Lecture #5: Worldbuilding Part One — Brandon Sanderson on Writing Science Fiction and Fantasy

BRANDON: I had a request out of my 15-person workshop that I move world building up a little bit, because they're starting new stories and the world building comes up very early. I'm going to do world building for the next two weeks. Isaac, Mary Robinette is coming when? ISAAC: The 20th. BRANDON: The 20th, okay. We'll have this week and next week on world building. We'll then have Mary Robinette come and talk to you about short stories. Then we'll do the Q&A on world building, along with some prose stuff the next week, and then we'll do the

two weeks of character after that. All right? That's kind of our format going forward. World building, I usually do about two lectures on this, and today writer going to do the lecture on Sanderson's Laws. STUDENTS: Yay! BRANDON: This is very fun for me to do, because Asimov has laws, right? Clark has at least one. I figured I should have laws named after me, so I did it. Let me give you some background to what Sanderson's Laws are and how they came about. Sanderson's Laws started when I was working on Mistborn, the first book. I finished

Mistborn 1, and I turned it in and was working on Mistborn 2, and as Mistborn 1 was coming out, I started to realize that I felt like I'd done something wrong in Mistborn 1. Something wasn't working with the ending the way I wanted it to. I try to avoid too much in the way of spoilers, but what happens in the first Mistborn book is, we were at the climax. The ending was happening. Everything was going well. I wrote it. I sent it to my editor. He wrote back and he's like, "I feel like this needs

a little extra oomph. There's something missing here." I thought, huh, what could I do to give it a little extra oomph. I thought, well, I've got this whole plot where Vin is going to start learning to use the mist to power allomancy a little bit, because it's foreshadowing for some stuff we need in book three. I thought, well, I'll just move that forward to this climax that allowed some new and interesting thing. Remember, this was the first book I ever wrote knowing it was going to be published. Even though I'd written 14 novels by this

time, I still was pretty much a newbie. I'd never done a lot of these things before. This was the first time that I'd really worked with an editor on a book as I was writing it. Elantris had been finished years before, and yes, I'd done a lot of editorial on this, but it was a new experience working on Mistborn 1. So I did this. Moshe was like, "Great. That works. Gives it the extra oomph I need." And we released the book. When the book was being read, I started getting feedback, and I went and looked

at it, and it really feels like I just added a new power to the main character at the 95% mark in the book, which is exactly what I did. Absolutely 100% what I did. I started to think about, a lot of people will point at science fiction and fantasy, that they don't like it. One of the things that they will say about it, that I don't think is true, and is a bad reason to not like sci-fi/fantasy, is they'll be like, "Oh, the author can just have anything happen, and therefore your ending lacks any sort

of conflict because the author can just make up a way to save them.” Now, I'm totally okay if people don't like sci-fi/fantasy. It's a flavor of storytelling, and there's no right storytelling and wrong storytelling to like and dislike. You can dislike things. But I think this criticism doesn't actually work, because any author in any story can do this no matter what the story is. It is not something that I think is actually more prevalent in sci-fi/fantasy than any other story. Yes, in sci-fi/fantasy you can do what I mistakenly did, which is invent a new power

for a character late in the story, and therefore deflate a little bit of the satisfaction of the ending, because it involves the character using something you didn't know they had access to in order to save the day. But you can just as easily write a romance where the primary tension is that Character A is nobility and Character B is a commoner and that's keeping them apart. You could have, at the 90% part, a long-lost uncle walk up and say, "Oh, by the way, she's royalty. You guys can totally get married," and evaporate the conflict. That's

a sidestep of the actual conflict, but you're solving it by putting a patch on it, the same way I kind of put a patch on Mistborn in a way that wasn't satisfying. You can do that in a romance just as easily. Doesn't matter what the conflict is, you can, at the end of your story stick a patch on it that will be a resolution, but an unsatisfying one. Having fluency over this is really an important sort of storytelling mechanic. Since I am a writer of science fiction and fantasy, since I love fantasy, I framed my

kind of rule I came up with for myself to help me understand why this problem existed and how I could avoid it in the future as a kind of little scientific-y sort of thing. That's what I do write. I don't write science. I write scientific-y things. With some development, I kind of broke this out themed toward building a magic system in a fantasy book, because I realized some other things about it. I'm going to write the first law up here. You can find these online, though. Isaac, I believe the essays are broken on my website

right now. We've gotten emails saying that people can't read them there. We will get them up and fixed. But Sanderson's First Law, and I apologize in advance for my handwriting. This is one where I actually want you to read it, so I will try to write so that you can. Your ability to solve problems with magic in a satisfying way is directly proportional to how well the reader understands said magic. All right. This is a technical way of explaining what I just told you a story about. Your ability to solve problems with magic in a

satisfying way is directly proportional to how well the reader understands said magic. This is something I thought about a long time, how to phrase this in a way, because I was understanding something about my fiction that I hadn't before. I had known that deus ex machina is a bad thing. If you're not familiar with this phrase it means god from the machine. Am I right on that? It's an old Greek term for when they would have the god save the characters at the end of a play because basically there was no other way to get

out of the problem. We use it in modern storytelling to mean the author inventing a mechanism by which the characters are saved from the consequences of their actions in the late part of the story. Inventing new magical abilities in the late part of your story in order to get your characters out of problems will often feel unsatisfying for the same reason. However, there's another story that goes along with this, and this was when I was at my very first Worldcon as a participating professional author. This would have been in Boston, so whenever the Boston Worldcon

was, around 2004-2005. I sat on a panel at a big science fiction convention. I'd been going to these for a while. I was really excited to sit on this panel. I was put on a panel called How Does the Magic Work. How do we use magic? I thought, this is perfect. This is my thing. I love magic systems. I love interesting magic systems. I am ready to go. So we got on the panel, there was me and a group of other people, and the moderator looked down the line and said, "All right. We'll just start

off with what is your go-to, fundamental thing you think about when building a magic system?" I thought I could just really knock this one out of the park. They asked me to go first. I said, "Well, obviously, a magic system needs to have rules." I think I picked this one up from Orson Scott Card's book. I think he talks about it. But either way, it was something that I just had fundamentally believed. A good magic system is a magic system with rules. I thought I was really just using the easy, softball answer that would get

the conversation rolling. But the other people on the panel looked to me and said, "No! If you put rules on your magic you ruin it." I was shocked that the next half hour of our discussion was me arguing with these three other people, where I was like, "No, no, no. This is foundational to building a magic system." This was like you had just told me that one plus one does not equal two. I was flabbergasted that I had to argue this. But through that discussion I actually started to realize my way of doing it was

