Antique stores are fun to fight through. (But only if they’re classy.)

[Melaan]

Okay so the title is actually based off the Mass Effect games, but what got me thinking about it was a scene from ‘Words of Radiance’.

 

In this scene, Kaladin contemplates life and practices the spear in the center of the flooded training arena during the weeping.

 I honestly can’t remember how it was described, and sadly the book is packed away in moving boxes so I can’t re-read it right now. The point is,  when I finished reading that part I was just taken aback by how lovely a scene it was and how not only the character’s thoughts, but the SETTTING conveyed the emotion of the piece. So it got me thinking. . .

 

Why are the settings in my own stories so storming boring?!

 

Are we really so desensitized to the norm and expected that we see in stories everyday that we can’t think of anything  more awesome?
 

Soldiers fight in fields. (Duh where else would they go?)

Elves run through forests. (also duh.)

And superheroes take out bad guys in New York, old warehouses, and on the docks. (But mostly New York.)

 

So. . .Let’s chat.

Does anyone have some fun or clever ideas to share about exciting and unique places, fictional or 'realistic' where fights or other story events could take place? What do these places look like, and why there?
 

Don’t be afraid to be random.

Maybe a room full of bubbles might be fun to show a batter royal?

See. . . I’m not afraid to be random.

[Talanic]

My latest story takes place entirely inside the mansion of a 5,000-year-old hero of legend.  I did my best to give the place character, from a room wallpapered in the scales of gargantuan beasts, to an immense statue garden, crafted by the hero to serve as mementos of his friends who didn't attain immortality.

 

At its very heart, one can still find a camp, set downward from steps of packed earth and stones.  The entire place was grown from that one point, and so the battle occurs there as an invading elf attempts to pull the entire structure into Faerie.

[Melaan]

Just with the bit you said about it I'm totally interested. It sounds like a cool story.
With the hero being around that long I'd imagine there's a lot of cool objects laying around too.

[Talanic]

It's on the forums here - currently as Monkey Wrench, but it really needs a new title.

[Melaan]

Thanks! I'll have to take a look

[bartbug]

Uh, I'm putting my "elves" in a hybrid between a sea and a swamp, and I'm making them really biologically strange.

[Kasimir]

This is on a slightly broader level than the question is asking, but I'm working on setting an urban fantasy in a Greek-motif trading port of an Empire (read: insignificant backwater). My aim is for this trading port to be in general terms culturally and historically distinct from the superpower of it's day (a quasi-Persian Empire). I admit, it is in part a comment on how the conceit of many urban fantasies basically is that gods, creatures, magic, mythologies from all over the world still end up locating themselves in America. One must sometimes wonder what happened to the places that once used to have these gods and/or magic.

 

...I've always thought that an army having a battle in war-adapted space suits on asteroids in an asteroid belt might be rather cool, although the logistics are something that's going to take quite a bit of doing. And I've been doing some reading on cave diving because I'm intending to feature the environment of submerged caves in a story somehow or other

[Melaan]

Uh, I'm putting my "elves" in a hybrid between a sea and a swamp, and I'm making them really biologically strange.

 

I love how you put 'elves' in quote marks.

 

 

. . .I admit, it is in part a comment on how the conceit of many urban fantasies basically is that gods, creatures, magic, mythologies from all over the world still end up locating themselves in America. One must sometimes wonder what happened to the places that once used to have these gods and/or magic.

 

...I've always thought that an army having a battle in war-adapted space suits on asteroids in an asteroid belt might be rather cool, although the logistics are something that's going to take quite a bit of doing. And I've been doing some reading on cave diving because I'm intending to feature the environment of submerged caves in a story somehow or other

 

It's true, we like to set things up in a very America type place, even fantasy places have a lot of similarities. While this makes sense ('write what you know') It's also a little silly.  I don't think people really consider how different other places in the world are -- Language, culture, politics. . . Even just day to day activities.

I admit when I read ' a battle. . . on asteroids' I was like 'how the heck. . . .' But it could be pretty awesome. One take on it would be how much planning and strategic work would need to be done.

Edited October 16, 2014 by Melaan

[Melaan]

Yesterday evening My husband and I passed some factory or something on a drive but there were a bunch of vents in the ground so it was really steamy. I thought that would be an awesome place to have a fight. i mean, Ninjas use smoke bombs all the time, now they wouldn't need to.

[BreathTaker]

I have been reading the Coldfire Trilogy and a lot of the locations in the series are pretty cool, like the Forest and the Black Lands. 

 

I think a cool place to have a battle would be in a huge forest. Marching through a dimly lit and misty forest, constantly jumping at the sound of a stick cracking in the distance. Always on edge waiting for the enemy to jump out and say, "Boo," until the stress is too much for some men. Eventually Army 1. would find Army 2. slaughtered by what looks to be a friggin dragon. But in reality it was... never mind that's going in my book.