Questions tagged [urban-fantasy]
Questions for incorporating fantastical elements into the modern world (20th century or later), with an emphasis on cities.
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What cutlery would rotifer monsters use?
The rotifer monsters are monstrous rotifers with a roughly human level of intellect. They are roughly 7 metres in length and 2 metres in diameter. They possess the power to manipulate gravity, ...
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Modern era with magic that will stop gunpowder from igniting, what weapons are used instead?
One of the annoying problems with most urban fantasy series I've read is that they seem to mostly try to avoid discussing the fact that most of their fearsome magical foes could be felled with a ...
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Setting Up a Snow Elf Portal Network, Part 1: The Framework
My urban fantasy setting, in which mythical creatures live in secret amongst the human race in the late 90s USA, has a species known as snow elves (my setting's take on Christmas elves) who are ...
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How many customers per day would a medieval-era tavern serve on average in a big city? [closed]
Additionally, how many meals and/or drinks would they serve per day on average?
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How would zombies affect trench warfare?
After thousands of years the mightiest of magic uses have finally cracked the code to revive the dead... Kind of. The resurrection spell, while restoring the body to a basic capacity, leaves them a ...
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What is the earliest point in human history that gold could be hoarded?
I am currently brainstorming the history and logistics of the dragon species in my urban fantasy story about immortal mythical creatures. The way I currently envision them, dragons have their ...
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Where could a vampire get blood without harming people?
I am looking for possible ways in which a vampire could obtain blood to feed in an modern urban fantasy setting explicitly without harming humans or other sapient beings. Parameters for this question ...
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Can my city be full of giant rats?
The rodents of unusual size in question are not implausibly large from a biological standpoint, being roughly the same weight as an American Beaver, but much more adapted for land living and with an ...
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How would a city work to accommodate much larger and smaller humanoids? [duplicate]
In my story there's a rather highly populated city with multiple humanoid creatures with varying heights. I'm not sure how much this would matter, but the most common species in the city are humans ...
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What sorts of media would a secret subculture of immortals most prominently produce?
Vampires, werewolves, elves, dwarves, merfolk and all manner of other magical creatures, collectively known as "immortals" due to their eternal youth and immunity to disease, secretly live ...
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In an Urban Fantasy Setting, Why Would a Magical Courier Be Hired Over Traditional Couriers? [closed]
The premise is that there's a guild of couriers that use a dangerous parallel spirit world for shortcuts through mortal space to deliver packages at great speed.
Despite the advantage of speed, why ...
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What level of Endurance does a player have to have to shrug off a 9mm round from a pistol? [closed]
Weird one, but here we go.
Setting:
-A modern world, with the same laws of physics/same materials, weapons, etc.
-The player is a normal human. Think baseline average American citizen that has a ...
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Can sustainable farming be done in the suburbs in this supernatural post-apocalyptic scenario?
So, here's my situation: my first book revolves around an unknown entity giving modern day humanity an assortment of supernatural powers. Every week a new power is given to everyone on Earth over the ...
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What would be the best area of medicine for a doctor that moonlights in fighting evil to specialize their career in to deal with unexplained absences?
I have a character who is involved in the typical, secretive supernatural shenanigans of my setting (think something like a superhero, a monster hunter, or the vampires in Vampire: The Masquerade) but ...
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How would technology differ in a society with different intelligent species than just humans?
In my story, Longhorn, there’s five races descended from five gods of the same names, which consist of humans, keratas (anthropomorphic big cats w horns) lykos (anthropomorphic Wolf/hyena creatures) ...
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How much does my potioneer have to dilute her potions before she can be confident her customers aren't spiking drinks with them? [closed]
In my setting, potions are created by boiling magically-imbued plant and animal matter and exposing it to a soul gem, which is the crystalized MANA (magical DNA) of a dead magical creature. The ...
