Walking the Earth/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: The hero wanders through Adventure Towns, without a steady income or place of residence but living comfortably.

  • Straight: The hero wanders from place to place, not looking for anything in particular except an interesting next chapter of the story.
  • Exaggerated: A kingdom recruits an army of wandering heroes.
    • The hero wanders galaxy to galaxy.
  • Justified: A god appeared to the hero in a dream and told him to Walk the Earth, promising that he'd never want for support.
  • Inverted: The hero brags that he's never been twenty miles from his birthplace.
  • Subverted: The hero wanders aimlessly... on his superiors' orders.
  • Double Subverted: The hero wanders "aimlessly" from mission to mission, making a point of never taking two missions in the same place.
  • Parodied: ???
  • Deconstructed: The hero is a bum. Life's hard, and it's not so much out of wanderlust as of hardship and annoyance. He'd really like to settle down.
  • Reconstructed: The hero supports himself by selling his skills locally, or slaying dragons for their hoards, or independent savings/filthy richness.
  • Zig Zagged: The hero is an out-of-work, drunken Knight Errant who sobers up to kill a dragon whenever he runs out of money.
  • Averted: The hero heads out to accomplish various goals, then returns home.
  • Enforced: "So, Bob wants a story about Aztecs, Ted wants something in the Middle Ages, Jane wants a Western, and Marketing insists that we're writing sci-fi. Well..."
  • Lampshaded: "You were in Tucson last month, weren't you?"
  • Invoked: An aspiring warlord with designs on a county presents himself as a wandering hero who heard they were having a problem.
  • Defied: The hero has every intention of going back home (or finding a new one) when this cruel war is over.
  • Discussed: Alice and Bob discuss the merits of a quasi-nomadic versus a settled way of life.
  • Conversed: "They must spend a lot on set design, what with going to new towns every episode."

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