Channelknight Fadran

"It's quite the place," Vance admitted. "I'll give it that."

"Is that consistent across all of them?" Vance glanced back at the circle. "I mean, some might try to explode back."

"Oh, well. We just had a complete and utter breakthrough." Vance continued overlaying counterspells. "But otherwise nothing much."

Quendi glanced at her two 'companions.'

Vance returned to the mansion skimming over Quest's notes and turning to the rightmost staircase: the one they hadn't quite disabled yet. The witch that had lived here had been less of a true sorcerer than he'd thought, it seemed. All these magical circles and ancient runes seemed to indicate a lack of ability to directly imbue her power into the area. She was a 'technique over power' kind of witch. That was fine, he guessed. It meant there was a way to directly counteract the magical impregnation here, rather than forcing them to wait for her influence to fade so he could overtake the place. But this kind of magic was really more of his sister's thing. This rune here means... uhh... He squinted. Gosh, these are complicated... "All undead possess a certain ability to regenerate outside of lifedrain, but you're right: for the most part, preventing its magical osmosis will stop it from healing." With the carriage stopped, Quendi jumped to the ground and strode forwards slowly, starting by pushing her power to her senses. The air was frighteningly still around her, barely swishing this way and that with her footsteps. A nighttime mist was beginning to set, though she was able to see through it for now.

"That'll have to do. You have magic at all?" "Oh, and let me know when you feel confident in that," Vance added, walking back up the hill to the mansion. He turned his head back to look her in the eye, a mischevious grin on his face. "I'll duel you whenever you want." @Ookla the BlowUpperOfStuff