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How can ungulate humanoids conceal their weird legs in public? [closed]
In my story, mythical humanoids secretly live amongst humanity in modern day, but not all of them are created equal when it comes to blending in with the human race. While individual humans do know ...
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Best way to smell-proof a revolver in 1998?
My heroine, a wandering loner living a nomadic lifestyle traveling across 1998's western US in an RV, is a supernatural being, known as an immortal, with a great many useful powers. However, none of ...
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What would have been the most infamous "Reaper's Moon" in history?
My story is an urban fantasy tale, set on an alternate Earth where every mythical humanoid that humanity ever thought was real, is in fact real, or at least used to be before going extinct. From ...
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Why can't immortals use the "make humans ignore this" symbol as an invisibility cloak?
My setting involves a masquerade (though in this setting the term used is "The Veil of Ignorance") where numerous immortal humanoid beings live in secret amongst humanity as a 1-in-1000 ...
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Why would vampires sire vampires of lesser blood than they have to?
Long story short: my story has magical humanoids (known as "immortals" due to their immunity to old age and disease) existing in secret on mostly-modern-day Earth as a 1-in-1000-humans ...
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What modern-day object could a magic wand be disguised as?
In my setting, wands and staves are two of the many means by which magical creatures can harness, to a limited degree, other magical creatures' powers. When a magical creature (known as an immortal) ...
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How would the world governments define a super person?
DC, Marvel, X-men...etc style people, or things, exist. Great.
Now the existence of those people would definitely change laws and many legal practices. And of course the governments of the world would ...
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What would be the ideal date and time for a magical zombie apocalypse to occur to cause the most death and destruction?
An invisible eldritch entity has enveloped the entirety of modern planet Earth. As a result of this, any human who dies becomes a zombie. This is not spread by bites or anything like that, death of ...
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What would be US Military procedure for investigating a portal to another world? [closed]
Here's the scenario I'm working with: a portal opens up within 30 minutes' drive of one of the better equipped military installations in the continental United States. It is stable, shows no signs of ...
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What accommodations would a giant need?
I'm making a human female who's size was multiplied by 10. I need to know what sort of accommodations she'd need to make up for any disadvantages. This is in the modern day, so 21st-century medicine ...
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How realistic would a city of over ten million people in an area of less than 100 square kilometres be?
I have been playing Cyberpunk 2077 on my PS4 and Night City in the game has almost 7 million people and an area of just 75 km2. It is very dense with suspended streets and highways and giant buildings ...
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How, if at all, could my secret immortal clans hold on to territory in small towns?
I have a story set in an alternate version of 1998 USA where nearly every single mythical humanoid humanity has ever believed in actually does exist (or used to before going extinct) and lives in ...
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How durable would a kaiju-sized human be?
I am writing a story that centres around a person who slowly grows larger and larger overtime, to the point of kaiju-size and beyond. They grow due to magic, so other than their vastly increased size ...
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How does a government handle a large number of people disappearing that are anticipated to return all at once at some point in the future
I have a world I had toyed with where our world is invaded by creatures very vaguely like the heartless from kingdomhearts. The creatures are mostly immune to traditional weapons, as regular matter ...
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Strategies against a water bender in modern day for an average citizen?
Assuming a water bender can only manipulate water that they are either touching or is within their relative touching distance (say, a few cm to a meter away), and assume that blood, saliva, and sweat ...
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Could fairies be a hominid subfamily?
By "fairies," I'm referring to the eldritch horrors and creepy-crawlies of Celtic folklore, not the glittery pixies with butterfly wings.
My urban fantasy setting puts a sci-fi spin on supernatural ...
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How can I plausibly justify why a secret society of superhumans didn't get openly involved in the political events of the 2020s? [closed]
I have a setting that is intended to be set in the "present day" (i.e., whenever the reader is reading it) set in the United States which involves a secret society of supernatural people ...
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How can supernatural social beings avoid total extermination/enslavement when the human world has the Big Brother system?
The human world has the world government (and thus the single Big Brother system, which monitors people living even in the most obscure places).
For sake of being short I will call "supernatural ...
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How do the inhabitants of my city-wide death trap figure out that nobody will be let out until only 100 people are left alive?
So, in my story, there is a city that gets cut off from the rest of the world. Golden translucent walls rise up on all four sides, going all the way up into the atmosphere and all the way down to the ...
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Earth under one roof: Feasible?
Okay, so how feasible is it- if even possible- to put the Earth under 'one roof'?
So here is the premise. The world is heavily heavily over populated, so overpopulated in fact that almost all of the ...
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Why doesn't my memory-manipulating illuminati routinely sweep new species for immunity to their mind control? [closed]
My story is set in the late 90s, in an alternate reality where elves, dwarves, vampires, werewolves and the like all secretly live amongst the human race. Initially the masquerade trope is played ...
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How can a 15-year-old vampire get human blood?
Since they can't really work a job that would allow easy access to blood, I thought of having them volunteer at a blood bank then maybe steal a bag. Alternatively, is it plausible that they would come ...
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What would be the best city in the U.S./Canada to live in for a supernatural being trying to exist undetected from humanity?
I am wondering if there are any specific cities on the North American continent (not considering Mexico for the moment being, for reasons detailed below) that supernatural beings trying to live hidden ...
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Seating in Integrated Cities - Not all humans, different species
Okay, so, I have different species than the ones for, well, most of my questions (This is the first question of the series), but the purpose is still here. However, it's on an alien planet, called ...
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How powerful could a person with superpowers/group of superhumans be without greatly affecting world history?
One of the major problems I've always had with the MCU and the DC universe is how powerful many of the beings or people are whilst the World is still almost the same as ours.
It was as if the writers ...
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Is it realistic for a town to completely disappear overnight without a major crisis and massive cultural/historical impacts?
I was inspired by this question which talks about feuding clans of immortals in an urban fantasy setting trying to wipe out each other's cities while under a masquerade. There's a lot of this kind of ...
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How could my secret societies of immortals take over rival-clan-controlled towns without breaking the masquerade?
In a previous question, I brought up the concept of sanctuary towns, towns populated entirely by people who know about the population of immortal (as in they can't get old or sick; they can still be ...
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How to keep wizards and other magicial creatures from taking over the government? [duplicate]
In most urban fantasy, powerful wizards and other magical creatures form their own societies with their own governments and politics (The Magical Congress of America, for example). They seem very ...
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Is it possible for a group of supernatural beings attempt to declare an independent, sovereign state from within the U.S [closed]
I had previously asked this question about how the U.S. military would deal with a secessionist uprising from an organized coalition of werewolves, when I realized I hadn't thought very much about the ...
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Can an individual be their own Sovereign Nation?
Setting:
I'm working on a scifantasy setting that has many of the "classic" monster tropes turned on their heads a bit/adds unique biology/ that sort of thing. The metacommentary is about ...
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21st Century Intracity Train Design with These Races
Link To Races: Rail Transportation with Races Described Below - Specifically, Seating
However, this will be for my intercity and international, trains. Intercity means this: It starts in one city in ...
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Would the collapse of civilization make turning into a vampire and colonizing the ocean floor a sane idea?
One idea I've always wanted to try writing is the concept of vampires exploiting their lack of a need to breathe and generally low-maintenance biology to escape the brunt of the sun's rays by living ...
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Would subways/trains be adapted to be practical for various fantasy species or would something else be invented?
The title says my question exactly. Also if another mode of general transportation were invented for a landlocked city, what would it be? Below are the specific fantasy species that I am dealing ...
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Freezing the water in blood
Ice magic lowers the temperature of things. I was thinking of freezing the water in blood (specifically blood plasma) to kill. How would this work? Also, can it be used on non-mammals, like sea ...
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