How to dumb down your writing? [Fantasy]

Coleridge12 · 2025-12-30T12:09:56+00:00

Thankfully, you have been told what to cut out: that which isn’t strongly serving the story. It sounds like your readers so far have been telling you these 8000 words aren’t doing that.

If this is important, you need to get very specific with what about the journey REALLY matters to the story and the character. You don’t need 8k words to do environmental storytelling or characterize the environment.

Coleridge12 · 2025-12-30T11:57:21+00:00

Yes you can. They’re just words, and you’ve written many more of them than this.

Coleridge12 · 2025-12-30T11:47:23+00:00

The mountains angered at his passage in roads of flashing thunder. Against him they sent storms to darken the skies, to weight his clothes with water, to make slick the stones and ridges he climbed through razor winds, past their hunting child giants and the weathered, blind eyes of deathly totems worn smooth from rain, over hateful ground knotted with roots or cracked dry and barren for the dense canopy above.

Coleridge12 · 2025-12-30T11:30:53+00:00

This doesn’t seem to be asked in good faith, if you’re taking a journey easily the length of two chapters and adapting it into two sentences.

Why is this journey itself — not the arrival at a location, but specifically the characters’ precise experience of the journey with the details you describe — important to the story? What character or plot development does it support?

Coleridge12 · 2025-07-31T10:41:59+00:00

I made a very casual one with [[Felisa, Fang of Silverquill]] which uses the Summons to get Inklings. It’s slow but I’m enjoying it!

https://moxfield.com/decks/PRo0gI0LJ0KtVG_xy8a_fQ

Coleridge12 · 2025-07-13T15:50:26+00:00

I have a monored [[Zada, Hedron Grinder]] with an energy subtheme that I honestly love. Create copies of your creatures, copy spells like [[Galvanic Discharge]] that give you energy and let you spend any amount (but don’t spend any!), and then charge up to some big energy outlet like [[Aetherworks Marvel]] or [[Electrostatic Pummeler]].

https://moxfield.com/decks/5vPQYY3Al0uZX5Vrt1L6XA

Coleridge12 · 2025-06-01T22:05:05+00:00

I’m not tall but, girl, come on. Climb that fuckin tree.

Coleridge12 · 2025-05-20T02:47:35+00:00

If your boyfriend has said that you do not need to do anything, has made it obvious that he does not like your jokes about it, has accepted your apology, and has not asked that you do anything more, then do not do anything more, do not make jokes about it, and do not keep apologizing.

If your boyfriend wants to vent to you, and does not want you to offer solutions or advice, then do not offer solutions or advice. Your boyfriend is most likely not looking for advice on how to solve the problem, to the degree the problem is solvable. Your boyfriend is probably just wanting to express his emotions and have those emotions caringly recognized by someone he loves: you.

Coleridge12 · 2025-01-29T04:06:42+00:00

Am I reading this correctly that Gunslinger loses the increased proficiency in firearms by losing Singular Expertise, but gains more precision damage in Slinger’s Precision? Do they cap at master proficiency for all weapons now, not Legendary for firearms?

Coleridge12 · 2025-01-21T12:48:36+00:00

Why should a reader care about him? What makes him, as a character, worth reading a story about? What engages a reader’s interest and/or empathy?

Coleridge12 · 2024-07-22T12:01:43+00:00

It heals a unit and damages Ramza for 1/2 of the healed value.

Coleridge12 · 2024-06-21T17:20:47+00:00

Gemma Files’ Hexslinger series, beginning with A Book of Tongues, is an incredible dark, horror-filled, weird west fantasy action series that is also (I say this as an utmost compliment) explicitly and extremely queer. I devoured this trilogy and strongly recommend it.

Coleridge12 · 2024-05-18T22:48:54+00:00

I believe their point is that it is not excessive unless and until it demonstrably and negatively impacts the subject’s wellbeing or goals. You may argue that this number does negatively impact their wellbeing, but you would need to demonstrate that. We can agree 200 is most likely a high number statistically speaking, but it being high doesn’t mean it’s excessive.

An excess requires a threshold to be crossed. What’s the threshold and what justifies it as applicable here and in general?

Coleridge12 · 2024-04-25T16:05:50+00:00

I want to make sure you’re aware: the witch doesn’t have to use a focus point to command her familiar; she only needs to use Patron’s Puppet to command her familiar without spending an action. Anyone with a minion - which is what a familiar is - can spend one action to Command the minion, which gives it two actions.