not the only way to do it, and in fact, a lot of the stories I liked didn't explain the rules of the magic to me, and maybe didn't even have rules that the author relied upon. I thought, well, how is this working then? So I started to build this second sort of philosophy about magic, which is that there is, the way I see it, a kind of continuum, a sliding scale that you can be on. On one side is a sense of wonder about the magic specifically, and on the other side is problem solving with

magic, or magic as science. Now, don't take this as law, because I bet there are people who are able to do both. But generally what happens is as you move toward solving problems with magic and your magic working more like a science, you move away from a sense of wonder or mystery to that magic. It's very natural sort of thing. The more you explain about something, the more it moves to a different emotion and understanding in you. As I became a writer, my intersection with movies and books that I read changed. Instead of being in

this sort of, "Wow, how did they do this?" I moved into, "Oh, I see what they're doing. That's cool." Those two emotions were kind of different emotions. I can be in awe of a story that's pulled off well, because I know exactly how hard it is to do. But I'm no longer mystified about how the author accomplished that. It's kind of this same sort of thing. I'm not sure if sense of wonder is the exact right phrase, but I think you can get the idea. What's going on here is, as you move this direction, you're

able to solve problems in a satisfying way with your magic. What does this mean? Why am I saying this? Well, if you give your characters some tools, and then get to watch the characters use those tools to escape problems and to solve problems and escape situations, then you as a reader will feel really satisfied about that. It's why my kids, when they were young, loved to watch Mickey Mouse Clubhouse was it? Where they're like, "Here are the three tools that we are going to need today." They set up, "Here are your three tools," and then

as they go along it's like, "Oh, one of our tools is a jack. Oh, our car broke down. Which of our three tools do we use?" Now, you do a more complicated version of this in your stories, but it's essentially the same thing. You are going to set up, here are the tools the character has. This character is able to teleport through walls. This character is able to drink a potion that turns them into looking like someone else. This character has this ability. Then you are going to, on this side of the magic, rely on

the character's quick wits to apply that tool to different situations. It's a little bit like the heist archetype that I talked to you about a couple weeks ago, where you can take a certain archetype where you give someone a group of tools, they work on it, and then they rearrange them to use them in different ways at the end. That's the sort of thing you're doing with a rule-based magic system. But it's not the only type of magic out there. In fact, there are a lot of magics where they're searching for something else, and in

this case, it's a magic you don't know what it's going to do. The Mickey Mouse Clubhouse they had a mystery tool. "We don't know what this is. It'll solve a problem eventually." The mystery tool, or even things more mysterious, happen a lot in fantasy books, and it doesn't mean they're bad magic systems. In fact, some of the best magic systems use what I would call a soft magic, as opposed to a hard magic. A soft magic is you don't know the consequences or even really the cost of using the magic, and you are not certain

you can predict what the ramifications or effects will be. Most of the time, the viewpoint protagonist is not the one using the magic, or if they are, it is a type of device that they are using, or some sort of magical thing that they can't predict the consequences. The Monkey's Paw story is a nice little hybrid story that's a little bit sense of wonder. It's on the sense of wonder side. You know you can make a wish, but you don't know what the consequences of that wish will be, and the emotion that story's relying upon

is that sense of wonder twisted on its head to a sense of horror. A lot of times, horror is twisting a positive emotion into a negative emotion in some way. Monkey's Paw, if you don't know this story, people make wishes on this monkey's paw, and they always turn out awful and horrible and frightening. As the book progresses you see the escalation of the wishes that are getting made and things like this, and it's just a brilliant story. It is using a soft magic with just a little bit of an edge toward, so you understand what

the characters can do, but they cannot control consequences. That sort of story, that sort of magic can make fantastic stories. I'll give you two examples of stories that use both a hard magic and a soft magic in the same story, and you can see how the contrast of the two is very effective. The first of these is Lord of the Rings. Lord of the Rings uses for the ring what I would call a magic that is toward the magic as science with the ring. It's still that one step away toward the sense of wonder, or

in this case also horror, because you're not exactly sure what the ultimate consequences of using the ring are, and you're not exactly sure what Sauron can do with that ring. You just know it's bad. But most of the storytelling mechanics of the ring do a couple of things. What does the ring do? It turns you invisible. Yep. It turns you invisible and expands your lifespan. What are the costs? Sauron sees you and you turn into Gollum. Right? Basically these are the things. The enemy can find you and you turn into Gollum. Tolkien is very wise

to put in the story example of Gollum showing you exactly what the consequences are. That is a story that's very good at showing you, look, if Frodo keeps this ring he turns into this thing. It's right here on screen. It's actually a very hard magic system as magic systems go. Every time Frodo is using it, you can judge. He's going to turn invisible, but here are the consequences. Lo and behold, in the story those consequences are usually pretty dire, but they're anticipatable. It's repeatable. It's following the scientific method. And the reader now knows the tool

Frodo has and the costs of that tool. What can Gandalf do? STUDENTS: (Calling out several indistinct answers) BRANDON: Yes. Now, I'm not asking the people who have read all the back material, which does move Gandalf a little bit more toward the middle. But in the books, Gandalf is pretty much all the way over here. You know Gandalf has power and can do stuff. You're not sure what it is. And a lot of times when he even uses his powers he's offscreen. He fights the Balrog offscreen, purposefully in the books. You're not sure what's going on.

You don't know what he's doing. You know it will have huge consequences. And lo and behold the huge consequences are he dies and gets resurrected as Gandalf the White. You're not sure how that worked, why that worked, the consequences. You might say, "Wait a minute. That feels like it's removing consequences from the characters." But that's not the purpose of Gandalf's magic. Gandalf's magic is not-- Gandalf is not a tactical nuke that you're using in a specific place for a specific purpose. Gandalf is there to make sure that the Hobbits feel small, both metaphorically and literally.

