@rbreich What about monopsonies? Arguably those are worse. What Amazon is able to do to sellers, indies and publishers, what gig food apps can do to restaurants and similar situations destroy the ability for anyone to chase the American dream.

All the traditional pathways out of generational poverty have been devoured.

@serge “We enter town”

“As you pass through the city gate, which has long raking scars carved into the wood, you see two blue-clad young men with silver dagger pendants threatening an open-air trader on the left and the town guard on the right conspicuously looking the other way. The missive said to meet at the Wolf’s Head inn just off the crooked main street. Curiously, the guards each have a second silvered sword at their side.”

@serge Instead of an npc saying a group of mercenaries are dicks, you can show people wearing their emblem harassing people, taking shop inventory without paying, and pushing little old ladies into the mud for fun.

Both of these examples involve exposition, but you can pace it out over many descriptions as incidental tidbits.

@serge When people say show don’t tell they often mean to not have a character directly explain how things be. They usually then do a poor job of explaining the alternatives. I’ll try to here.

Environmental storytelling involves showing in the description of they environment what happened. For example, the signs of a long ago battle can be etched onto the landscape in bone, scraps of armor and gouged ancient trenches.