Part Two: The Suspension Scale As I see it, there are three types of people in this world: those who love themselves a good long sword fight, those who will yell at you for your sword fights being unrealistic, and the people in between who try to mediate but almost always fail miserably. I’m a spectacle fan. Really. Honestly, I think people who gatekeep other peoples’ fight scenes are among the most toxic human beings on the face of the planet. I mean, the Inigo Montoya vs Wesley duel is probably the best sword fight in cinematic history, but it was so unrealistic in every conceivable fashion. Do you really want to “well actually” the Princess Bride? But I digress. Back to the point: fight scene realism. When writing a fight scene, it’s important to designate just how much you’re willing to suspend disbelief. I’m numbering this scale as a rough outline, but will go into greater detail and nuances that will effectively demolish the numbering of realism entirely, so consider yourselves warned. Absolute realism. The fight scene option for hard magic system enthusiasts and the spear people who hate on swords for some reason. Regular “realism.” A lot of the mediator types find themselves here, telling themselves that a little bit of exaggeration is okay as long as the majority of the fight scene is okay. Expect short sword clashes and a decided lack of powerful magic, though. Realism is unimportant. You’re perfectly willing to let a battle drag on for minutes in order to entertain your reader. Battles are often won by the power of friendship or another army miraculously arriving in the nick of time. This is where the fun begins. For standard anime enjoyers and action movie enthusiasts, you decide to throw all conceptions of basic fight scene realism out the window in favor of absolute spectacle. Enjoyment comes first and foremost and fact-checking can come later You’ve officially reached Saitama levels, and it’s not even a question of power or responsibility or anything anymore. Conflicts regularly explode entire cities as collateral damage and characters survive blasts powerful enough to annihilate planets on the daily. But before I get into demolishing this number system, I’m going to answer the new most obvious matter: what level of realism should you use in your writing? The answer seems obvious: do what makes you feel best. You’ve surely noticed by now that I laugh in the face of realistic fights and strive for nothing less than incredibly overpowered anime combat, but please don’t take my obvious riffings and biases personally if you really want to write one-slash sword fights between a pair of time-period-accurate knights in time-period-accurate armor. So let me provide you with the a cohesive, mostly unbiased five-step plan to figure:out what level of realism fits best in your story. First look at your overall plot and character arcs. Define the scale of impact that your particular storyline has. Roughly match your realism type to the story scale. If your protagonist is the Chosen One, destined to defeat the immortal Dark Lord and lead an army to victory against the tyrannical rule of the empire, then you should probably go with a lot of suspension of disbelief. On the other hand, if your story follows a prospective assassin painstakingly making their way up the ranks, you might want to take a more realistic and gritty approach. Now that you’ve selected a realism level, cross-reference it with your various planned fight scenes.Think of the tone and impact that you want each of these scenes to have. Make sure they match the chosen realism level and overall tone of your other fight scenes. While it might make sense for your Chosen One to be constantly engaged in hyper-realistic combat against orcs and wizards, if the final battle against the Dark Lord is supposed to be god-tier-powers versus god-tier-powers then you might want to remove some realism from earlier fight scenes so as not to jar your reader too much. Make sure to really define how power functions in your story. Is it simply by combat prowess and years of harsh training, or does your magic concentrate in promising individuals to grant them powers above all other mortals? Really define your scale in reference to how realistic you want it to be. Ask Fadran for help if ou have any questions, because he’s totally willing to assist! So now that you’ve figured that part out, allow me to explain to you why figuring that part out is frankly unimportant. The problem here is that the best stories are often inconsistent. I recently(ish) read Eye of the World from Wheel of Time, and was quite shocked by the ending. The entire book was about a bunch of kids being led by an elementalist witch lady through a kingdom full of discount orcs wielding regular swords and riding atop regular horses, then suddenly jumps to Rand with literal god powers fighting off the Dark Lord. As a concept this doesn’t seem to work very well in terms of power level consistency, yet in the story it functions exactly as it should. Similarly, there are plenty of stories about god-level heroes and villains facing against each other, but in momentary bursts of prowess rather than epic drawn-out battles of magical might. Best example I can think of are the earlier episodes of Demon Slayer, where the fight scenes might seem really long-winded and unrealistic, but rarely include very many attacks from the main characters at all. Tanjiro only ever makes a couple actual offenses against his enemies when it comes down to it: all the rest of the fight is usually him dodging attacks and closing the gap to set up for a single strike: very akin to sword fights like in real life (probably). So what am I saying here? Well, it’s simple, really. You can’t trap a story to one single level of disbelief. You have to borrow aspects of adjacents—or even far-off levels—in order to keep things spicy. Need to illustrate how underpowered your protagonist is? Make an early villain a step over them in the realism scale. Want to ground your Level 20 wizard a little? Have every strike go with precision and purpose into the army of CR ¼ goblins rather than smiting them with a big laser beam. The idea is to hold your reader’s expectations to a certain threshold before bending the rules, granting just the right amount of impact to whatever it is you’re trying to write out. Nobody’s going to care if your MCs rival is just “better” at swordsmanship; you have to establish this dominance through how much you change the pace for them. But enough of that. Seriously. I said to “frick this broad scud,” but here I still am. Certainly it’s a lot more focused on the fight scenes themselves than the fluff surrounding them, but I still have yet to post anything about writing action. That’ll be Part Three. Stay tuned.

"What kind?" Quendi started preparing her energy, reallocating the magical power throughout her body into her vital areas. "I'm afraid they can also be quite resilient, even without the passive self-regeneration."

"They tend to be quite stupid. They're slow and predictable."

"If there's a route with a fortress on it, maybe. It would appear that it's already smelled us."

Well... an adventure seemed fine to her. Cherry tossed them the parcel and shrugged. "Worth a shot, I guess."

"They aren't a particularly enjoyable abomination to fight."

"Yuh-huh. He said we were getting paid. How's about we just do that and we'll be on our way."

Quendi cursed. "Of course..."

"I should hope so." Cherry waved the parcel around in the air. "Here's your little package."

Thanks v much, Kas, for giving me an awesome first SE!

Dude. Stop posting hot guys all the time. You make me question my straight-ness.

Excuse you, I'll ask the questions here (no)

Amen

It always happens in the Introduce Yourself subforum for some reason. Idk why. Hi there! Hello! Glad you can finally be here. Thoughts on mushrooms?

And in the end, Tantyck managed to survive against all odds Very fitting