That's the whole point of having Hobbits in the story. Tolkien was a student of the classic epics. He did a translation of Beowulf once. If you want to have fun, then go read Beowulf and compare it to the Hobbit. It very much felt like he wanted to write one of these ancient heroic epics but put a normal person in the role of the hero. Instead of Beowulf we get Frodo or Bilbo. In order to emphasize that, though he gives Frodo a power that's a hard magic power, he makes sure Gandalf exists in the story to

indicate this is a world of magic that is much, much bigger than anything the Hobbits can comprehend, and you as readers don't need to comprehend it. These two magics work perfectly in this book hand in hand, giving both a sense of grandness and wonder, and giving a tool to the main character that he can use at certain times in clever ways to escape problems and situations, and then to have to pay for that later on at the climactic moment of the stories, where indeed, the costs that he has been paying come due. Another great example

of this is Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss. One of the reasons Name of the Wind works so well, I won't speak about this as much, is that he also has a hard magic and a soft magic, and by including both of those he is able to contrast. If you haven't read the books, he is going to a magic school, and one of the things they do is build magical devices using sympathetic magic. It's a type of magic that people believed worked in our world, that like affects like, that actually works in his world.

The rules, it gets a little soft in there, but mostly it's like, you do this, you get this. You do this, you get this. Meanwhile, there's a professor at the school who studies a different type of magic. This magic is the naming of things. This magic is explained as very powerful, very mysterious, and likely to drive you crazy. Of course, the main character is drawn to this naming magic in the same way that a moth is to a flame, and that's part of the tension of the story is, is he going to suffer the consequences

that this professor has by delving into naming magic, which the naming magic is there to reinforce this story being about a poet and a musician and talking about a magic that is more like poetry and music. You can't define it. There is engineering class in his magic school, and there's poetry class. Yes, he can figure out engineering class, but he wants to go to poetry because you can't quantify poetry. The two work very well in a scholarly setting as kind of showing off these two different disciplines and the contrast between them in these two stories.

You do not need to have both in your books. In fact, most books only have one. I will say that you don't have to be all the way to one side or the other. In fact, usually it's very handy to be right about here with even your hard magics, so that you have the mystery tool, so that later on if you're writing a series you can expand the magic and leave some mystery in the first book that can later on be explored and explained. The further my books go, because I tend to be pretty far

on that side, the more the magic gets explained, and the more the holes that I've introduced in the magic intentionally in the start, start to get filled in. This is how you actually have, like, the ending of Mistborn 1 could still work. Because Sanderson's First Law is really a law of foreshadowing. If I had spent the whole first book saying, "There were some Mistborn sometimes who were able to do something really weird and we don't know how, and we think it might involve this. And here's this apparent contradiction in the magic system that we think

should work, but we don't know why." And then later on those things are reconciled, and the character figures something out and is then able to access the magic, that would work. In fact, most Asimov Three Law stories are this way. If you haven't read Asimov's Three Laws, he's got three laws of robotics, this, this. And then a robot is acting weird. It's running around in a big circle instead of doing what it's supposed to do. What's up? Well, let's go look at how the three laws interact with one another and we'll find out why this

robot's programming has a bug that is causing a contradiction between the three laws, and therefore they're acting this way. That is kind of one of Asimov's go-to storytelling devices. Of course, he also has the "robots develop some weird sense of wonder thing, we don't like it, so we destroy it." So he does have sense of wonder stories as well. This is the Law of Foreshadowing. The reason I say, "in a satisfying way," I want to point out before we do questions about this one, is sometimes you don't want to solve problems in a satisfying way

because you are doing something else with this scene. The example I often use for this is, you've probably seen a lot of stories where the characters in the first third of the story get into desperate situation, there is no way out of it, and then out of nowhere someone comes and saves them. Probably seen a lot of this. It's done all the time in Hollywood films. Why is this done? Usually to introduce this new character. That's one of the things. You're like, we want to have a dramatic introduction to this character. We will have them

save the other characters and show off their cool abilities in Act 1 when the characters couldn't possibly have survived. There are other reason that narratives do this. Some of them are kind of lame, I'll admit. Some of them are quite legitimate. Introducing a character in Act 1 to save the day is very different from having an unnamed character show up in Act 3 to save you at the end. Han works because it's foreshadowed. But Han, if he showed up in the first part of the story, could just show up and save them. Be like, "Oh,

yeah, this is my friend Han. Now you know how cool he is." Understand that these are all tools. There's not wrong ways to do this. In fact, Sanderson's Laws, I call them laws because it sounds cool, and that's basically the format that people use, but they are not laws for you. You don't have to follow these. These are rules I made for myself to tell the types of stories I want to tell, to get the type of effect that I want to get, and they might be helpful for you to understand some sort of narrative

things about using your magic systems in a story. So let me ask, any questions about Sanderson's First Law? Yeah. STUDENT: This could be spoilers, but the end of Oathbringer. BRANDON: Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. CLASS: (groans) STUDENT: And how that works. I guess it doesn't have to be that specific example, but how do you make it an ending that is both satisfying and doesn't follow that? BRANDON: When I'm talking about this, when I'm doing this right, the goal is that I am foreshadowing that something can and will happen, and that you could have figured out what

was going to happen before it happens. Now, I might not always get this right. It'll depend on your own personal read. But when Sanderson's First Law is working for me, it is you could have known and figured out what was going to happen at the end ahead of time. With Oathbringer, I would argue the answer was coming down to a character's decision. You didn't know which way they were going to decide, but you knew they could decide either way. The emphasis is, if they decide one way something happens, and if they decide another way, something

happens. The setup for this is very different based on situation. Let me explain. I've got a good story for you to explain this. The story is the two Lord of the Rings films, movie two and movie three. Now, movie two of the three is my favorite of the Lord of the Rings films, and part of this has to do with the defense of Helm's Deep. Now, in this story, what happens is characters go to Helm's Deep to defend it against an Orc, Orci, whatever, invasion. They know that this is kind of one of their last

stands. They are in serious trouble. The setup ahead of time is, Gandalf says to them something. You guys remember what it is? STUDENT: "Look for me the morning of the third day." BRANDON: "Look for me the morning of the third day," is that what he says? Fifth day. "Look for me the morning of the fifth day." What's that? You watched it last night? “Look for me at the morning of the fifth day. Look for me, and he rides off.” The setup for that situation is, if we survive five days, Gandalf will save us. Now, the

narrative does everything it can do to make you forget that, by showing you how terrible the situation is, by making them fight to the very end of their wits, and their strength, and their exhaustion. They are basically defeated. But at the end they go out for a final charge, and then the sun rises, and then it plays Gandalf's "Look for me on the morning of the fifth day," and Gandalf appears. They see him, and then an army comes up behind him. Now you've seen this army leave, so the pieces were there, but the setup for

the characters was not "You need to defeat these Orcs or else." The setup is, "If you survive this amount of time, you are okay." In the third movie, this setup is not done the same way. They are defending Minas Tirith. It is set up as, "If we don't protect Minas Tirith, we are doomed." And then Aragorn goes off to ghosts. And then as they're about to fall, Aragorn shows up with the ghosts and saved them. On a kind of strict outline basis, these two are the same. Yet in the Aragorn saving them with the ghosts,

