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Tag: Fantasy
Worldbuilding Wednesday 10/4/17: Legendary Creatures
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 …
Worldbuilding Wednesday 9/27/17: Arabian Nights
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 …
Black Queen IV
What Galadriel became after she was seduced by the power of the One Ring.
Worldbuilding Wednesday 9/20/17: Useful Magic Items
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 …
Worldbuilding Wednesday 9/13/17: Houses of Ill Repute
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 …
Worldbuilding Wednesday 9/6/17: Barbarians
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. …
Dracolich
The Dracolich, or undead dragon, is the most terrifying and powerful of all dragonkin. Fortunately they are few and far between. (Rotten Meat, by Edward DeLandre)
Worldbuilding Wednesday 8/16/17: Dragon Names
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 …
Worldbuilding Wednesday, 8/9/17: Bureaucracies
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 …