The Mythcreant Podcast 562 – Designing Urban Fantasy Factions
Everyone knows that werewolves and vampires hate each other. It’s just a fact of urban fantasy life. But… why, exactly? For that matter, why are any secret magical factions in conflict with each other? And when they do fight, why doesn’t the one with more powerful magic just auto-win? You would think that wizards could just drop orbital strikes on everyone else without leaving the sanctum. Do we have suggestions on how to handle those issues? You’d better believe it.
Transcript
Generously transcribed by Lady Oscar. Volunteer to transcribe a podcast.
Chris: You’re listening to the Mythcreant podcast, with your hosts, Oren Ashkenazi and Chris Winkle.
[Intro Music]Oren: And welcome everyone to another episode of the Mythcreants podcast. I’m Oren.
Chris: And I’m Chris.
Oren: So I’m putting the final touches on my urban fantasy setting. I’ve got a faction of mages that keep magic locked down real tight, so there are no rogue casters. And also a faction of werewolves that spends all of its time hunting down rogue casters. I don’t see a problem with this. I think this will be fine.
Chris: Hmm. Maybe the rogue casters are coming from inside the house.
Oren: Inside the werewolf house.
Chris: Werewolf house. [laughing] Werewolves just hunt themselves down.
Oren: It’s fine. Yeah. So today we’re talking about planning urban fantasy factions. Why do urban fantasy factions need their own episode? Because I felt like it. And also because…
Chris: We can do what we want!
Oren: Yeah. You’re not the boss of us! [laughing] Partly because we watched The Order recently, which is one of this crop of two season Netflix shows that was urban fantasy. And it had a lot of problems, and one of the problems was that its worldbuilding was real garbage.
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Oren: But I also just think that there are some differences in how you think about urban fantasy versus, like, high fantasy, or scifi, or steampunk or whatever. And partly it’s because they tend to be all mixed together, because there’s usually a masquerade, and so what you have are factions that exist within or alongside human society. And so you have to think about how that makes things different. And then at the same time, they also tend to have a more kitchen sink approach to worldbuilding. Which is not a hundred percent, right? There are examples we can talk about that don’t just throw everything at the wall, but there’s sort of a default expectation that, you know, if you’re gonna have some kinds of magical creatures in the modern setting, that sort of implies you have all of them.
Chris: I mean, I think when people think about urban fantasy, often their expectation is, if magic is real, then it must be linked to all of the folklore that we have about it.
Oren: Or in some cases the pop culture, right? Like, a lot of urban fantasy tropes are really, really divorced from any folklore, but…
Chris: What we think is folklore, right? [both laugh] And I think obviously that’s very eclectic and comes from all of these places. It’s not like we crowdsourced, like, tidy worldbuilding.
Oren: Right.
Chris: And so it just results in a very kind of eclectic world with lots of different magic users that work in different ways.
Oren: And lots of different creature types.
Chris: Mm-hmm.
Oren: If I’m making my own fantasy world from scratch, I can sort of decide what types of creatures I want to be there, and I can limit the magic more easily. But if I’m making an urban fantasy setting, it would be kind of weird if I was like, the only kind of mages are elemental mages. That’s all there is. It’s like, really? That’s all.
Chris: Yeah. I mean, you could have – some urban fantasy settings have a very specific, there’s a door to another world that’s where magic comes from. It’s not like you have to go with all the folklore. It’s just popular. I think the other issue is, you can exclude a faction if you have a nice tidy theme that makes it intuitive what is included and what is not included. But that is rarely combined with our typical urban fantasy. The closest I think I’ve seen, or at least one of the closest, is Teen Wolf. At least in the first seasons.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: Because you know, originally it’s like, okay, just werewolves. Alright, just werewolves, also druids and banshees. I’m like, okay, that’s… a little random, but we’re still going with a kind of werewolf nature theme. And then they add other types of shapeshifters that shapeshift into other types of creatures, so they’re kind of werewolf-like. And we still have no vampires, you know, like we add kitsune, for instance…
Oren: Mm-hmm.
Chris: Okay. And then they bring in steampunk mad scientists and like, what? [laughing] What are the steampunk mad scientists doing here?
Oren: They’re here. Don’t worry about it.
Chris: And then later we get ghost cowboys.
Oren: Everyone loves ghost cowboys.
Chris: [both laugh] And so eventually it’s just, okay, well why not vampires at this point?
