What Laws Govern Your Story?

Everyone in a society is subject to the laws of that society. This applies to your characters as well. Creating a system of legal rules and regulations for your characters is a good part of the background work you need to do.
In fantasy novels, you need to have laws in place for your society. This includes laws on magic, both laws from society and the limitations of the magic.

Law is usually the result of agreement for the society. That is how society works. Decisions are made for the good of the society. Or it’s rulers. You don’t need to go into too much detail, just determine what your characters can and can’t do and why.

A detailed legal system is not necessary, but you should have a broad idea of them. More important is the physical laws. If your story takes place on earth, you can use the physical laws of our home planet. If it takes place on another planet, you can adjust gravity at will.

If you are writing a fantasy with magic, you need to figure out what the limitations of magic is.
Magical systems, weapon systems and the like all need some kind of governance and limitation. They need limitations, because they have the potential to solve the story problem. If that happens as soon as the first person uses it, your story is over.

Setting limits on your weapons, and magic, can be used to create more conflict. Conflict drives the story forward. So that’s what you need to determine.

You can create a magical or weapon system that your character needs to do. Then you have to throw a limitation in there to keep them from solving the story problem far too soon. Commonly, magic takes energy. The same is true for science fiction weapons.

So when doing the background work on your stories, make sure to build in limitations on the things your characters can use. Weapons may need special training your character doesn’t have or energy charges that the character needs to stop and allow the weapon to charge up. Perhaps the weapon needs a battery, and the character discovers they don’t have one available to power the weapon up.

There are other limitations that you can impose on your characters. Various spells in magic do things that can benefit your character. They might say the spell with just one wrong word and the spell does something they didn’t intend. That’s how you can use a limitation to create more conflict. Perhaps your character needs to use a sword, but has never even held one before. Some magic spells could take more energy than your character has.

You get the idea. You can create conflict with limitations and physical laws. So make sure to build weaknesses into your legal system and physical laws of your story’s world.

About pebblepup

I am not one who is comfortable talking about myself but here goes. I enjoy writing, family history, and reading. I decided to do this blog because I wanted to try something new. I decided to make it a weekly blog because I wasn't sure that I could keep up with a daily one, and monthly seemed like I was writing a magazine. I think I did ok with my choices. You'll notice that there are not a lot of graphics on my site. That's because there are graphics plastered everywhere on the Internet and those sites sometimes take forever to load. This blog is a place where you can kick back, relax and be ready to be amused. At least I hope I willbamuse you. This blog is on a variety of subjects from my ficitional cat agency, the FFL, which is monthly, to instructional blogs to editorials, which are my opinions only. I admit that I don't know everything and could be wrong -- I frequently am. Now, stop reading about me and read what I have to say!