I like to consider myself a pretty perceptive person, but sometimes I have to be completely hit over the head by something before I really notice it. As such, this month when I was reading The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror - 2006 (a gift from my husband, who is perceptive enough to notice the huge stacks of fantasy and horror anthologies that I've purchased or borrowed in the past year), I came to a startling conclusion... The fantasy genre is being taken over by modern Earth-based fantasy! Well duh. If I were more perceptive, I might have already noticed that, given the popularity of Harry Potter and Laurell K. Hamilton, and the fact that fantasy movies tend to be leaning more towards the Underworld style than the Conan style. But no, it took me reading most of a huge anthology and realizing that every single story is set in modern or historic Earth. Except the one that's set in Hell, and Hell is like a coterminous plane with Earth, so it only halfway counts as not-Earth. The thing is, I can't complain, because I'm part of this growing trend. I just recently started work on the third book in my as-of-yet unnamed and unpublished series. A series which is set in modern Earth. I used to write your typical swords-and-sorcery fantasy, but not anymore (well, I do have an idea for a book in that style, but it's on the back burner). I've also helped my Dad and my friend from writing class with their modern Earth-based books, though Dad's counts more as sci-fi. I'm not sure what the cause for this trend is. Maybe the swords-and-sorcery genre is played out. Maybe JK Rowling, Neil Gaiman, and other popular and/or skilled authors in the modern fantasy genre showed everyone how good it could be and they all wanted to give it a try. Maybe everyone's too lazy to make up their own worlds anymore. Maybe it's an inexplicable shift in global consciousness. We may never know. So I guess maybe it's time once again to talk about the modern world as a setting for roleplaying and book-writing. I don't know if this will become the new theme for my column, or just be a one-shot. We'll see how I feel when the time comes around to write my April column. If you want to try gaming in a modern world, there are a lot of systems out there that you can use. You've got your World of Darkness, your d20 Modern, your Call of Cthulhu, systems like GURPS and BESM which can be applied to any setting, and probably other games that I'm unfamiliar with due to the small selection at my current gaming store. However, I've already covered running a modern game in a pre-designed game world, so today I'd like to talk about developing your own contemporary world for roleplay and writing. The most important thing is to decide on the rules of your version of the real world at the very start of things. How you integrate the elements of fantasy into our every day existence shapes everything else in the game or the book, and you need to take it into serious consideration. A very popular route to take when working the supernatural into a modern setting is to keep it secret. Only a select group of individuals knows the truth. Oftentimes these groups are dedicated to "protecting" the mundane population by concealing the truth. This can be a fun way to run a game or write a book, and it requires you to make less changes to the canon; that is to say our history and culture. This is the route I've chosen for my books. Because I'm used to seeing this style of modern fantasy and sci-fi, I was totally thrown off when a friend loaned me one of Laurell K. Hamilton's books. In her world, everyone knows about faeries and magic, and it's had some effects on history, law, and more. Although I didn't like the book over all, I really liked how she integrated the supernatural and the real. If you want to go through the work of overhauling Earth, this can make a great setting for a game or book. Once you've made the big decision as to how well-known the supernatural is, you also have to decide how common it is. In my books, I have three characters with "special" powers. At one point in the story, one of the normal characters wonders if he just happens to know a lot of special people, or if they're just more common than he knows; maybe his world is full of people with abilities that they keep secret. So, is magic/psychic ability/mutation a one in a million occurrence in your world? Rare, but not unheard of? Or very common, but well-hidden? I almost want to write a book where everyone in the world has suddenly developed supernatural abilities, but they all keep them hidden for fear of the repercussions. If you decide on common and/or well known supernatural elements, you have to decide how the rest of the world thinks about such things. We're all familiar with the X-Men method of handling this, where the "normal" populace largely fears and mistrusts the paranormal. In the Laurell K. Hamilton book that I read, there was a bit of that, but there was more fascination... People treated the faeries like another brand of celebrity. In another book I read, by Will Shetterly, elves and magic were present and people just took it in stride. Another part of our world. Now that you've decided how common, well known, and accepted the supernatural is, you need to decide on a menace. Is the menace supernatural as well? It could be Elder Gods, dragons, evil mages or psychics, anything. It could also be mundane, a group of powerful "normals" who are out to deal with the paranormal elements in the world. In Changeling, a particularly dedicated mundane was at least as feared as the most dangerous magical enemy. There's a lot more I could cover on this, but my time runs short. Let's all give this some thought, and maybe we can return to the subject when CT resumes in April. If you want to check out this modern fantasy phenomenon yourself, you only need to go to the bookstore and have a little browse around. You'll find plenty of material in short story collections and full-length novels. You may even find fantastic elements hidden in *gasp* the literary fiction section! Happy reading and happy gaming!

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Copyright © 2007 By AJ Reardon E-mail AJ at: ErtheFae@aol.com Visit AJ at: www.erthefae.com