I felt just really kind of let down. I'm like, "Oh, okay. I guess they're okay. It's still a great film. Yeah, whatever." And in the middle film, every time Gandalf comes up over that ledge as I'm watching it, I can barely keep the emotion in. When the light comes down behind him and the Orcs are like "Aaugh!" It's just beautiful. Every time when Aragorn shows up with the ghosts I'm like, "All right, we're done having fun with Gimli and Legolas bantering about who killed what. We're done with this. Okay, we're done. So I would ask

you, why do I have such a different emotional reaction to number three than I do to number two? This is about promises and payoffs. In both the Tolkien, or actually this is Jackson, because they don't happen exactly the same way in the books, in both of these Jackson is solving a problem with an external force that is protecting the characters from the consequences that are coming toward them. But in one of them, they are promised if they can do this, they will receive this. In the other, they are promised, "You need to survive. Oh, you

didn't? Okay, we'll just save you anyway." Now, it is obviously much better done than that, because it's a fantastic film, even the third one. But when I am looking for this to work, it's not necessarily that you need to understand exactly what the magic can do. You need to understand what the setup is. For instance, a lot of stories will say, "I feel like if I can solve this problem with the magic I will receive a dump of understanding about everything that will let me save the day." If you have set that up for the

reader, if they figure out this problems and then that happens, the reader will be fine. They're like, "Yes! This is exactly what I was promised." I f they fail to figure that thing out, they fail to make the decision, they fail to achieve what you've set up in your narrative for them to do, and then they still succeed, well, then you're going to need some other way to make that work, and you totally can. But in that case, that's where Sanderson's First Law is not really applied, if that makes sense. Again, I'm not perfect at

this. So you can totally read one of my books and say, "You know, Sanderson, I don't think you completely pulled it off. I don't think you did the setup the right way I needed to for this ending to work." But this is what I'm trying to do, if that makes any sense. And that story helps me kind of explain how I view this. Other questions about this? STUDENT: In regards to setup, how do you explain your magic in an exciting way without info dumping? BRANDON: Yes. How do you avoid the dreaded info dump? Did I

tell you guys last week what I was doing with the Mistborn screenplay? I told the little class, didn't I. I didn't tell you guys. I'm writing the Mistborn screenplay right now. CLASS: (oohing and ahing) BRANDON: Ah! Yes. Ah! STUDENT: How close is it? BRANDON: How close is it? It's not that close. Basically, me writing the screenplay is not what you want to have happen. It means that I've given up on Hollywood writing the screenplay. I'm just going to do it myself. I am not an expert screenwriter. I've only written one screenplay before in my life,

so this will be number two. So I'll need a lot of help to even make it work. But fortunately I have some good help from some friends in Hollywood who are very good at screenplays, who are giving me advice, and I've done some brainstorming sessions with them. So I am approaching how to do this. One of the things I ran into is in the book, this isn't too much of a spoiler for the book, in the book, Kelsior takes Vin, Kelsior's the mentor figure, Vin is learning the magic, out into the mist to explain how

the magic system works. In a book it actually works pretty well. It's like, instead of sitting down in the classroom, he takes her out and says, "All right, let's try this and experiment with this." She's like, "All right. We'll try this magic power. We'll try this magic power." That alone takes it away, takes it several steps. One thing you could do is include an encyclopedia entry on the magic you're doing. That's your worst choice. Choice number two is to have the characters sit and talk about the magic and get it explained. That's still a pretty

bad choice, but at least it's moved to dialogue. Choice number three is, let's go out and experiment and having problems making it work, and the teacher instructing them. That works pretty well in the book. In the screenplay I don't have time for that, and it would work less well on screen. So what did I do is I combined that scene and the scene also early in the book where Kelsior sneaks into House Venture to steal a bead of atium. In the movie version, these were the same scene. Vin's followed him. She's like, "You promised to

train me." He's like, "All right, baptism by fire. Come with me and we're going to try these different things while we're robbing these people." So by overlapping those scenes, suddenly there's way more tension to "Now you've got to learn to do this, and if you don't, that guard is going to alert us, and we'll all be in trouble." And when she screws up he can help out and things, but now there's a tension to the scene. And the scene combines two scenes and it gets way more active and interesting because the reader's like, or I

guess in this case really the viewer's like, "Oh, now there's some real consequences on the line to this same sort of project." The same thing is happening, practice, same sort of practice, same thing is happening as happened in the book, but in a situation with increased tension. That is also a good way to make sure this happens. Now, you have to balance that. Because one of the things you risk when you're bring this into a tense scene is that the reader might get lost and confused while and action sequence is happening, which is generally a

bad idea. Fortunately, on film I have all the ability to visualize a lot of this, so I don't have to explain it in the same way as I do in a book, which makes that scene work. One of the biggest challenges to writing science fiction and fantasy is how you get across your world building elements in a way that is not boring. To do this you need to construct your scenes deliberately, in a way that gives you a chance to not just show the magic working, but to show character and setting details while you are

explaining the magic in some way. In fact, the point of the scene might be to explain the magic, but your emphasis in the scene should be making sure the character is interesting and you're showing as much or more about the character as you are about the magic, or at least you are providing excitement equivalent to that. Try to do multiple things at once, and make sure you are keeping your focus on the character. All right? Okay. Let's move on to Sanderson's Second Law. All right. Sanderson's Second Law comes about because I was sitting and thinking

about powers that I put in my books. This one also kind of relates a little bit to Mistborn. I was at a book signing at one point. I spent a lot of time thinking about, what are new powers? What are new things I can put in my books that are going to be different? Someone came to me at a book signing once and said, "Hey, I love Mistborn. It's like a whole book full of Magnetos." And I'm like, "Wait. Oh, wait, that's just basically Magneto, isn't it?" Like what are Mistborn? You take Magneto, you mash

them together with "these are not the droids you're looking for because they can manipulate emotions," and you've basically got Mistborn. I was like, "Oh, wow, am I a hack?" As a writer, expect that question to pop up in your head frequently. "Oh, no, am I a hack?" The answer is no, you're not, because I don't even really like that term. If you are seeking to write stories the way that you would want to read them and enjoy in your stories, you are not a hack. But there's this thing of, "Am I original? I thought I