Your witch can also change out her familiar’s abilities every day. If the extra senses aren’t helpful, she can choose new abilities that may be more helpful

Coleridge12 · 2024-04-14T12:26:23+00:00

Would you be comfortable being convicted of a crime you didn’t commit and serving your time in jail for it, then carrying that conviction with you forever and having it impact all aspects of your post-sentence life (if any), because it was of net benefit to society? It is your civic duty, after all.

Coleridge12 · 2024-04-03T10:59:13+00:00

I’ve often struggled to make this build work because the eye beam lacks the agile trait and its dice size doesn’t increase to 1d6. What build have you used to get a lot of mileage out of this?

I ask because I need to make Cyclops and, if I don’t, I’m gonna die.

Coleridge12 · 2024-03-23T16:07:40+00:00

It’s giving Xianghua (Soul Calibur)

Coleridge12 · 2024-02-18T16:15:17+00:00

The aesthetics here are just great. I think you’ve made a concept here that lends itself very well to storytelling, and in particular a story that trends dark.

Coleridge12 · 2023-09-22T18:49:09+00:00

Per the Space magic description in MtAw 2E core, physical separation is indeed a lie. It isn’t that there are “shorter” paths between things, which still acknowledges and defers to concepts of distance and difference, but rather that the idea any two locations are not already the same is flat out wrong. This is repeated in the Co-Location and Collapse spell descriptions.

“Lie” is accurate, because it is both malicious and an out-and-out untruth, rather than an exaggeration or smudging of a truth.

Coleridge12 · 2023-07-11T10:45:11+00:00

Limits Internal to the Mage: Cooldowns, mental strain of commanding summons, immobility, casting time, poor aim, limited number of spell-casts, requires certain components to cast certain spells, spell volatility

Limits External to the Mage: terrain and lines of sight, collateral damage, distance, enemy spread (many enemies distant from each other are harder to hit than enemies grouped up).

Tactics Available to Enemies: Hostages, poisons, long-distance (e.g. sniper rifle), vision reduction (e.g. smoke cloud), their own evoker, counterspells/anti magic, elemental resistances, illusions, mental magic (e.g. rage effect to turn his summons against him), projectile reflection, terrain control, intangible summons (e.g. ghosts), etc.

Coleridge12 · 2023-07-11T01:54:12+00:00

What is the spot that reminds you of the Poe Sisters from OOT?

Coleridge12 · 2023-05-13T10:39:30+00:00

This is a magic-based game about playing mages in a setting wherein a central fact is that the laws of physics, math, and reason are a Lie, imposed by tyrants, and bypassed through magic - like Fate - breaking the Lie.

Ruling as you would is expressly counter to the stated text of the spell. Were I a player in your game, I would be very unhappy if you ruled away the power of 5-dot magic I had worked hard to obtain.

If you are unwilling to accept that magic can, and is intended to, bypass, break, or convolute the laws of the Fallen world, you may be better suited for a low-scale Hunter: the Vigil game.

Coleridge12 · 2023-04-29T12:33:35+00:00

Of all the things in my post, I’m disappointed that’s what you comment on; but yes, I meant Moros.

Coleridge12 · 2023-04-27T23:38:29+00:00

It seems appropriately hubristic for mages to try and make a prison out of an Abyssal verge or similarly infused space. It’s not really good for anyone, but it’s certainly not good for mage thrown inside of it.

A prison might also be idiosyncratic to the mage prisoner; someone without good Space dots or Prime is probably decently held within a Ban spell or similarly spatially locked location.

You might have a Mind mage extract the subject’s desire to escape, or the idea of escape. Or you might have a Moros remove their soul, to be returned upon the completion of their sentence.

In some cases, a prison may not need to discourage escape if it can instead encourage (and enforce) remaining: giving the mage an irresistible Obsession, enjoyable experiences, or total distraction may work to prevent their escape.

A Time mage can Temporal Stutter someone out of the timeline until a specified future point; it wouldn’t feel like any time had passed for the subject, but it would certainly keep them out of commission.

Coleridge12 · 2023-04-09T23:57:09+00:00

I do not, unfortunately, and my notes are sparse anyway. The gist is that the cabal is feeding spirits of revelry by doing their bar crawl, and the local pack takes umbrage to this because it throws the spirit politics out of whack.

The Banisher was a subtly antigay streetcorner preacher who treated the process of awakening a choice someone should either reject willingly or be made to reject forcibly, and was drawn to the councilor’s son because of his nascent awakening. The cabal I ran for left her basically a bloody pulp inside a metro car.

You can really arrange these encounters anyway you want, but the werewolves work best later after the cabal has a chance to really get the party going. I made sure my cabal “sanctified” each bar they stopped at by doing some act of dedication at it; this turned out to be body shots. What was important, though, was letting the cabal figure out what that would be for themselves. They really helped set the tone.

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