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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Dr. Strangemonkey" data-source="post: 1090766" data-attributes="member: 6533">I highly recommend Sean Stewart for very interesting takes on the idea of Fairy Tale adventure and settings.A similar project to DeLint but a very different set of results.An interesting component of both, more present in the Sean Stewart I've read but I've only read a little bit of the De Lint, is that fairy tales integrate very differently into the many societies and time periods that use them.From those books and Fairy Tales themselves I'd say that a primary component of any fairy tale setting would be that magic is very close to the mundane, just below the surface or over the river, and that while it isn't very well integrated into the mundane it is available to anyone who wants to travel away from the mundane for a while.To provide an illustration, in one of my favorite Stewart books, Nightwatch,  there are two different cities who have been radically rebuilt in response to the return of fairy tale magic and entities.In the first city the people give up half of their city to the magic as a result of a bargain made by their most powerful angel, a more or less wizardlike individual, with his own magical self and the magic of the culture.  People occasionally give their children to the magic, but overall have little to do with the magic except for occasional scavenging and various rituals and relationships regarding death and birth.  Except for the fact that their leader is now the wizard who saved them from the magic.In the second city, the people dealt with the magic by developing very strong relationships with three entities, Double Monkey, the Dragon, and The Lady, who live among them and developing people and systems that could expel all others.  The three entities live among them, but move rather mysteriously.  So that you don't just become a student of Double Monkey, he has to have some compelling reason to come to you or you to go to him.  The local council has representatives who meet or deal with them and it is very clear that the relationships between the people and the entities can be pretty tense and fraught no matter how important they are to each other.The overall point is that both settings are very different but in both cases you have to deal with the magic on its own terms, and you could easily go through life without confronting any of it except its effects.I mean a lot of fairy tales feature a forest that eats people, and that's a pretty direct effect but not if you avoid the forest.</blockquote>

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