Channelknight Fadran

"Two hours, they said," Ayia replied. She'd already pulled her Rowlet out of the little pocket dimension she kept her junk in and started stroking his feathers.

"That would be... preferable." The pause came from Elya shifting positions. "Decent warriors are hard to replace."

"If we can, we'd want to break into their weapon's vault and steal or destroy what we can. Of course, there's probably no way to do that quietly," Elya scanned the building again. "There will be bodies left behind today."

Elya placed her hand on the ground. She couldn't necessarily feel the vibrations of the men inside or anything, but the cold pressure helped her focus. "There should be a side entrance, for the janitorial staff and whatnot. That alley, over there," Elya pointed with her free hand, "it should be there. That's our best shot to get in."

"Well, I've seen the massive ones in the richer parts of town," Elya replied. She pulled out a few throwing daggers. "I expected that they'd get more dramatically smaller the poorer the areas got. Though I guess not."

Ayia did after a few moments, then blew into Andante's face.

"It's larger than I thought it would be," Elya said, peeking at the building from around the corner.

So this is Brandon Sanderson's fansite. Talk to most young authors nowadays: chances are they're a hard worldbuilder. They can throw together the foundations for a decent universe on the fly without a pen or pencil in just a few minutes. Chances are also likely that they read Brandon Sanderson--let's face it, who doesn't? Is there a correlation here? ... Yes. Yes, there is. The answer is yes. Which is fine. Hard Worldbuiding is great; I would know. I'm a hard worldbuilder too. Heck, I'm right here at the Sandersite. But I don't need to write a blog post defending Hard Worldbuilding. Now, most people aren't jerks (there's gonna be a blog post about that soon-ish too, actually). However, I've still met the odd folk infected with Worldbuilder's disease who knows absolutely nothing about Soft Worldbuilding (imma called it "Softy" from here on out) and are kinda mean to people who do it. This problem stems from misunderstanding (obviously): essentially, people will assume that Softies exist as just a weaker version of Hardies, which of course would be bad. Basically, what this means is that soft worldbuilders would simply be lazier than hard worldbuilders, and should be treated like such. Which is wrong. That's not what Softies are. It is not a form of Hard Worldbuilding with fewer details and weaker connections; it's a form of worldbuilding with a focus on a different aspect of the story. Generally speaking, Hardies are very plot-centric. Take Mistborn, the Final Empire, for example; I mean, both the magic and the world are both there in the name! The plot is all about the nobles versus the skaa, and the exclusionary metal magic and creepy eye spike dudes. Why do you think they're called the Stormlight Archives; it's all about the Stormlight! Hardies are a planner's playground. Sofites, on the other hand, cover a completely different side of the story: the tone. Show of hands: how many of you read Mistborn and have tried to write a dark fantasy, nitty-gritty slog story? Based on what I've seen from the Shard, a lot of you have. Some are better than others (I'm thinking of Syn's Mystic-verse in particular), but it's easy enough to say that a lot of you have a half-murderhobo protagonist who gets down and dirty with some sort of oppressive force, using their magic to slaughter the evil and bring about justice in their own twisted way. In the case that you rasied your hand, then clearly you liked the tone of Mistborn enough to try and replicate it. There's no problem with that; I loved Mistborn as much as the next guy. Its tone is so perfectly dark and gritty. The point I'm tryna get across here is that tone is crucial for a story--but it's often difficult to get across correctly. A Softy story is almost always entirely tone-centric. They're meant to evoke more otherworldly feelings and internal connections rather than drive a hard plot along with logic and reason. If any of you have seen Studio Ghibli, try to imagine the strange wistfulness that every (good) movie always evokes: Spirited Away, Castle in the Sky, Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind, Howl's Moving Castle, Kiki's Delivery Service, uhh... Ponyo (what was that movie? I love it to death but it was so weird). PRINCESS MONONOKE (I just watched that last night so I'm still kinda in the vibe). These movies never really expound on the details because that wouldn't help--heck, it'd even detract from--the immersion. Lemme whip out an example that people have actually seen, though, so I can go into more detail: Spiderverse. To start, imma just say that this movie is the best frikin cinematic masterpiece of a