Urban Fantasy?

[phydaux]

Is this the right sub-forum for an urban fantasy game?  Something like Dresden Files or Buffy the Vampire Slayer?

[GhostDancer]

 

I'd go with Other Genres, personally.  Have you read Kiss of Shadows by Laurell K. Hamilton?

[bubba smith]

I thnik it is phydaux

[phydaux]

I got about 10 books into her Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter series.  Good premise, but the author just INFURIATES ME.  

 

She makes guns central to the story, and to the main character.  "I cann't arm wrestle with vampires & werewolves.  I have to shoot, without hesitation, or people will DIE.  And I can't trust, or love, anyone who can't pull the trigger without hesitation..."

 

Except the author knows NOTHING about guns, and seems like she refuses to learn, either.  She keeps making little mistakes that just drove me CRAZY.

 

"Anita thumbed back the hammer on her Browning Hi Power to show that she meant business."

 

Um, the Browning Hi Power is a single action automatic pistol.  If the hammer isn't ALREADY back, then you can pull the trigger ALL DAY and nothing will happen!

 

Also, she kept having to revise her mythology every few books, regarding what powers vampires actually have, and what happens when a vampire bites but doesn't kill a human.  

 

Seriously, it seemed like every 3-4 books how EVERYTHING in her universe worked changed, except how guns worked because she never understood that to begin with.

 

I much prefer Kim Harrison's The Hollows series.

[phydaux]

I'm thinking about a straight rip off if World of Darkness.  The PCs will be hunting werewolves & (Sabbat) vampires.  What they won't know is that while their contact is human, he is actually a thrall and they all really work for the Camarilla.

[Tasha]

Wow very picky about the Anita Blake books. The thing you quoted doesn't sound at all like she doesn't know how the gun works, just that the character was pulling back the hammer on her pistol to make a clear point to her target about her intentions. (Unless you assume that she should have already had the hammer back being ready to fire). I would call that making a presence attack. Like racking a round into a pump shotgun, even if one if ready. It makes a very distinctive sound and motion that people have seen and heard in hundreds of movies

Laurel is an avid gun person, and shoots regularly if you read her blog at all. She also consults with police etc about the accuracy of what she writes about investigations etc. esp as in her early career she was called into help identify what supernatural thing killed a target. In Anita's world, the hunters really didn't know everything there was to know about Vampires or werefolk. She just thought she did. The way vampires worked never changed she just found out about new powers and capabilities of the very oldest vampires that she didn't know about before. I call that discovery. In all of the books, vampires die the exact same way (ex one kind of vampire that has a power that makes beheading and heart removal problematic). I have read the series like 3 times and while I am not a gun person, the way she treats supernatural beings is the same thoughout. I enjoy them. The books get better and better as Laurel gets more comfortable with her world and gets the cast more or less set. Anita changes in wonderful and sometimes frustrating ways though the books, but is IMHO still a great character over 20 books into the series (22 books and 6 novellas later).

 

Kim Harrison's Hallows novels aren't exempt from inconsistencies in the world. I think that you aren't as keyed up about it as Rachel Morgan doesn't use regular guns, just paint ball guns that shoot potions at folk.

[phydaux]

The series started out with a lot of promise.  

 

If you're going to be a professional author and make a living by publishing a new book every 18-24 months, then the best way to do that is to have an interesting setting and an interesting character.  Hamilton had both.  Then you develop a formula, and write a new story with that character in that setting that follows that formula.  So you're really not writing, say, 12 books.  You're writing one book 12 times.

 

The Anita Blake series had all that, and started out strong.  I really enjoyed them, regardless of the occasional gun-related faux pas.

 

(I could go into an example where the author clearly had no idea what a .38 Special derringer was, or what it could do, yet she had the main character run this elaborate bluff based on what the author THOUGHT a 38 Special derringer could do.  Read it left me thinking "There's Laurel, there's Anita, and there's me, and clearly ONE OF US is an idiot..."  But this was early in, and the stories were still strong, so I let it pass.)

 

About 8-10 books in, the author totally lost control of her own series.  It seemed like every book the main character gained a new power, so that nothing she previously encountered in the world was a threat any more.  So the author had to abandon the formula and change her own mythology.

 

"Yes, we told you THAT was how vampire powers work, but actually THIS is how vampire powers work."  

 

"Yes, we said this is how vampire powers work, but this is only Level One.  There are two more levels..."

 

And as the story progressed the main character became less and less sympathetic, to the point where in order to progress the story the ONLY sympathetic character left, werewolf boyfriend, had to be written out of the story and replaced the very next book with a different were-creature boyfriend.

 

"Wow, it took several books for Anita to develop a serious relationship with the werewolf, but she peeled her panties off for this guy in under 100 pages.  That's really inconsistent for this character..."

 

It all just struck me as poor planning on the part of the author, and very self-indulgent story telling.  Hamilton isn't alone in this.  David Weber did the same in his Honor Harrington series.  Jim Butcher did a great job keeping Harry Dresden under control early in the Dresden Files, although he seems to have jumped the shark in the last few books.

 

JK Rowling said she had to rewrite Sorcerer's Stone four times while she worked out her mythology, what magic could do and what it absolutely couldn't do, before she went on to write books 2-7.  That shows commitment on the part of the author to maintain an internally consistent fantasy setting.