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: But for a while there, we had a pretty tidy urban fantasy setting where it was just, you know, people shape-shifting into creatures for the most part, and that kind of kept it together. But if we had several different types of creatures from a wide variety of pop culture-ish folklore, folklore-ish pop culture, and then didn’t have vampires, that would be weirder.
Oren: Right. And a lot of it is gonna come down to what are you choosing to show, and how long is a story going for? Like, it was weird to me watching The Order that we have mages and werewolves, and that’s it.
Chris: And nothing else.
Oren: Right.
Chris: Right. I kept expecting vampires to show up.
Oren: Yeah. And that seemed strange to me, but at the same time, the storylines were so narrow that I was like, all right, I guess we aren’t really exploring the world at all. Maybe there are other magical things that…
Chris: Oh, there’s also a golem.
Oren: Yeah, they do make a golem once.
Chris: Best character.
Oren: Yeah, we love that golem. The one that really got me was in the Kate Kane books. They have werewolves and mages again, odd. Odd that that happened twice. But the mages are all necromancers, which again, okay, sure. But they have vampires, but the vampires are, like, undead…robots…
Chris: Harsh!
Oren: …that the necromancers pilot around. That seems, yeah, that seems mean.
Chris: Why aren’t they zombies?
Oren: Yeah, I don’t know.
Chris: Why not make them zombies? That’s what zombies are for.
Oren: Like if someone picks this up and he’s a vampire fan, it’s like, oh…sad. The vampires in this setting kind of suck.
Chris: I mean, we always do tell people to add your own spin, right?
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: Maybe we should have given a caveat there. Okay, “Add your own spin, but please don’t make it disappointing.”
Oren: Yeah. It’s like, I don’t know, “Be creative except when it’s bad, then be less creative.”
Chris: Be creative, but if you use a creature, try to retain what people think is cool about the creature. I mean, I have talked a bit about, like, at what point should you not call it the same thing?
Oren: Mm-hmm.
Chris: Because in general, I always recommend reusing words people are familiar with because it just lowers the cognitive load and makes things easier to understand. And I’ve seen all sorts of… But this typically happens only in high fantasy. Like in high fantasy we can have, you know, vampires and werewolves and wizards and elves, but they would be called other names to make it seem like they’re not vampires and werewolves and elves.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: When they are. When they obviously are. [laughing] And they would all be names that are hard to remember, which means the fans just call them werewolves and vampires and elves.
Oren: How dare you? Those are my lupine changers and my, uh, sanguine draw-ers, and my eternal fair folk. [Chris laughs]
Chris: At least urban fantasy worldbuilders are not trying to pretend that they’re using something new when they’re not. But at a certain point, again, reuse the name, but at a certain point, you lose the essential something that makes it feel like it’s anywhere close. And so vampires that act like zombies, that’s a little…
Oren: Yeah. I just don’t know why you would call them a vampire at that point. Just seems misleading.
Chris: Yeah, I don’t know, did they daintily suck blood instead of just bite into people’s necks?
Oren: No, they’re just monsters. They’re just combat robots basically.
Chris: Okay. But yeah, I mean, I do think, again, there’s a lot of expectation, like once you add werewolves, are there gonna be vampires? I think there’s slightly less expectation that if you have vampires, there will be werewolves, just because we have so many vampire books that are just exclusively focused on vampires.
Oren: Yeah. And while we’re talking about werewolves and vampires, there’s other things to think about. But one thing that I really recommend thinking about, especially with urban fantasy, is if you want your factions to come into conflict, why? Because this is a thing that has always been a little confusing to me, and I’ve run into this problem when I’m running World of Darkness, which is that if you look at these fantasy factions, especially when they’re divided by creature type, they very often don’t compete over anything.
Like, you know, vampires like to suck blood, and in most settings, werewolves like to live in the woods. And so they don’t really have any direct reason to fight each other. But they always wanna fight each other, right? Like, that’s what authors want. So what is the reason for that? It’s easier to do this in a classic high fantasy or other setting because you just have, you know, they fight for the same reasons that humans fight, for control over territory and resources and stuff. But that doesn’t really make sense in an urban fantasy setting most of the time because they’re already sharing their territory with humans, right? Like again, they live alongside humans, so it’s clearly not an issue there. Is there something they both want and there’s not enough of it? What’s going on?
And this is why in my big urban fantasy RPG from a few years ago, I invented Essence, which is like the supernatural energy MacGuffin. What does it do? Don’t worry about it. Everybody wants it.
