/me hopes that title is different enough to avoid any sort of legal action from Warner Bros. or J.K. Rowling
With Dad at work and Mom + Aly off in Disneyland where the youngin’ was marching in a parade (which would be a much more exciting story if it was mine to tell), I had the house to myself today.
So obviously I partied hard with some friends, got messed up on drugs, died and am now writing this from the grave.
Boo.
In all seriousness, I didn’t party too hard and become a spooky, scripting spirit. As cool as that would be.
I actually had a chill afternoon all on my lonesome. I didn’t even leave the house outside of going to the gym.
After two weekends of running around doing things with relatives, it was nice to take it slow and focus on my own stuff. Mostly because all of the running around made me fall behind on my novel-writing schedule.
20 pages a week doesn’t seem like too much until you get hit with the roadblock of a death in the family.
But luckily, I was able to rectify that setback with a nice, quiet day on the couch.
At this point I’ve made it to ~35 pages, with my goal being at least 40 before tomorrow.
So far everything is shaping up far nicer than in my original 12-page attempt at a draft. I’ve actually made it past the first major set piece of the story: An underground cavern with a single room at the end of it.
… Exciting, I know. I promise it sounds better with in-depth descriptions!
One of the more interesting bits of research I’ve done recently to push my writing forward was, as the title suggests, finding the right mythical Tolkien-esque creature to fit the slot of an antagonistic race for my main characters.
Luckily my friend Sam is a bit of a Dungeons and Dragons savant and came up with a whole bunch of possibilities when I asked if there were any good avian-themed monsters I could use.
Why avian specifically? It was a jokey idea when I was writing that early draft that started when I described a helmet as beak-like, and stuck so I could make one of my characters call them “birdbrains.”
So… Bird people. Seemed legit.
I didn’t quite expect there to be so many different kinds of bird people, however. There really is a ton to unpack when you delve into the inner-machinations of an experience like D&D.
Probably the most obvious and well-known example is the Harpy.
Pretty famous representative from Greek mythology. Not a bad choice, but a little too much of a monster-monster for my tastes.
The kind of creature you can see mindlessly attacking, but not necessarily forming an advanced society.
So next came the Kenku.
Definitely a closer match, given their clear propensity for humanoid dress and a variety of roles in warfare.
However, the crow look is a bit too inherently evil-looking, and they are quite a sinister race apparently. Was looking for more of a neutral appearance.
Plus they cannot fly in the lore, which is something I wanted to include.
So Kenku were a no.
Luckily the third choice, Aarakorca, was perfect.
Check out these majestic bastards.
Not only are they a perfect blend of humanoid and avian features to make for a fairly human-like sensibility in my story, but the extra lore features from D&D — their obsession with self-grooming, bilingualism, status as traveling explorers and the fact that they look like giant birds while flying — make great tie-ins to my story’s purpose for them.
Namely… To be a surrogate for Napoleonic-era French society.
Yeah, that’s right.
It’ll be even weirder when I write about their leader riding around on a horse despite being a literal birdman. And I love it.
Being able to gather all sorts of new knowledge on interesting fantasy creatures has been a great pleasure of mine over the course of this project. It’s essentially an amalgamate of some of my favorite video games, movies and books in the fantasy genre, so the more I can include the better.
Wargroove is the big contributor of new ideas to my concoction at the moment, but that game deserves its own story another day.
In the meantime, I’m going to get back to writing so I can finish this section I’m in the middle of. Who knows, perhaps I’ll start to trickle out passages and chapters for advice in the near future.
All I know now is that this line kind of defines my brain.
Work in Progress 
4 thoughts on “Fantastical Creatures”