The Cauldron: A Pagan Forum

The very setting of an urban fantasy would suggest that there's this mundane, cosmopolitan world... and then there's this crazy, crazy, crazy-in-your-face-all-the-time world. Urbanites don't fully comprehend the phant'sy, the phantoms don't fully connect with the urbanites.

A situation like that, usually calls for an arbiter, some guardian between the worlds who sets the rules: if the denizens are hiding, and why; treaties, penalties for breaking it.

Such rules have reinforcers. Enter Anpu. Judge? Assassin? Or just a guardian/watcher?


When I write gods as gods... they're sure to have a check-and-balance with other godly characters, or they're kept to a come-and-go mysteriously mentor/helper/healer position, or a one time big time thing, or their powers are limited if not stripped from them completely (so then they can have a bigger part in the story,) or their personality traits and energy don't necessarily always serve them well in the situation I write them into... All this just because I figured, narrative ought to have color and conflict. And only character being a god, the main character at that? Perhaps a great way to honor one's patron, but I see a big risk of it becoming quite a boring story-- if it's all only going to be about how awesome the main character always is. Are you comfortable with writing a god as having difficulty solving some problem? Because that's what I call a story.

There's also an option of, making an original flawed main character, and then making that character a namesake of a god rather than an actual god.

My influences: Roger Zelazny's Lord of Light (Buddha is the main character, but it's a steampunk war against the Hindu pantheon,) Neil Gaiman's Odd and the Frost Giants (Norse mythology, plucky crippled human helps temporarily disadvantaged deities), and Ever (a fictional pantheon, with the main character, a wind god Olus, falling in love with a human sacrifice to another god. The human sacrifice ascends to goddesshood, herself.)

Something that really annoys me is when gods don't "sound like" gods. When a character is talking to someone who is Really Old, I don't generally expect them to talk like a modern teenager. I think it takes a certain kind of author to make that sort of thing believable. If you want an easy way to make Anpu's speech sound a little more archaic, I'd recommend not using contractions. It might sound a little awkward at first, but for me personally, it lends itself well to the feeling that the being a character is talking to is Old.

Of course, I'm assuming that if a deity has had enough time to interact with humans, they'd manage to pick up some slang, but I guess I've read too many urban fantasies where Really Old and Powerful Beings sound more like whiny teenagers.

The opposite bugs me more, personally. But of course you know they're old and powerful, because they refuse to use contractions. Yeah, always a hit-and-miss with the audience.


Revisiting the setting, AR, there are different urban fantasy setups than Keep Up The Masquerade. Some others, it's like cyberpunk or steampunk-- an alternate future or history where the urban just naturally developed to intertwine with fantasy -- and everybody is in the general know it.