was original, and now I realize I'm not." Well, that's a completely different story. You are probably going to worry you're not original too much, because the end of the day, the most original thing you can add to a story is your perspective, and that is unique to you. Now, the more you write, the more you will realize how to not be derivative. Because when you start off you will be derivative, and that is generally a problem and something you want to avoid. The more you write, the more you'll learn to put your own stamp on

things. But generally, experienced writers worry about being derivative well past when it's not even a consideration for you at all. Okay? If you're worried about it, see if some early readers say you are. Learn how to tweak things to make them your own a little bit more. Sanderson's Laws might help you. But don't stress this as much as perhaps you might. But what I realized is, I'm like, "Well, how did I come up with allomancy? Why did allomancy work? Why did I enjoy it so much?" One of the things I landed on was this idea

that allomancy, if you haven't read the books, you can push on pieces of metal and they'll fling you up in the air. Basically, if something's heavier than you are, if it's attached to the floor and you push on it you go the other direction. It's vector physics used as a fun magic system. If you push on a coin it flies away from you, but if it hits something heavier than you, then you'll launch backward. Equal and opposite reaction, right? This was really fun to write. Why? Because of Sanderson's First Law sort of stuff. Making the

character stretch with the tools they have rather than solving the problems externally was a real blast to write and it made this writing more exciting, more interesting to me, thinking how can I use this tool in a way the reader's not expecting but they could have anticipated is very fun to me. So I spent a lot of time in that space. I realized, though, that allomancy is just a really lame form of flying. Like, if you could fly, then that would just be strictly better than launching off of something. If you had full telekinesis, you

could just move things around wherever you wanted, that'd just be a better version of allomancy. And yet I've read books with that, and the magic systems have been less fun. So why is that? And that was kind of Sanderson's Second Law. Sanderson's Second Law is that flaws or limitations are more interesting than powers. Doesn't mean that the powers aren't interesting. Like the question of "What if you could do this?" is a great story starter. What if you could fly? Where would you go with that? But in developing a magic system, building in the flaws and

limitations, and I'll say costs, is generally more interesting and creates more storytelling potential than the powers themselves. For instance, if I said to you, "You can fly," that might send you along some interesting paths in telling a story. If I said, "You can fly, but only as long as your parents are both sleeping." Then suddenly you're like, "Oh!" It's a very different story, right? This suddenly takes us into a different direction. "Do my parents both need to be alive? But they both need to be asleep? Do I now move to the opposite side of the

world so I can consistently be a, during the day when they are sleeping?" Or come up with whatever, fly. You can have the classic, like what is the one that Scott Card uses in his book. You can use the magic, but if you do, one of your living relatives will be killed. Suddenly, that's what the story is about. The Wheel of Time has a great example of this. All these mystical, wonderful powers, but the more you use them, the more likely you are to become insane and kill everyone you love. In fact, we start with

the prologue showing someone who has gone crazy and killed everyone they love, so you understand the stakes and consequences right from the get-go, which was a brilliant move. It's the same thing as putting Gollum in your story so you can see what the character will become. But the flaws and limitations and the costs are where generally your story happens. Superman has classically been a very difficult character for people to do films about. We had one and a half really great Superman films, and then we've had several films that have had really great parts, but the

authors of the films have struggled with making those Superman films click with audiences. And this kind of comes down to the fact that people are like, Superman has too much power. It's too hard to write a story. And yet I watched as a young man an entire series about Superman that I loved, and I still think is really fun, even though it's a '90s show, so it's way campy. That's Lois and Clark. You'll see that Superman works really well on the small screen. There have been adaptation after adaptation of Superman or Supergirl that have been

really fun stories to tell, and that generally is because the people telling the small scale story have such limited special effects budgets that they can't make a big spectacle of Superman punching someone harder than that person can punch, and so they have to say, "Well, what else can we do?" And Superman stories generally fall into one of three categories. The first one is what I just said. Someone has shown up who can punch harder than Superman. Oh, no! That's where the movies tend to go a lot. What is the other Superman story? Somebody has kryptonite.

Oh, no, I don't have my powers anymore. What is story number three? I am unable to use my powers effectively to solve this problem. Either someone who is weaker than me is in danger so my powers, now they don't have the powers, or, I would really like this person to fall in love with me. My powers don't give me that ability, except at the end of the second film, which is why there's one and a half good Superman films. Or I guess now that's the kiss of forgetfulness. But you know what I mean. But Superman

II has some goofy super H stuff in it. I still love it, but it has some goofy super H. Okay, story time. Early in my career, this has nothing to do with anything, early in my career, I was guest of honor at a con up in, like, North Salt Lake or something, and they're like, "The local news station wants to have you on the news on the morning show." I'm like, "Wow, this is really cool. I've never been on the news before. That's great." They're like, "Yeah, but they're going to invite several other people, and

you're all going to be on TV." I'm like brand new. I'm like, "Be on TV!" So I show up and who's going to be on? It's me and Ursa, the Superman II villain, the one that's a woman, and a group of Storm Troopers. And the notice thing was us just standing there, and they're like, "Look at these weirdos at this science fiction convention. You should go meet them." It was actually a fine experience, but I'm like, "Wow, my now claim to fame is being on TV with the villain from Superman II. Not that one, not

that one, but that one, and some Storm Troopers." Somewhere, someone has that clip of me standing there awkwardly, being like, "Oh, yeah, I guess we are the weird-- the zoo has come to town and we wear Storm Trooper armor." She was very nice, by the way. But that's neither here nor there. The stories that people look to tell about Superman I think are instructive to us because generally they are looking to tell stories about things that Superman's powers don't really influence. In fact, my favorite episode that I remember of Lois and Clark was, like, there

was this robot who had kryptonite. They're like, "We're powering it by kryptonite so if it punches Superman it'll take away all his powers." But the whole rest of that story, this robot's here, he's dealing with something with Lois, which is really interesting and engaging, because it's character relationship stuff, and his powers come into play almost not at all. They do this, they have this thing, and at the end of the episode they're like, "Oh, yeah, you have to go fight this robot." He's like, "Oh, right, I can fly, and I have laser vision." So he

flies up and he lasers the thing and then he flies away, and it takes, like, 10 seconds. That is writers who understood that Superman punching harder than something is not as interesting as the fact that he has galactic-scale godlike powers but can't interact with the human world. He's still just a nerd who can't make relationships work. That's why that show worked. Now, what does this have to do with? Well, when you're developing your magic, naturally a lot of your stories are going to err toward conflict. So they are going to err toward one of these

kind of three stories. Either the character is not skilled enough with their magic yet and needs to level up. Or, they need to find something that's not working in the magic and fix it so that they can then use their magic the correct way. Or, the magic is not working right now. "What do I do?" Or, the magic can't solve this problem. It can maybe help me with the surrounding things, but I need to then find a way to solve this problem using my other attributes, not just my magic. Those are going to be your

three paradigms for telling stories about the magic. there are others. But those are kind of the three catchalls. All of those deal with this idea of your flaws and your limitations are a big part of why those stories are working. I view these three things as three different things, and I also, they're just my definitions that I talk about. But I also view them as kind of larger storytelling rules, just like the first one's really rule of foreshadowing. This is kind of about your characters also. Your character's flaws and their limitations, and the things they're

willing to do and not willing to do, and the costs of certain actions, are where your stories are going to happen about your characters. Flaws, basically, are things the character could change, or the magic you don't understand yet, and with more application of effort or character change, you will be able to fix. For instance, I will see a flaw as, in Elantris the whole story is about a flaw in the magic. The magic stopped working 10 years ago. We don't know why. People used to get divine powers. Now they get cursed for eternity, and they

become zombies. The whole story revolves around there's a flaw in the magic and we don't know what it is. Something's broken. That flaw is what I build my whole story on. But in a lot of stories there's also this flaw of, we don't understand this part of the magic. Or, you are not good enough at the magic yet to do what you need to do. You need to practice. If they character applies themself, if the people apply themselves, there is a solution to this problem somewhere in the narrative. Same sort of thing with the characterization

thing. A flaw in your character is your character doesn't trust people. Your character has good reasons for not trusting people, but they really need to learn to trust their thieving crew, because these guys are actually good. Through the course of the story, you are going to learn to trust again so that you can actually have a relationship with this guy you're falling in love with. That is Mistborn's theme. There's a flaw in the character. That doesn't mean, again, the character is responsible for that flaw. Sometimes life has beaten people down. But it is something you

can work on and fix. A limitation is different for me, both for a character and a magic system. The limitation of allomancy is you can push and pull only directly away from yourself or directly toward yourself, center of gravity, or center or mass, or whatever. The narrative is now making you think, the character's need to figure a way to fix this problem. It's just a limitation of the magic. You work with it rather than you try to fix it. For a characterization, a limitation might be something like, you were born with one arm. The narrative,

you could imagine narrative where this character's on a quest to get a robotic arm or something, but most narratives are like, you've been born with one arm, you want to play in the NFL, you have a limitation you're going to have to work with. There's nothing to fix. It's not that if only you'd been a better person you wouldn't have one arm instead of two? But that's not the theme of the narrative. The narrative is about this person who has a handicap needs to work within this handicap in order to achieve what they want to

do. Magic systems are the same way. The magic system has this handicap, this limitation. You're going to work with it. And then cost. Cost doesn't play as well with character as it does with magic. It's just kind of a good rule of thumb to ask yourself what is your magic cost. But you can also deal with this in character by saying, if character takes this action, what is the cost to them emotionally, physically, mentally, these sorts of things? You can set up that if character makes this decision it's going to be very difficult for them

and cost them something, and that's really good tension. The same way with the magic system. The magic system where if you have this magical power, but every time you use it one of your next of kin dies, that is a really steep cost. You can vary these costs depending on how much you want the magic to be used and what the role of the cost is in the magic. A lot of times, and this is just fine, but a lot of times magic systems will write one of the costs as being equivalent to the bullets

in a gunslinger's gun. It costs using this resource, and the character will run out of it when it's dramatically appropriate that they do. STUDENT: Stormlight. BRANDON: Stormlight, that sort of thing. Very common to use a cost like that with the magic. The reason that those sorts of costs are fun is because they can have narrative tension, but also you usually can tie them into the economy really interestingly, and you have a legitimate reason if you want to tell story number two, character doesn't have their powers. You don't have to invent a reason why they don't

have their powers. You just deny them the resource, and now getting the resource can become part of the narrative, where you can set up your story as, "If we can get this stuff, then I can solve the problem." And of course, you're really telling, generally, in those cases, a different story about the character's story, and the getting the stuff just becomes a McGuffin for the plot. But it leads to a very useful method of being able to tell versions of story number two with the magic. But it also can tie things into economics, and you

can add a social dimension to it in that case where rich characters are able to use the magic more. Wow, theme! There's all sorts of things there. But you can also come up with very strict costs, which themselves can be really fascinating stories. You have three wishes. You're going to make all three wishes, but they're all going to go wrong, horribly wrong in some way. Go. Well, okay, we have a very strongly limited magic that also is leading to a horror story. You can vary the cost to depend on how you want your story to

go. But a lot of times your story is going to be about your flaws, limitation, and cost, either in character or in the magic system. Any questions about rule number two? STUDENT: With limitations, like not being good enough, how do you do a story about that, which is something about, like, they don't have enough in the story? BRANDON: It depends on the type of story you want to tell. It kind of depends on the character arc the character is on. If the character arc is, you need to get better at this, I frame it in

the story as a flaw, not a limitation. I narratively structure it out, if the character will do X, Y, and Z, they will overcome this ignorance they have and be able to succeed. Usually you tell these stories in the "I showed up to fight Darth Vader, and guess what happened? I lost my hand and now my entire world is shot. I'm going to go train some more so that next time I can fight Darth Vader, and I'm going to train in a way that isn't just about battling the sword. I'm going to train in a

way that I use the revelation." That third movie works because a flaw has been overcome in Luke where he realizes that just slamming his light saber against Darth Vader is not the way to win that battle. But it could also be couched as a limitation. I used this one in The Rithmatist. In The Rithmatist, certain people have magic, certain people don't, and someone who loves the magic doesn't have it. The story is framed as a "You aren't going to get this thing, because unfortunately life isn't fair and the people who might be really good at

something sometimes just aren't born into the privileged situation where they can use it, like you weren't. So let's find a way that you work with that limitation that is satisfying." That story is not about the character overcoming a flaw. It is working with a limitation. I tell very different climaxes for those two stories, even though they're basically about the same thing. That would be my response to you. What do you want the character's journey to be? What do you want your climax to look like? How do you want your stand-up-and-cheer moment, or your sit-down-and-cry moment

to feel? Yeah. STUDENT: I'd like your opinion on low costs that make a character more quirky. BRANDON: Low costs that make a character more quirky? Do you have an example? STUDENT: For example, let's say Luke can use the Force, which is obviously one thing, but say that you could throw in that he never loses in that space chess game. BRANDON: Right. Luke never loses in that space chess game. He's got a quirky-- So you're asking, can I give someone a power that doesn't really have much of a cost or limitation, but it's just there to

be fun? Absolutely. In fact, it also depends on if you're looking for-- like, that's doing something more like sense of wonder. You're characterizing with this thing, and you're using it for humor, for emotion, and things like this, and not for problem solving, and in that case, great. You're going to run into a problem where if your story then becomes about whether someone can win the big space chess game, and Luke isn't the person they choose to go play in that space chess tournament, that's where you have problems. Sometimes you give someone these quirky powers, and

then as the story progresses the readers start to ask more and more, "Wait a minute. Why aren't the eagles flying them to--" Right? There are explanations, but the fact that a lot of people ask that question means that the explanations were not satisfyingly presented, and that was given, it's more a quirk of Gandalf. He knows the eagles. It's more a sense of wonder. But then those two things intersect, and people start to ask. "Wait a minute!" And that's your problem with that. Does that make sense? All right. Let's go ahead and move on to rule

number three. There's three of these and a Zeroeth Law. All right, Law Number Three. Law Number Three comes from me when I was working on trying to build the Stormlight Archive. Now, the history of the Stormlight Archive, if you're not familiar with it is, I think I told you guys about it before, but I wrote the book in 2002 before I sold Elantris. This book, I failed in writing it. For those who haven't read the book, the Stormlight Archive is a large epic, full of a large cast of characters, with a very different world from

ours. There is a lot of bringing people up to speed on the world building. There's a very steep learning curve. There's a lot of information to get across. Plus, I wanted to do some big thing where I had tons of characters. I'd been reading The Wheel of Time. I'm like, "There's so many characters. I want to do something like this." The first draft of Way of Kings was way too expository, meaning I was just dumping information on you, and it started the character arcs of multiple different characters and didn't finish them, because the book, if

I'm trying to do 10 character arcs or whatever it is I ended up doing, and I only got through 10% of each of them, instead of picking a couple characters and getting through their arcs. It made for a very unsatisfying book. But in 2007, a very large freight train called The Wheel of Time smashed into me unexpectedly and carried me with it on a long journey that I had not been expecting mere days before. That changed my career dramatically. TOR, as I had finished up Warbreaker and turned it in, was like, "What are you going

to do next?" I'm like, "This feels like the right time to do Way of Kings, if I can fix it." So I sat down, and I rebuilt all the world building from scratch, trying to improve it, trying to work with it, and I kept running into this problem. You see, I would go to signings, and people knew that Mistborn had three different magic systems. That's part of what made Mistborn work. Book 1, if you haven't read them, focuses on allomancy. Book 2 focuses on a different magic that's hinted at in the first book, and Book

3 focuses on a third magic that is hinted at in the first two books. You start to learn about the mechanics of each of them. It worked very well for the structure of that series to dig into a different magic in each series so there was always something new to be exploring. I didn't explain it all in the first book and left some sense of wonder for the future books. So people started to ask me, they learned about the Way of Kings. They learned that I had written this book and hadn't released it, and they

found an Amazon listing for it, somehow. I still don't know how this happened, by the way, because I never signed a contract for The Way of Kings. I signed a contract for Elantris and Mistborn. But initially, Moshe had offered on Elantris and The Way of Kings. So somehow, someone in TOR told Amazon this author was releasing these two books before a contract was signed, and they put up a listing for both of them, and then left the one up for The Way of Kings even after we didn't put that in the contract, and fans found

it, and then they became fans of my-- well, first they became fans. They fanned this and were like, "We're going to pretend we have this book." So they started taking fan pictures of themselves with the book with a fake cover that had Elvis on it, and a quote from Terry Goodkind that said, "A hunk o’, hunk o’ burning good book." They started to put fake quotes on the back of it. Amazon just let you upload your own photos and information. They were doing a Wikipedia thing back then. So there's all these wonderful quotes from made-up

people talking about loving the book, and there's a bunch of fake reviews of people loving the book and talking about the killer penguins and all this stuff. Regardless, TOR did eventually make that page vanish. I'm sorry. STUDENT: Do you have records of it? BRANDON: I do have records of it somewhere. I'm not sure where they are. I know fandom has some too. We have a copy of the book, I think, that they printed off the fake cover and put on for us after it was published or something. But regardless, The Way of Kings was known

in fandom, and they started to ask questions about it. They knew it was going to be my big epic. I always planned this to be the biggest and longest of my series. It was the one that they knew the original first draft of was 300,000 words, which is way longer than my other books. The published version has 400,000 words. But they started saying to me, "Brandon, how many magic systems will this book have?" I started to say, "Thirty." Because I'm like, "I'm going to develop 30 different magic systems. I'm going to have 10 magics based

on each of the surges, and I'm going to have 10 magics based on void binding, and I'm going to have a bunch of different magical mechanisms for the Fabrials science, and I'm going to explain these as 10 different magic systems and all the stuff." And I started to get caught up in the hype of bigger is better. This, when I went to my world building, is what I realized had ruined the first incarnation of The Way of Kings, the thinking that bigger is better, because it's not. Now, there are some cases where bigger is better.

It's not strictly true. It's not strictly untrue. If you love a book already, you get into it, oftentimes you're like, "Wow, I'm glad there's so much more of this book to love." And if the storyline you're trying to tell is improved by having a large arc in the same story like The Way of Kings, then big is better for that book in that instance. But big is not strictly better. In fact, with world building, I think it is usually worse. So Sanderson's Third Law is where I realized that "Before adding something new to your magic,

and I'll put your setting in general, see if you can instead expand what you have." There is a game series called The Elder Scrolls, which I love. A lot of people leave reviews on some installments of this, because The Elder Scrolls has always been about using a vast setting as a way to engage you. In fact, the first one I played was called Daggerfall, and the reason it hooked me, people said, "You've got to play this. There are, like, 10,000 different dungeons and they are all unique." They used procedurally generated dungeons to create Daggerfall. I

