If you’ve been following along the explorations this month, you probably have a whole lot of conflicts and possible conflicts alongside your story elements. We started out by creating a magic system, learned how to make nature an adversary and topped it off with a dose of internal conflicts.

Now we’re going to mix everything together and get started on our stories.

As before, if you haven’t completed the previous explorations, you’re just fine! Although this exploration assumes you have completed the previous ones, you can jump in at any time.

Part 1: Seeds of Legend

We started out the month by creating a season-inspired magic system. At the end of completing your magic system you may have also rewritten a myth or fairytale with your new system in place. If you did, congrats:

You now have the first building block of creating legendary heroes for your fantasy world.

If you haven’t, choose your favorite myth, folk tale or fairytale.

You’re going to take your chosen story, rename and build out the characters and turn them into legendary heroes according to your magic system and any other world building you may have done.

Don’t forget that you need to decide roughly when these legends took place in your world. It may help to keep this vague and avoid putting direct numbers in there. There’s nothing worse than realizing your story falls apart because of a timeline.

Part 2: Old Growth, New Growth

You have a magic system, and a legend. If you haven’t already, now you need to create at least four characters.

New Writers:For this, I recommend falling back on the standard DnD classes mentioned back in Planting Internal Conflict: A ranger, a druid, a cleric and a paladin.

Give each of them a long and short term goal.

More importantly: You need to know why each character connects with the legendary heroes and heroines from Part 1.

Your new characters now have a quest: to find a relic from your legendaries, or to find a location connected to the legend.

Bonus Tip: If you’d like a smaller cast list for this story, use one or two of your characters to assign this quest to the remainder.

And if you’re wondering where they’re supposed to go, or how the Seasonal Struggles Exploration ties in: guess where your characters are going to have to go.

Your characters will have to navigate the wilderness you filled with obstacles and challenges in order to complete their quest.

You can start writing whenever you’re ready. Pantser or discovery writers may want to run some more flash fiction exercises. Plotter or architect writers may find it easier to complete a brief outline. Choose whatever works for you and get writing!