Chris: Hey, it was nutritionally important to young, magical people.
Oren: Mm-hmm. Yeah, it’s important. Don’t worry about it. Don’t look too closely at that.
Chris: [laughing] But yeah. Gave them something to fight over. I think there’s also a question of, okay, are we only making factions for the purpose of having them fight? Do they have to fight? Can they all just hold hands and sing Kumbaya?
Oren: Yeah, I mean, I would say they don’t have to fight. I would say that if you are creating factions, it’s probably because you want there to be some tension between them.
Chris: Maybe I just want one character to start a coffee shop.
Oren: Yeah. I mean, you might, [both laugh] in which case the factions don’t matter nearly as much. Because they’re not gonna play that big a role.
Chris: Right. Like in Legends & Lattes, which is like in a D&D setting. It has the different D&D ancestries or, you know, groups, just because that’s what’s in the game. Not because the story actually needs all those factions, but everybody’s already familiar and knows what gnomes and orcs are.
Oren: Mm-hmm.
Chris: So it also just doesn’t add any information overhead. So the story can afford to add a bunch of factions that it’s not actually going to use in the plot in any important way. And just adds color to the setting. And you know, you could potentially make up your own factions and do that. But I think that is, again, a benefit of urban fantasy. Usually if everybody knows what a werewolf and a vampire, etc. is you can just add them to the story and make less of a big deal about them because you didn’t have to spend a whole bunch of time to explain them.
Oren: Yeah, that’s true.
Chris: I think mainly you do want sources of conflict in your world, right? So especially if you’re planning on writing a whole bunch of stories in one world, and you need new conflicts for sequels, having the different factions fight is just an intuitive way to do that.
Oren: Or like the threat that they might. I’m not saying every urban fantasy story needs to have a big war in it. Just that there’s a good chance that if you are building a setting from scratch and you are creating these factions, it’s probably because you want them to be at odds in some capacity. And that’s gonna be easier to do if you think of some underlying thing that might put them in competition with each other in the same way that different groups of humans and/or orcs, elves, dwarves whatever are kind of in inherent competition with each other over limited resources.
Chris: Mm-hmm. I mean, in that big urban fantasy role playing campaign you mentioned, you also had political dynamics of a kind of a joint governing system. And the more powerful groups had representation and less powerful groups didn’t.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: So, but you know, theoretically, honestly, if you have magical people in a real-world setting, they’d probably have tons of money. So the idea that they need to like – having a joint governing board assumes that they have to pool their resources to accomplish shared goals in some way. I suppose if they’re trying really hard to maintain the masquerade, they could have fights over how that’s done that just require cooperation because any one group could, you know, spill the beans, but that’s honestly looking too hard at the masquerade. You probably don’t wanna do that.
Oren: Yeah. [Chris laughs] And that’s what makes that so challenging, is that you can’t usually use, like, the vampires and the werewolves are fighting over, you know, a building they both wanna own. Well, why that building? What does that building matter?
Chris: Okay. How about magical global warming? Like the, uh, God, what was your – the, like, skeleton…?
Oren: The Necro-Industrial Complex.
Chris: [laughing] Necro-Industrial Complex!
Oren: I mean, The Order actually had this, and it was really cool. It was just introduced in like the last two episodes out of nowhere, which was this idea that the more magic is done, the bigger the chance of these, you know, dangerous eruptions that happen that can eventually reach apocalyptic levels. Which provides the justification for why the magical organization clamps down on rogue casters so hard in the first place, and creates a reason why different mage organizations are in competition, because they’re fighting over their magic carbon budget, basically.
Chris: Yeah. I thought one dynamic of that for this particular show was that you’re supposed to pay for your magic by doing – I mean, they call it a sacrifice, but for smaller spells, it’s just like you cut yourself and bleed a little bit, and then you magically heal it, so it’s fine.
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: But I think what was happening is that there were specifically too many people neglecting sacrifices, right? So they were using magic a little lazily, which honestly, if you had magic spread far and wide, that would totally happen.
Oren: Yeah. I mean, they were a little inconsistent about how that worked. But sure, like you could also have it be not a strict carbon budget, but more of like, you know, not-super-well-trained practitioners are more likely to do this, so we have to keep it really focused on only letting the people who we approve of do the magic, that sort of thing.
Chris: Yeah. Yeah. But yeah, no, it was a good conflict that, of course, was not handled – was not taken advantage of very well by the show.
