"No no write that down"

A character trained all their life to make that killing blow, to the point where when there might have otherwise been a moment of hesitation that results in them finally coming to terms with their attachment for the other character, instinct takes over and they kill before they have a chance to stop themself.

Everyone knows what happened after the Beacon was ignited on Allenoria. Monsters, disaster, general chaos. But for the rest of the Mural? What did that look like?

As soon as it was lit, the Beacon poured out waves of... something, into the universe, drawing the attention of most anything that could think. Hence why so many monsters and gods and whatever showed up to check it out.

Plenty of planets and peoples had no way of "checking it out," and were instead left to deal with the call of the Beacon in their own ways.

On Cathoul, they called in The Calling Star. It soundlessly cried out just on the edges of the Tamr people's conscious, and on the dark side of the planet you could feel it with only a few moments of focus. At this point none of the Cathoulites were very aware of life on other planets. The appearance of The Calling Star surprised even Ectanmr, and the serpent god immediately set to work trying to find out what it was and where it was coming from.

The Calling Star may have actually been the catalyst that set off the cultural movement for Tamr to become Tamr. The people of The Eye, Ectan's watchers in the dark, looking out over the vast nothing to find secrets hidden in the star swept void.

Eventually the Beacon was deactivated, and suddenly the Tamr people were quite dismayed. The silence of the Star did not feel like an appeased silence, but like a stifling. Like call for help suddenly cut short. Whether or not you sympathize with this belief, the deactivation certainly was sudden, and though the Star no longer called from the night sky, its memory in the eyes of the Tamr people never faded.

You're telling me that this old fisherman or scholar or king knows anything about What Happened Here 800 years ago? How do they know this? Who wrote it down, and how do we know they're telling the truth?

No, I want multiple characters that the protagonist meets to have varying accounts or understandings of world or local events. I want them to be wrong about how to appease the spirits. I want to discover that that ancient king that everyone hates for ruining everything never actually existed because he was a scapegoat the scholars created to cover up their wildly corrupt meritocracy that fell to revolution. Have the immortal demigod you've been taking advice from lead you to the wrong spot, and you realize that the one person you thought you could trust for an accurate representation of a bygone era has got a screw loose, and now you can't trust anything he's said up to this point.

You know, the stupid thing where your brain skips over the the second "the" and then at the end they give you that smirk and say "No go read the sentence again" and I want to throw my brain away and congratulate it at the same time.

"The King's Assassin"

You know the one. Every so often there's a country where the ruler has this living weapon they deploy to hunt down criminals/political rivals/people who looked at them funny.

Sometimes no one knows who they are. They go by many names and theories abound regarding their true identity. Perhaps it's even someone in the court? Maybe they're not even real, and those recent --and very convenient-- deaths among the kingdom's nobility and in those government prisons were really coincidental, separate instances? Wishful thinking.

Other times everyone knows who they are. They stand at the left side of the throne, always balancing on the knife edge of honor and disgrace, surveying the court with unblinking eyes of steel. People look down upon meeting their eyes, making a mental note to visit a priest later.

Many times this is the protagonist, actually. Sold into slavery or exploited by their family, the royal family. Personally, I'd like to see more of this trope approached from the outside more often. Take it a step further. Make them more than just brutal and untrusted, make them inhuman.

Characters shiver in the dark, part from the cold, but part from the constant terror that a set of etherial, piercing eyes will appear from the folds of darkness in the alleyway.

A too-wide smile opens like a gleaming scar in the peaceful night and two knives flash in the low light, soundlessly removed from their sheaths. Maybe they don't smile at all. Maybe they're a soulless and uncaring killer. They don't flinch at pain, they make no noise, and the only indication that you're even fighting anything are those flat, dead looking eyes that seem to look through you, even as they open up your chest.

They appear where there was no way for them to have entered, and seem to be everywhere you look, from the moment the crime is committed to the moment they finally emerge from your peripheral vision to strike.

I'm sitting here thinking "okay what problems are going on on this planet that I can exploit for a story", only to find that everything is working just fine actually and the natural order is in perfect harmony and the gods are happy and the different nations are only in the regular amount of turmoil.

Conflict is the soul of a story, so how do I make a story if I built the setting to avoid rubbing on itself and creating friction?

Been thinking about the idea of large scale magic systems that exist over the whole of the Mural, and their relationship to smaller systems present on specific planets or in specific cultures.

On the one hand this can mean the really big stuff, in the case of the Mural being Focus, vrishi, Ebron, and Artifice magics, as those are the four that everything else really falls under. You could argue about Inert magic but that kinda fills in the cracks.

But see, if Artifice is the Big Picture Magic, then Soul Anchors on Lathian is the mini magic. Both involve creating an object to fulfill a certain magical purpose, but the smaller scale magic doesn't totally understand how it works or the full extent of their magic's potential. They know they can lock down certain aspects of themself and hold them at the same level as when the Anchor was activated, but do they really know what that's actually doing? They have no idea about Shapes (at least not more than an elementary "It's your soul" understanding), or the variety which the Artifice they're using allows them.

Not sure if I explained that super clearly, but think about the possible uses for this principle. People from different worlds start interacting and realize their magics bear some distant similarities. They start learning from one another and discovering new, previously impossible ways to use their magic based on the apparent capabilities of the other planet's magic.

Maybe a scholar or wizard from another planet is in hiding on a backwater planet with very primitive magic, but using their centuries old theory and the absolute basics known on Backwater Planet to decode age old mysteries about magic and the universe elsewhere.

Characters becoming mythology in later stories

Like not even the other direction either. Sure, it’s cool to hear about somebody in myths and then go back and see a POV or meet them through another character or whatever, but on the other end you have a character you’ve followed for maybe hundreds of pages, through hardship and decision, through triumph and tragedy, and then you see them in the history books.

In order for a good story to work, you need to care about your protagonists, so the author has been building up that relationship between you and the characters, meaning that when you see that Painting hanging on the wall in some gallery or a statue in a city depicting their glorious visage you can point and say “hey I know them!”

You just don’t get the same thing in reverse as easily. Bonus points if they get the history wrong and you utterly confuse the reader or any characters who are still around that we’re with the protagonist.

The best I’ve seen this done is in Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn series, since you have a whole trilogy set in like 18th-19th century and following your little band of crooks, murders, and weirdos, but then a time jump after book three sends us into the industrial revolution and now those weirdos are the subject of religions and stuff.

Now you’re here watching the new protags going through a graveyard and seeing a statue of Vin and being all “ah, the Ascendant Warrior. What would she have said, were she here, I wonder? She was so wise and powerful if only I was more like her” and you’re reading like “nah man she was a gremlin for the first several years and even after that she was still really murdery”