What’s a writer to do when they want to set a story, series of stories, novel, or game in a large American city, but can’t for one reason or another? The answer: Make up their own. H.P. Lovecraft did this well with his Cthulhu Mythos stories, basing the made-up New England city of Arkham …
Not only did ancient peoples look to the night sky’s constellations as cultural touchstones, they also looked to individual stars. The star Thuban helped the Egyptians align their pyramids, and Sirius, when it rose at dawn, let them know the flooding of the Nile was soon to come. The stars of the Pleiades star cluster …
In a pre-industrial society, stars and constellations had more impact on the viewer because there was less light pollution. Pictures could be traced, paths, and stories, all providing a commonality among members of a tribe or society. One common example is the constellation of the Big Dipper, or Ursa Major, imagined by many ancient cultures …
There are all sorts of fairies, elementals, grues, demons, devils, angels, nature spirits, and the like in fantasy. Often they serve a purpose in the story, and just as often they are there for window dressing, like the offhand mentions of pookas or kelpies causing trouble. In fact, things wouldn’t be the same if …
So many of them sound like video games, don’t they? Probably because both are designed to take their users to a strange, disoriented world full of action and violent motion. With a dozen lists and a randomizer, here’s what I came up with, to create your own travelling carnival or Midway. Nausea-inducing fairground rides …
They are the things that make children wake screaming, blind with fear, in the middle of the night. They are the things that slip through the cracks under bedroom windows, the things that turn the knobs of bedroom closets and push them open with agonizing slowness, while the children cower under their blankets and pray …
Geisterbahn is German for ghost train, the popular amusement park ride that carries thrill-seekers into dark, eerie tableaus designed to thrill and shock them. The most elaborate of these are found at Munich’s Oktoberfest. In the US, these rides are known as Spookhouses, or Haunted Houses. Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion is an example of the best …
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 …
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. …