Oren: Right. I’m also a big fan of, like, magical locations. Because you can create areas that different factions would want for different reasons. You know, if you have a special glade that is sacred to the moon cult, then you could also see why both werewolves and certain kinds of mages would want to control that, that sort of thing.
Chris: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Oren: So it doesn’t always have to be like one thing. It’s just good to think about what it is that’s gonna bring them into competition with each other.
Chris: Yeah. Maybe ley lines are super important.
Oren: Yeah. Everyone loves ley lines.
Chris: We gotta fight over control of the ley lines.
Oren: They’re very flexible ley lines. They can do a lot of things. [Chris laughs]
Chris: I mean, I do think that one thing that’s tricky is once your factions start fighting, then you have to be more fussy about whether the power is balanced in the way that you need it. Because – I mean, otherwise your job just gets hard, like if you’re planning a big battle between wizards and vampires, but your wizards could just fireball the whole building where vampires sleep during the day?
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: The conflict is over, and you don’t wanna have to be like, oh no, just forget about that. Or, you know, make up very silly excuses for why your wizards are not doing the obvious thing that they should be doing. And it just becomes really distracting and contrived really quickly.
Oren: This is why as a rule, when I am making an urban fantasy setting, I actually don’t like having witches or mages as their own faction. I know that’s like a big trope, but the moment you do that, it becomes really hard to balance them, because again, urban fantasy lends itself to a kitchen sink approach to magic. And if your wizards can do almost anything, as a group, how can there be competition against them? Because their powers are so flexible.
Chris: Right. If you look at every faction like it’s just a mage, and look at their spell list. You’ve got werewolves, and on their spell list, they can turn into a big beast. Maybe when they want. [both laugh]
Oren: Yeah.
Chris: And the vampire spell list is like, okay, I’m immune to certain types of damage. And depending on the story, maybe they have some strength powers, and perhaps they can hypnotize people a bit. But they also like, again, have a major weakness about not going out in the sunlight in some stories. And then wizards and witches have a spell list that’s infinity long.
Oren: Yep.
Chris: And can do anything, right? And it starts to become obvious how a fight between these factions is not gonna work. And again, following the whole, like, pop culture of folklore, people really want their wizards and witches to basically cast whatever spell. And so that makes it really hard. I mean, you can tone it down, but they might feel a little lackluster. Like if your witches can only fly on brooms and occasionally get vague visions of the future, that’s not what we’re going for with witches. We want witches that are cool and powerful and, you know, put curses on people.
Oren: Yeah. It’s hard. It’s a difficult problem that I don’t think has a single solution.
Chris: The other thing that I’ve seen is you can try to even it out by boosting the other groups, like give werewolves and vampires more powers. But you would still have to reduce the powers that witches or wizards have, and then they can also end up feeling a little bit more of the same than you’re looking for. Like 4th ed. D&D for instance really focused on balance, but everybody felt like all the different classes were the same.
Oren: I mean, that was literally what happened in the Dresden Files, right? You get to the most – once you get far into the Wizard-Vampire War to the point where Dresden is basically a walking weapon of mass destruction, and it’s like, okay, how are vampires gonna deal with this? And the answer is that the vampires are now also wizards. And it’s like, okay, well, I mean that does explain it, but, kind of boring.
Chris: Yeah. I will admit that I do like the idea of witches that can cast magic spells, but it always takes like several weeks so they can’t do action spells, you know? But that would only help a little bit. It’s still bad if you let them, for instance, spend weeks making a bunch of magical bombs and then throw the bombs. Like you can’t let them do that either.
Oren: Then you’re just getting into the Batman problem. How much time does he have to prepare? [both laugh] Yeah, I have found that there are basically two ways you can approach this. You can either just not have mages as their own faction, and instead if you want to have a flexible magic system, have it be available to anybody, and then just have different kinds of creatures. Or you can just, you know, really limit what your mages can do, but find clever ways for them to use it.
Chris: Mm-hmm. Yeah.
Oren: Right. And so at that point, the mages basically become, not a powerhouse, because they can’t stand up to anyone in a direct fight, but they can cause lots of problems around the edges. And so that’s a reason why no one wants to mess with them, even though they aren’t real strong face-to-face. And that’s, like, the lore in World of Darkness, for example. It just doesn’t match with what mages can actually do.
Chris: I mean, if you have witches and you just don’t put them into full warfare with any other faction, and then you would also need to make them purposely neutral, right? A faction can be more powerful than any other faction without plotting headaches if they just don’t get involved in the fights. Instead you could have them as, like, neutral arbiters that sometimes you have a conflict over convincing the arbiters to decide with you, for instance.