played it, and then I realized that those 10,000 dungeons were the same 10 assets recombined in enough ways to make 10,000 whatever. Not 10 assets, but, you know, a number of assets. In fact, people started reviewing the game, saying, "They are an ocean that is an inch deep." This was one of the big criticisms for the series. In fact, one they kind of tried to fix in the most recent one, Skyrim by saying, "We're going to back away from the procedural generation, and make some of these dungeons have a lot of attention to detail, particularly

the ones that you're most likely to play through, so that they're interesting and engaging." And indeed, having 10 dungeons in a game that are really well made, turns out, for most player experiences, is way better than 10,000 dungeons that are basically all boring. This is what you run into with our magic systems and your settings if you start to say, "Wow, Sanderson is doing a 10-book epic with all of this stuff in it. In order to write an epic fantasy, therefore, I need to have my languages all built ahead of time. I need to have

the lore going back 10,000 years. I need to have built all of these different interesting religious systems and governments and magic systems. And, oh, no! I need 10 PhDs to write this book." The danger here is that that's not necessarily better. Now certainly, having an expertise and applying it to a book, or even making sure you're doing a wide variety of different things in your book can be very handy. But most readers will latch onto one idea done really well, better than they will latch onto 100 ideas just barely touched on. In Way of Kings,

the original, instead of taking and trying to do 10 different character lines 10% of the way done, if I instead picked three, Dalinar, Kaladin, and Shallan, and I told a really good chunk of their stories, turns out the book is way better. Because doing a really good job with three characters and having a bunch of side characters who all have interesting hooks, and they'll all get their own books eventually, but in that first book making sure-- really, the first book is 50% or more Kaladin and doing his story just as best as I could do

it, with Dalinar and Shallan just being there enough to get you interested in them, because you knew they were going to have more extensive arcs later. That book worked. You should apply this in many cases to your world building. If you're asking yourself, "All these things I need to do," if you instead say, "You know what? I'm really interested in religion. If I create three interesting religions that all come off of the same branch, like Christianity, Judaism, and Islam branched off of kind of the same core theology long ago, it creates an interesting relationship between

these three religions. If they're all taking a different perspective on it, and I dig into that perspective, and maybe I related that to a magic in the world," you are going to have a better book than if you say, "There are 50 different religions in this book. It's so diverse and interesting. You're going to love it." That book with three religions done well, almost always going to be a better book. This is about learning to dig deeper into a concept and explore the different ramifications of it, instead of just throwing everything you can think of

into a book. This is really important for fantasy and science fiction, because we are coming to fantasy and science fiction because of the world building. In general, we want to come to this world building and be transported to a different place. It's very common for the author to say, I'm going to take you to a different place. I'm going to put all this weird stuff in, but then not leaving the reader with something to latch onto, that is really interesting, that presents itself an interesting problem or an interesting hook. That interesting problem or hook related

to the world building is way more vital than these other things. Next week we'll dig into all the different types of things you can put into a fantasy novel, and it will feel like, "Oh, no, I need 100 PhDs to write this book." The whole goal of that lecture, though, is to kind of push you, to expand what you view story or science fiction to be, and to try to find where your niche for a given book might be, latch onto it, and do it really well. If you are writing a big epic fantasy, you

probably need to be multiples of these, and in fact, you need to learn a skill which we'll talk about as the iceberg theory of world building. When I first became a writer, I heard a lot of authors on panels talking about how world building should be an iceberg, the classic iceberg theory. Here's the iceberg, here's the water, and there is this huge body of world building underneath the ice that the reader should be able to tell that you did, but you're not going to show them on the page. Right? Well, this is usually wrong. This

is not what writer doing most of the time. Pulling the drapes back and showing you the wizard behind the screen, most of the time what we're actually doing is we're doing that. It is a hollow iceberg, that we've done just enough work so that if you look down through the water, you're like, "Yup, it goes on." That would flip over, by the way, in real life, so I understand that. STUDENT: How about an iceberg with a steel bottom? BRANDON: Yes, with a steel bottom. But what we're really doing is this. Because unless your grandpa told

you, and you can take 20 years and a degree in linguistics to create world building for 20 years, which, by the way, there's nothing wrong with, and if that's what you want to do, great. But remember, this class' job is to assume you want a professional career in sci-fi/fantasy where you're releasing books consistently, because that's what you'll need to do in the market today, is have a book every few years. You don't have time to do that iceberg that people are talking about. So what you do instead is, you learn to fake it. Writing books

is like being a stage magician. If you want to surprise people with twist endings, it's all about making them pay attention to this hand while you're slowly giving them the information they need so you can punch them in the face later. If you are doing world building, you are doing only what you absolutely need for your story, and you are hinting that the rest is there in a way that lets the reader say, "Oh, they've done all that. They have it all in their head. I can trust them, and I can just let myself enjoy

this world." Oftentimes, that's by doing things like saying, mentioning there's this other thing that these people know about that the main characters don't, and okay. Or it's done, we'll talk when we talk about prose, it's done by getting small details right so that the reader is allowed to just assume you got everything else right. Or it's about doing one thing really well that the reader knows you've done well, so that they trust you that all the rest of it is there when you tell them, "By the way, it's all totally there. We have 10,000 worlds

of history built for this, but you don't need to learn it, because it would bore you right now." And the reader's like, "Yeah, it would. Thanks. I'm glad you did all that work." When really you did none of it. Next week we'll talk about how to do that. But let's end with Sanderson's Zeroeth Law. Sanderson's Zero Law is very quick. Sanderson's Zeroeth Law came when I was doing all of this, and I started to ask myself, "How often is this where a story starts for me?" The answer is, not very often. Now, the Sanderson's Three

Laws generally have a lot to do with my building of an outline, and they have a lot to do with how I do my revisions and write my story. But Sanderson's Zeroeth Law is where stories begin. Sanderson's Zeroeth Law is, "Always err on the side of what is awesome." This is because I wanted to be very clear with myself that most of my ideas-- my idea for Way of Kings, where did it start? It didn't start with all this cool stuff. It started because I wanted to tell a story about knights with magical power armor.

That is the origin, well one of them, there's a lot of different threads that became The Way of Kings, but one of the main origins was, wow, power armor is cool. I want fantasy power armor. How can I make that work? Well, big, enormous, cool magic swords are cool, but they don't make any sense really narratively in most settings. How can I make a setting where giant magic swords would be the thing you'd actually want to have? That is where I start, is with the cool idea, and then I work backward. So I'll just leave

that with you. Remember that making a great story is the goal, and if these rules help you do that, great. I'm glad I shared them with you. If they don't, throw them away. We'll see you guys next week. CLASS: (applause)