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Standing Stones
Worldbuilding

Fantasy Portals

How to create a fantasy portal for your world

Portals can be useful devices for fantasy writers.  They can almost instantly get characters to a new place, era, world or realm.  They have been used effectively in such different books as C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia series and Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander novels.

They can work in most fantasy sub-genres, including epic fantasy, urban fantasy, steampunk, children’s fantasy and superhero novels.

Your portal could lead to a different era in the past or future.  It might go to a celestial realm or underworld.  It could go to an alternate reality or an entirely different realm.  There are countless possibilities.

The portal itself could take many forms.  It could be something as simple as a door or archway or something unexpected, such as a mirror, a book or a hotel.  When you create it, think about descriptive details.  Travelling through a portal might resemble walking through a door, being swept through a vortex or being taken apart and then put back together.  Consider how it looks, sounds and feels.

You will also probably want to create a strong contrast between the world left behind and the place where your character(s) arrives.  It could be daylight in one world and nighttime in another, or summer in one and winter in the next.  The surroundings might be utterly different.  If the portal leads to a celestial realm or fae realm, time might not exist in the new location or it might move at a different speed, so your character could return home to find that decades had passed during what was a few hours for them. Buildings might be constructed on a different scale for larger or smaller inhabitants.  There might not be any technology.

You can download a free set of templates to help you with this or other locations here.  If you want more help creating memorable settings, you can get the e-book or illustrated paperback of “A-Z of Fantasy Settings” at Amazon now.  You can also download the e-book for free when you join my email list for writers, where you can also get other gifts and bargains.

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