Oren: Mm-hmm.
Chris: And that could be something that’s challenging, but you don’t try to have a tense war of, like, witches versus werewolves.
Oren: Right. Another thing to think about here, beyond just the raw power of your factions, is you have to think about the areas in which they compete. Because if they compete in completely different areas, that’s often not gonna make for a very fun story. Like, if you have dream spirits whose entire thing is that they attack you in their dreams versus werewolves, it’s like, what’s the story here? Right?
Chris: [laughing] What are they competing over? That would be interesting.
Oren: Like, how are they supposed to be in competition with each other?
Chris: Well, when a werewolf eats somebody, they expect to be able to eat their dreams, too. But if the dream spirit is already in there, it completely ruins the meal. [both laugh]
Oren: It’s the same problem that you get into with vampires when they can’t go out during the day. It’s like, okay, if you make them powerful enough to auto-win at night, then you’ve just got like rocket tag, basically, with whoever attacks first just wins. And that’s not very interesting either.
Chris: Yeah, that’s a hard one.
Oren: Another avenue to think about with this, and again, this tends to be a specific urban fantasy problem, is just for one, first of all, how organized is your world at all? Because that is a question that has huge repercussions, and it’s easy for authors to neglect it, especially if they are bringing a character across the masquerade for the first time, and you only explain a little bit of the setting at once.
Chris: By organized, you mean like does the magical world have its own government, for instance?
Oren: Yes, exactly. Like, are we talking about, you know, supernatural creatures are solitary and just kind of hang around humans and don’t have an organization? Do they have small groups? Do they have organized factions? Do they have a one-world government?
Chris: How about if we pretend they’re really isolated at first, but then we realize we need someplace to take our second novel, so then we say that there’s been a government all along that’s been ruling them?
Oren: Yeah, I mean, that is a thing that happens sometimes, and it’s a real problem, you know? [laughter]
Chris: I mean, you could do that, but it would be hard, right? It would be hard to create the idea of isolated individuals and then have that stay consistent with a world where there’s a government. Maybe you could do something like, oh, well actually the werewolves we met were just the outcasts that were thrown out of bigger society, for instance.
Oren: Right. I mean, you could have it be like okay, there’s magical government in the cities, but in the rural areas, it’s kind of a free-for-all. Yeah. Like that’s possible.
Chris: Yeah. This is – Supernatural did something like this, right? Where everybody seems super isolated and then we find out there’s somebody who, like, makes her money stealing magical items, which is…
Oren: Okay. Yes, but that’s a different problem. [Chris laughs] So the issue with that was that the supernatural is secret, but also there’s an entire underground society of rich people who know about magic. And there’s a lady who buys items, like artifacts for them. It’s like, who are these guys who are buying these artifacts that they know are magic? Eh, don’t worry about it.
Chris: Maybe they’re magic ghoulies, very rich magic ghoulies?
Oren: Yeah, maybe. We don’t know. We never hear about them again. You do run into this problem, again, whenever you try to split like the Hunter RPG in World of Darkness. This is why it doesn’t mix with the other settings very well.
Chris: And Hunter is basically like Supernatural, right? The premise is that we’ve got a couple of humans who are by themselves hunting supernatural things that are also isolated.
Oren: Yeah. And you can introduce big hunter organizations if you want to. I hate doing that. I think it completely ruins the game. But some people like that. But even in that situation, it still doesn’t really work. Because it’s like, okay, so now we’re like, there’s a vampire feeding on people. Okay. We’re not just hunting the vampire. Now we have to think about, like, what are the political implications of killing this vampire?
Chris: Is this gonna start a human-vampire war?
Oren: And like, I’m not gonna say you couldn’t make an interesting story out of that. It’s just not what default Hunter is set up to be.
Chris: I mean it’s also, you know, again, why it’s weird when Buffy suddenly has the government in season four starting to, like, manage the supernatural. It’s like, okay, well if that’s true, Buffy should always be able to call the government for help anytime, you know, the hellhole gets out of control. But yeah, that’s…
Oren: I love how the government got involved in season four, and then just was like, “Eh, I guess not.”
Chris: Somebody cut funding. You know, there was DOGE coming in there with its AI, and just like, how about we just pull the plug on this program? I’m sure it’s fine.