singular film ever created (it's tied with Castle in the Sky, by the way, for first place in my grand tier list of movies. Endgame would be higher, but it's too perfect and also not much of a standalone, so I keep it away). Now, to start, this is a comic book movie: it's not exactly designed for cold hard reason. However, a lot of Marvel films are very hard worldbuildy anyways (Iron Man and Captain America, for example, are farther on the harder spectrum than, say, Shang-Chi and Doctor Strange), so I honestly couldn't care less. Anyways, Spiderverse leaves that amazing, wistful gut feeling in you like nothing else; every time it gets to the final scenes and everything awesome has already happened I'm always just aching for more. But that's not created by the hard physics of multiversal travel and Spiderman powers: it's created by Miles Morales' and all the other Spidey's arcs. Tone is captured by the atmosphere of the setting as well as the characters and their emotions. It's almost as all-encompassing as a theme, and manages to capture your world not in a fancy picture frame but through a different lens. Every story needs it; but Softies are almost always 100% focused on it. When I first started writing, I never really focused much on the Tone. Iconar Collective was just a boogaloo of hard magic and worlds. I never focused on trying to set a vibe to the whole thing; I was too bent on showing off this epic world that I had created. But, of course, dropping exposition left and right isn't writing: hence why the first act is so goshdarn terrible. It's easy to learn and memorize facts: how to properly plot and pace a world, how to give a character an arc, how to develop of a solid world. It's less easy to learn the writing itself: theme, tone, voice, and all that. And it wasn't until I started trying out Softies that I really got a hang of decent prose. Before I wrote Wishing Away and a myraid of other little storyettes, I'd never focused how to write a decent setting or strike a certain mood. I'd go completely minimalistic for how everything and everyone looked, leaving the reader with a blank image of pretty much nothing in their head. All they got was magic and facts. But now I go into paragraphs upon paragraphs of detail explaining just one or two things so it's very clear just how this particular place is supposed to look and feel. Currently I'm working on another Hard Worldbuilding project (the itch came back to me), but all my dabblings in the Softy realm have given me more experience in theme, tone, and even just prose itself than jotting down details in a notebook ever would. So if you take anything away from this at all, then just give a Softy a try. Crack open a google doc and try to hit the tone instead of the details of the world; flesh out as little as you can, and just focus on your character. If you can figure it out, it'll give you the most experience a piece of writing ever could. * * * * * * Thanks for reading! This might've made absolutely no sense because I'm terrible at explaining things, but if you've gotten this far, then good for you! I'm going to create a thread in Creator's Corner dedicated to developing Softies so people can ask questions that I'll hopefully answer in time. I've been meaning to make one for awhile, actually. And no, I'm not only making it now so I can have the 1000th topic in the subforum. I'll edit in the link as soon as it's made. Don't die! ~ Fadran

Uhh... I already wrote a thing about it in my "blog," but I guess I should probably teleport it into here. Can you post again so I can do that?

"None whatsoever." Elya smiled at him.

She ended up opening the door entirely for a quick crossbreeze. "That's better."

No clue. To be completely honest I don't even have a basic concept.

"Rest up if you can." Elya said, straightening her jacket. "The sooner you heal, the better." With that she gestured to the others that they should probably get going.

Help I need a cool solid hard magic system that has the same vibe as Fullmetal Alchemist's and you seem like a weeb so... help?

"Actually, yes you are." Elya also brought out a granola bar. "Also you can have this if you get hungry."

By... hitting the edit button

As soon as he was done tying his knot, Elya added a couple flairs of her own, including an undertuck to keep it away from prying fingers. "There."

So... who is your PFP supposed to be? Just a lil' doodly boi or a character or...?

"I'll add to it," Elya promised.

Yeah. You just have to edit the OP. Penguin? Penguins? On a scale of one to eleven: Iroh.

"There isn't any safer place to keep it." Elya replied. She started looping it around Ne'ik's ankle.

"I'll just leash you to a wall is all. You could still walk around and sleep and whatnot." Elya brought out a long, thin cord from her jacket. "As long as you don't strain it shouldn't hurt at all."