves, at least not usually, but are integrated into the economy in some great leveling along with everyone else.
Admittedly I'm hungover so this might be total gibberish I'm writing.
"Bright" is one of the worst examples of urban fantasy. I don't think it's a good idea to critique the genre using that as a case study aside form what not to do.
Not OP, but why is Bright so bad? I haven’t watched it, and it sounds like a good decision to do so.
it didn't turn out to be a shadowrun prelude
and it was entirely too modern despite having a supposed fantasy history
It was just so so, fair bits of it didn't make sense but its a buddy cop movie, not a fantasy story. The moral is kind of preachy and everyone but the ork just more or less phoned it in. Its worth a watch not a rental (do they even still do that?)
How the frick did this turn into some pro-socialist propaganda piece?
I honestly don't see how any of that would be any different in any other economic system either, let alone socialism. You'd still pay rent and slave under your overlords doing the same things, it's just doing those things for your government overlords instead of your corporate overlords, just as it's always been.
There's a point there about safety and novelty. I think space/post-apocalyptic scifi works because it brings back that frontier and unsafe environment you're getting at, and adding that aspect in would probably be the way to mesh everything together. But none of that has anything to do with economic systems. Hell, the western genre/setting and shit based on it came out of an era fueled by rampant capitalism. Oil barons and gold miners trying to get rich by any means necessary and all the auxiliary people going along with them to make a living selling them shit.
shut the frick up dumb amerilard
The most concerning thing is when I read anons who don’t think socialist organizations end up being for profit.
The eternal chimp inside every person screeches to pile more bananas on the pile, until at last he can die upon said pile.
Modern capitalism is a relativist hellscape but to this anon’s point having too much consolidated power tends to result in that regardless of how a society feels about capital. The accidentals change but the essence is the same.
Is this thread just a pretext to talk about dresden since the new audiobook just dropped?
I think literally everyone who listened to it collectively went "yeah that was okay,"
>dresden
die in a fricking fire
>dresden
>die in a fricking fire
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Dresden_in_World_War_II
Bruh.
my commands stretch through time
Nope. Never read it.
An extremely successful genre already exists in the urban fantasy sphere. It's called, "Horror."
Two steps:
1) Industrialize magic.
2) No guns
Then it's as simple as adding magic to urban scenarios. Make urban landscapes utterly massive so you can mix tropes into the urban settings.
Things like a primal, feral society living in an abandoned cityscape overgrown with vegetation. Or animals that learned to use weapons (raccoons with switch blades is one of my favorite things to use).
Another trope I like to use is cities and corporations are older than history. That modern technology is basically the best it gets, and it's been around for thousands, possibly tens of thousands of years. So it's treated as ancient and has mythology behind it.
There's other ideas I had but I can't remember at the moment. There isn't only 1 solution, there are a bunch of small things the setting needs to feel fresh.
that's just having magic replace technology
There's only so many things that can be done. The other option is don't play an urban setting.
I'd make it Arcanum-esque. Technology and magic don't exactly mix because one is beyond natural laws/is them while the other manipulates or works around them
the most profitable film ever, Disney's Marvel's The Avengers's Infinity War's End Game, is modern fantasy
>How could you make a good modern-fantasy world?
Literally Stargate.
I assume we're talking about for a game and not for books (because they're different goals).
For a modern fantasy setting to make a lot of sense, you need to decide whether history is divergent due to whatever the fantasy aspects are (e.g. Bright) or the same despite them (e.g. Urban Arcana). Once you've settled on that, you pick your immediate locale (e.g. New York, Chicago, Omaha, Muncie, Bridgeport, etc.) The city is important because the city's culture flavors the game. That does not mean you need to set the game immediately within it.
As an example, one game I ran was set outside Omaha. Pretty specifically outside of Omaha. In cornfields, essentially. But because of how magic worked, the cornfields were home to all sorts of pseudoterrains and pocket dimensions. But the game's flavor was impacted by Omaha's presence and the local culture of eastern Nebraska/western Iowa. Everybody was neighborly, farmers would drag your beater Volkswagen out of the ditch without even razzing you, people would just give you food without a word.
Totally different from the game run in/around DC. Most of that involved ripping through the satellite cities and bedroom communities. Whole different feel. Plus political devils and demons were a major factor.
Gods should only get involved if they would get involved. If you have a character that's a chosen champion of the god, sure, they might get visited (in their dreams).
I like urban fantasy. I wonder why this specific genre is hated so much and why people become completely moronic the second it is mentioned. Is the idea of a Masquarade so difficult for you to suspend your disbelief?
Does Hunter x Hunter counts as urban fantasy?
What tactical combat RPG works best for "techwear-clad anime girl operators using high-tech weapons and magic to fight monsters, mutants, infected, robots, aliens, and extremists in a mid/post-apocalyptic world" gachacore?
Think Arknights, Girls Frontline, Blue Archive, Honkai, Punishing: Gray Raven, Last Origin, etc.
Do they make decent modern fantasy settings?
i played a few of those. as far as gameplay they're all realtime and don't involve much strategy so they wouldn't translate well to the table. i'd run them as pbta maybe.
the setting usually uses real history and suddenly magic bullshit appears
arknights i think is more of a zombie apocalypse thing too but the zombies have magic and shit. maybe more of a sci fi setting in that way
a lot of anime jrpg settings just have high tech and magic. like final fantasy 7 or something with power plants running on ghost energy. that's maybe the "best" way to do it but it gets stupid fast.
First, I think this sort of thing requires a tad more care than just haphazardly putting elves and orcs and dwarves in a modern looking setting.
One thing that pisses me off is that people take modern day real world but just add the fantasy shit sloppily on top of it like the movie Bright.
Take some time to actually develop some history on how you went from ye olden shit brown dirt farmer fantasy to dudes in suits wit swords. The technological and cultural progression doesn't have to emulate the real world
Pic related is unironically one of the best "modern" fantasy
Fantasy shouldn't be set in the real world
Not SMT or Phantasy Star?
>magic just suddenly came back
Just make it so that magic has always been there, dumbass