Oren: Yeah, we’re spending how many millions of dollars to stop the apocalypse? Eh, that doesn’t seem efficient. [both laugh] Move fast and break things, and things being the world.
Chris: Okay. So how about guns? I mean, generally we discourage guns, if you don’t have to have guns in your setting, because guns are just, like Oren was talking about, the insta-win, right? If you have an ability where whoever attacks first they win. Guns are like that, because they’re so deadly, so quickly, and it’s just, it’s very difficult to write interesting gun fights.
Oren: Yeah. So I would say, basically, I would say that it’s okay if you want your characters in an urban fantasy setting to use guns. They can. It’s just that you have to be aware that once you open that Pandora’s box, you cannot close it. You can’t have them use guns some of the time.
Chris: Right. It’s like, well, why didn’t they bring the gun this time, you know? They could’ve done that and won this fight. Also, are we prepared for, like, werewolves wielding guns?
Oren: And if you do that, you have to realize that you’re signing up for a very different kind of story. I mean, there’s a reason why nearly all of the enemies in the early seasons of Supernatural are ghosts. And partly it’s budgetary reasons, but it’s also just way more threatening if the enemy they’re fighting is not physical.
Chris: Right. You can’t just take a machine gun and mow them down.
Oren: And once you make it physical, it’s like, okay, you can say that, well, it’s immune to bullets. It’s like, all right, is it immune to, you know, 5,000 rounds a minute? Like, that’s just enough physical force to cut it in half at that point, right?
Chris: Yeah.
Oren: So you just have to be aware of that. And a lot of stories don’t think about that because they want their sword fights and their, you know, kung fu battles. Or they want magic missiles to be cool, and then they introduce guns and it’s like, well, wow. We have a problem here.
Chris: And then there’s Teen Wolf with, like, humans use guns. Nobody else uses guns. Why?
Oren: Reasons!
Chris: Reasons. [laughing] Like, I’m pretty sure vampires, or – well, no, this is Teen Wolf – everybody else could also, werewolves could also wield guns.
Oren: Right? Especially since the werewolves don’t have to, like, fully transform, right? In fact, they mostly don’t, most of them, when they transform, they just like grow more facial hair.
Chris: So what if you had all the magical people, you know, basically can’t get too close to metal? Can you make guns out of, I don’t know, ceramics or something?
Oren: I mean, yeah, they’re called ghost guns. They’re, I mean, in the modern day, they are not a particularly advanced form of firearms as I understand it, because they’re really, their only use case is to sneak them past security. So, you know, they haven’t been given a whole lot of thought, but yes, you could do that. Also, then you wouldn’t be able to use swords and things, which I found that a lot of urban fantasy writers really want.
Chris: I know. That’s the thing. That’s the problem with, like, can’t get near metal. I don’t know, maybe bone swords? Stone swords?
Oren: Yeah, I mean, I would honestly say that in most cases, if you don’t want guns in your urban fantasy setting, the best solution is to just not use them, and don’t bring it up. [Chris laughs] You know, maybe you can make, have some throwaway dialogue about how like, yeah…
Chris: Okay, but Oren, what about this? None of my characters use guns. And then suddenly I need my character to be very clever. [Oren laughs] And so then this is the first person to think of using a gun, and then pulls it out in a dramatic moment and like, “Hey, check out this!”
Oren: We’ll come to your house. [Chris laughing] Like… I will personally find you and explain why that’s wrong.
Oren: But, okay. Real quick, because we’re almost done, I wanna make sure I actually say this, which is that in general, if you don’t want guns in your urban fantasy setting, the best solution is just not bring it up. You can maybe have a line of dialogue saying that guns don’t work on the supernatural, and then refuse to explain further. Do not take questions. [Chris laughs] And if you’re consistent, your readers will probably just go with it.
Chris: Yeah. You want people to just forget guns exist. So too much explanation is only gonna make it worse.
Oren: All right, well, I think with that, we will go ahead and call this episode to a close.
Chris: If you enjoyed this episode, consider supporting us on Patreon. Go to patreon.com/mythcreants.
Oren: And before we go, I want to thank a couple of our existing patrons. First, there’s Ayman Jaber. He’s an urban fantasy writer and a connoisseur of Marvel. Then there’s Kathy Ferguson, who’s a professor of political theory in Star Trek. We will talk to you next week.
[Outro Music]This has been the Mythcreant Podcast, opening and closing theme, “The Princess Who Saved Herself” by Jonathan Coulton.