World mythology is full of fabulous beasts, beings, spirits, and creatures. There are the ones everybody knows, like gryphons, dragons, and unicorns; then there are those that are semi-familiar, like the harpy and thunderbird; and lastly, some that are truly obscure, like the grootslang, the ahkluyat, the senmurv. Here’s a list of randomly generated creatures …
Many people, myself included, have thought that the book of Middle Eastern fantasy tales, One Thousand and One Arabian Nights, is a unified work of one author or compiler from the 16th century, ala The Brothers Grimm. But it isn’t. It’s a far older collection of folk tales and poetry from a far wider range …
Oh, lookies! I found another book of forgotten magic in the vast dungeon library I call my home! Wonder if it has anything this fellow is looking for? Perhaps something to animate that pink lightbulb heart? A new group of randomly generated, mostly useful, magic items that may find a home in your story or …
How do (mostly male) adventurers spend their hard-won leisure time? They might visit a brothel. Game of Thrones has shown fantasy fans what such a brothel might look like, but whorehouses, or rollicking inns filled with willing (or working) women have long been a staple of the genre, especially in sword and sorcery. Straight female …
Without dispute, pulp author Robert E. Howard invented the fantasy character trope of The Barbarian Hero, specifically with his creation Conan. But the roots were laid before that in the Tarzan tales of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Rudyard Kipling’s Mowgli. Both pitted a stoic, nature-wise man (or boy) of the wilds against corrupt human civilization. …
Let’s face it. Most of the food in a typical Medieval European kingdom wasn’t very exciting. This is better than most, folks. Historically, the peasant staple in Europe and the Near East was porridge, which is, basically, a form of oatmeal — whole grains boiled in water or milk, decanted into a bowl and eaten …
Jungle Girls are the female counterpart to Tarzan, Sabu, and countless other wild men and boys clad in flapping loincloths swinging through the trees. Modern interpretations of her began with Rima the Bird Girl, a character in the 1903 novel Green Mansions, which makes her older than Tarzan who debuted in 1912. Like Burrough’s creation …
No other creature is as evocative of the contemporary fantasy genre as the dragon. They combine snakes, lizards, dinosaurs, large mammalian predators, and human intellects into one massive, armored, fire-breathing package. (Their drives, however, are their own.) The current version of the dragon dates from within the last 100 years. Tolkien gave us a deadly …
Fantasy organizations are not limited to the grandiose and world-shaking. Scores of bureaucratic organizations run silently beneath the surface, serving to frustrate and stymie your characters in pursuit of their goals. Terry Pratchett, Franz Kafka, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Stanislaw Lem, and J. K. Rowling all used them to good effect. Often they also serve as …
The Granddaddy of all Fantasy fiction tropes must surely be the Medieval Inn, with its open hearths and wenches in low-cut bodices, unsavory characters lurking about, and bowls of hot stew. (No less a luminary than Tolkien created the seminal template with The Prancing Pony.) In truth, inns served a vital function in the Medieval/Renaissance …