Worldbuilding for Masochists

For a writer, a "better" government doesn't necessarily mean well-functioning or benevolent; it means “more complex and better for your story” -- which may well mean a government that is worse-functioning in interesting ways! But fantasy governments tend to look like one of two things: an absolutist monarchy or a US/UK-style representative government, flattened out i...

That's right! It's infrastructure week at Worldbuilding for Masochists! So we're talking about the systemic underpinnings of a nation and its economy, the fixed installations that it needs in order to function -- which, admittedly, might sound like the exact sort of overly-detailed, tedious, weighty worldbuilding that people sometimes complain about.

Okay, 

Magic is a lot of what makes fantasy fantasy. So, how can you do it better? What makes magic good and fun to read in the first place? Here at Worldbuilding for Masochists, we feel pretty strongly that magic systems should be more than an infographic, a D&D table, or a Sorting Hat. How, then, do we build magic into a world in a way that makes sense? And, even more...