Why didn't Armando Dippet assassinate Hitler?

Why didn't Armando Dippet assassinate Hitler? 

I touch on that one later.

In other news, 

   I love urban fantasy. It's great! You can expore the infinite possibilites of magic in the familiar framework of our world. And that's really fun, because magic is fun.

    But, if you're some variety of masochist and regularly read what I spew out, you'll know that I put a lot of stock into worldbuilding. And unfortunately, urban fantasy is really, really hard to worldbuild convincingly.

    The most important factor in urban fantasy worldbuilding is the question of "how public is the magic?" (in the rest of this blog post, I'll be using "magic" as a catch-all term for fantastical elements in urban fantasy. Sometimes urban fantasy takes the Men in Black route where the magic is actually aliens or something similarly sci-fi, but it has essentially the same impact)

    The publicity of magic is rarely a sliding scale; it's almost always either "magic is super widespread and everyone knows about it" or "only a very select secret society knows about magic." Both of these have problems with worldbuilding.

    The first route has a very obvious problem, that being that the modern world will definitely not be the same as it is now if everyone knows about magic. The existence of these elements would grossly affect the way the world turned out. Maybe World War One wouldn't have happened if Franz Ferdinand had magical anti-bullet wards. Going even earlier, any medieval conflict determined by illness or random death would be completely moot given the relatively common concept of healing magic. 

    There are two common solutions to this, and both of them go about it in the same way; make it so that magic couldn't have had an influence on history. The first way is to say that magic appeared very recently. If magic only started to appear in the past 20 or so years, the modern world wouldn't have changed that much. The second solution is to say that magic was present historically, but it wasn't influential for a variety of reasons. The most common reasons are that magic is rare, whether that be because it's fundamentally uncommon or because it takes a lot of effort to use, or that magic is very weak and thus couldn't really have had an influence (the latter is much less common because it's just less fun).

    Now, let's look at the second route; the idea that magic is only practiced by a secret society. This is the most common one, because it initially seems like it doesn't have many issues with worldbuilding, and because secret societies are cool. This is the route taken by all the famous urban fantasies; the Percy Jackson books, the Harry Potter series, Men in Black, etc. 

    You might have noticed that I said that the route doesn't seem to have any issues. Unfortunately, this implies that it does. And it does have issues. The big one is "If there's a secret society that wields reality warping powers, why haven't they done anything?" Why didn't Armando Dippet assassinate Hitler? I don't know, and J.K. Rowling probably doesn't know either. So far, I've only seen this answered in urban fantasy, that being the Percy Jackson series, where all those wars and atrocities were being perpetrated by members of the secret society. This is a pretty clean solution, but it does mean that your secret society will have a lot of baggage.

    The second big issue is "How is the secret society still secret?" There are generally two approaches to this. The first approach is "uhhhhhh magic," where some magic element keeps the magic secret in some vaguely magical way. This is a common approach because it's very, very, easy. The second approach is what I call the Men in Black approach, because Men in Black puts a heavy focus on it. Essentially, the secret society has to put in active effort to prevent the common plebeian from finding out. This approach is also taken by the wizards in the Harry Potter books.

    This got a bit long. I guess I'm good at complaining about things.  

-Marco 

(Some people choose to take the route of just not worldbuilding. Those people make me angry).