- Hero is forced or chooses to take up a quest
- Hero enters domain of evil
- Hero encounters enemy (usually a wizard)
- Through personal combat (physical and/or mental) wins out. (Sometimes solving a mystery which they uses to win.)
- Hero exacts revenge on the one who forced him to go.
Sword & Sorcery: Fossil or Fuel?
In 2006 I wrote a story called “Black God’s Burden” which eventually appeared in Flashing Swords #11 (November 2008). The editorial comments on the piece got me thinking about Sword & Sorcery plots for some of the committee members (a pox on editing by committee!) felt the story was too cliché, that a story about a warrior charged by a wizard to under take a quest was just too hackneyed. I thought I had used that old chestnut to serve a new purpose, that the outcome of the tale was not the usual. Had I not turned it on its head? Was it an anti-S&S story (such as Larry Niven’s brilliant “Not Long Before the End”? ) No, I wasn’t parodying the old trope, showing the story from the wizard’s POV. My intent was to set up the main character for a series of stories about how he dealt with the curse he receives.
My story aside, it did get me thinking about Sword & Sorcery and the kinds of plots it uses. My story used a plot similar to many others (though not all follow this formula), which looked something like this: