Worldbuilding Wednesday 1/7/26: Best of Twittersnips 2025 (Magic Items)

The Comb of the Chameleon can completely change its owner’s hairdo

My favorite magic items of the year 2025 from my X feed.

 

2025 Magic Items (Best of)

Bell of Freedom and Captivity: When struck once, this bell will free prisoners from confinement. Rung twice, it will put them back into whatever confinement they left.

The Cape of Un-bearable Deflection modeled by a Dwarven warrior king

Cape of Un-bearable Deflection: Made from the shaggy brown fur of a giant bear, this cape grants +2 to the wearer’s AC and deflects up to 6 hit points of blunt weapon damage per round.

Catalog of Lamentable Faces: This cursed item looks like a sketchbook full of skillfully drawn, but ugly, human faces. If anyone looks at the whole thing their own face becomes just as ugly (-8 on comeliness.)

Ginger Hunter: A legendary orange gem that glows brightly when a natural redhead is near, allowing these individuals to be tracked or discovered.

Journal of Carafe and Coffin: A slim volume, published yearly, for good-aligned necromancers. It contains community news, possible quests, and a spell or two.

The Lamp of the Minotaur glows a pale yellowish green

Lamp of the Minotaur: When lit, it allows the holder to successfully navigate any sort of dark maze.

Moonmead: A type of alcoholic beverage brewed by druids that calms restless spirits when poured as an offering before their tomb.

Pamphlet of Instant Embarrassment: No one can say, exactly, what the text in this cursed paper item says, but whoever reads it will flush bright red and want to hide.

Ring of Introversion: Causes the wearer to become quiet, soft-spoken, and secretive. A good or bad thing, you decide. Made of braided silver wire set with a cube of petrified wood.

Ring of Three Legs: This ring is made of silver and resembles three naked human legs entwined together. Its purpose is to improve stamina. Whoever wears it can walk, run, or stand one-third longer than they ordinarily would.

Rudgill’s Magic Pen: Draws the day’s adventures in cartoon form, on any media the owner provides. Requires magic ink, such as that from a Kraken, to use.

Tassie’s Mocking Mask

Tassie’s Mocking Mask: A stereotypical Greek theater mask that mimics the target’s voice and mannerisms, causing discord and disorientation.

The Chameleon Comb: Changes the color, texture, and length of the owner’s hair into whatever the person desires, as long as the user chants “Kamma-kamma-kamma-kamma” while combing their tresses.

The Solar Logs of Granthia: Compiled by the High Priests over many centuries, these books enable any Druid to predict a future eclipse.

Trousers of the Werewolf: This cursed item makes the wearer’s legs as dark and hairy as a werewolf’s. Note some people may actually want this transformation.

Worldbuilding Wednesday 12/31/25: Best of Twittersnips 2025 (Magic Spells)

 

The Ungrateful Hero spell can turn the most powerful wizard into a moping recluse.

My favorite magic spells of the year 2025 from my X feed.

 

2025 Magic Spells (Best of)

Anti-exotic Eyes: Changes a human’s eye color from gemlike or unique (purple, emerald, etc.) to an ordinary brown.

Drachenrippe spell

Drachenrippe: Also known as Dragon Ribs. Makes the recipient’s torso incredibly strong and sturdy with an AC of 3 (excluding any armor they wear.)

Endless Wagons: Makes a caravan of 3 or more wheeled vehicles appear as 12 or more, depending on the mage’s level. The illusion includes sight, smell, and auditory components.

Flotilla of the Forest: This powerful spell creates up to ten simple watercraft (rafts, canoes, etc.) out of wood found in the caster’s locale. Must be cast amongst a large group of trees.

Generate Relaxing Sound: Memorizing spells can be difficult in a noisy chaotic situation. This spell creates a white noise background for the caster so they can concentrate.

Gray is Good: Nudges a character toward neutrality if they are good or evil.

Hex of the Harshlight: Makes everyone surrounding the target judge their last action or decision in the most negative light.

Increase Bystanders spell

Increase Bystanders: Attracts passersby to an event taking place on the street, like an accident, performance, speech, or crime.

Lucent Horizen: Always the caster to know exactly what is on the horizon at the limits of sight, even if it’s hazy or unclear.

Mental Providence: Makes the recipient feel they have special protection of the gods (but they really don’t.) Can result in either brave or foolhardy behavior.

Multiply Friendship: When the caster makes a new friend, this spell makes the friends of that beings friends of the caster as well.

The neku-neku spell is always a hit at costume balls

Neku-neku: Cantrip that creates the illusion of cat ears on a humanoid’s head.

Somber Skeleton: This spell is used to protect the dead (but NOT undead.) Anyone who sees the remains will become very quiet and respectful and walk on by leaving them alone.

Stealthy Meal: Lets the caster eat quickly and without notice from others.

Tenacious Tale: When cast on a work of fiction, this ensures the reader will remember the story in detail for up to six months.

Ungrateful Hero: Causes a high-level character to whine “I just want to be normal like everyone else” and reject their hard-earned abilities.

Wingwrite: If a mage is in need of a pen, this spell nabs a suitable feather from the wing of any large bird that is passing by.

Wondrous Green Whispering: Lets a mage grow or heal plants by merely whispering to them.

 

Worldbuilding Wednesday 12/24/25: Let’s Talk About Santa’s Reindeer Team (Part 2)

Oz author L. Frank Baum

Clement Moore’s version of Santa’s reindeer team was not the only one. Children’s author L. Frank Baum, known for his Oz series, offered a competing version: A team of ten (!) named Flossie and Glossie, Racer and Pacer, Reckless and Speckless, Fearless and Peerless, and Ready and Steady. The names used a rhyming, alliterative style similar to Moore’s, reflecting the salient characteristics of their owners. They were featured in Baum’s  imaginative Santa Claus biography, The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus, in which Baum states Santa was a foundling who was raised by a wood nymph. But in the end it was  Moore’s version that stuck in public consciousness, not Baum’s.

The book is in public domain and you can read it here on Gutenberg.com, along with a short story, “The Kidnapping of Santa Claus.” Look up the covers of the latter (it’s freely printed, as it’s also in public domain) and you’ll find Santa in a number of lurid bondage situations.

Over the years other reindeer have been added to the mix if not to the team.

The 1964 Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer added Rudolph, of course, but also a young deer called Fireball who is his rival and a female reindeer, Clarice, who served as a love interest. (Clarice had a mother who was a character, but she wasn’t named.) There’s a scene in which Rudolph and Fireball are training to make Santa’s team that year, which implies that the team changes composition every Christmas; Moore’s lineup was but one of many. It’s an interesting idea that isn’t carried further. Santa, of course, is immortal, but since the reindeer couple off and have offspring, they are not, and when a team member can’t make the cut anymore, he is replaced.

(I say “he” because only male reindeer make up the team. Which may have been par for the course for 1964 sexual norms, but also shows the zoological ignorance of the writer(s) — not only male reindeer have horns, females can sport them as well, depending on the reindeer subspecies. So there’s no reason half the team, or all of it, couldn’t be female.)

Another version of Rudolph appeared in 1998. The story was similar in that he is mocked for his nose and runs away, but otherwise the story goes in a different direction. In this one the rival is Arrow and the love interest, Zoey. Another female deer is named Mitzi. Again the team are all male.

If we run with reindeer naming conventions from the Rudolph universe, male deer are given bold, active, masculine names, and females, human female ones. That Rudolph breaks the mold for a male reindeer name is a head-scratcher and adds to his rather sissified status. (Robert L. May, Rudolph’s creator, considered naming him the more macho-sounding Rollo.)

Other reindeer from modern media are Bobtail, Thrasher, and, of course, Olive the Other Reindeer.

Since it’s fair to say Santa’s reindeer are all domesticated reindeer, another way they might be named is by location. Native herders still live in Russia, northern Canada, Finland, Sweden, Norway, and Alaska, and it’s from these places I randomgenned the names below. (The Inuit ones are real, though!)

 

Some Names for Santa’s Reindeer

Finnish

Arukko

Esski

Kalfamarska

Markki

Matopu

Meevar

Moonjoika

Siivo

Smuls

Taika

Toomar

Tunomo

Ursi

 Russian

Byez

Bysho

Fyustrov

Gertev

Khyuv

Kyatna

Merva

Sedansk

Tetsla

Tyok

Yaril

Yullerina

Zinya

 Sami *

Andija

Birki

Caija

Gaivvas

Imba

Julla

Junkil

Milot

Mures

Olen

Saibi

Sejo

Valter

 Inuit

Chulyin

Desna

Iqniq

Kassuq

Nauja

Nirliq

Olikpok

Qannik

Sesi

Sirmiq

Sos

Suka

Tapeesa

* Sami are the ethnic reindeer herders of Scandinavia.

This picture shows a herder and some typical domestic reindeer. Notice how small they are compared to elk and moose! This gives added weight to the line in Clement Moore’s poem: “And what to my wondering eyes then appeared, but a miniature sleigh and eight tiny reindeer…”

Robot Reindeer

Since I’ve been posting about reindeer, let’s see Santa’s flesh and blood creatures changed into sleek, tireless robot servants. It makes sense that Santa would eventually move in this direction. Such a compassionate soul as he would want to avoid stress and strain on the mortal creatures. They would be semi-retired and serve only as an honor guard for special occasions. The majority of the Christmas Eve work would be done by the robots.

A convoy of tiny autonomous vehicles delivery food and gifts during Christmas.

Artwork by The Dodomiter

A lone reindeer treads a boreal landscape.

Artwork by CynicalTopHat

Another reindeer strikes a pose.

3D model by Lixinjing

Here’s an interesting one. I assume the artist is Chinese, which makes sense as the animal resembles a chunky mythical Quilin rather than a reindeer.

Boston Dynamics, the manufacturer of the robot dog Spot, decked out their creations in reindeer garb one Christmas and had them pull a sleigh.

AI image generators offer lots of robot reindeer, and if I may gripe I like crediting actual artists rather than simply “AI.” I’m not sure if this is AI though. But it’s cool. (When I was growing up such images were tediously generated by airbrush by a human hand.)

A reindeer as a military drone, by artist Daniel Beaulieu.

Worldbuilding Wednesday 12/17/25: Let’s Talk About Santa’s Reindeer Team (Part 1)

A suspiciously skinny, peeved Santa meets with his elves and reindeer team, from the 1964 Rankin-Bass special

In my original plans for this post I wanted to generate some names for new members of Santa’s flying reindeer team, but instead I went down a rabbit hole of Christmas canon.

For example, much of our (meaning American) ideas about Santa Claus came from poet Clement Moore’s work “A Visit from St. Nicholas” which was published in 1823 in The Sentinel, a newspaper based in Troy, NY. This was an age in which printed media was more regional and publishers had more freedom to do what they wanted. The papers then were not strictly for news and often published fiction as well, functioning in the same way magazines would later. They were also less picky about things like authorship and copyright. A friend of Moore’s had sent the poem to them and apparently they printed it without Moore’s permission or even paying him. In the following decades it was widely circulated, and reprinted, throughout the country, again without Moore’s permission or even his byline. But apparently that was OK with him… he was a professor and didn’t want to be associated with the plebian verses, which he had written originally for his own children. You can read more about the original poem, and its controversy, here. 

In the poem Moore posits a team of eight reindeer for Santa, in vaguely alliterative-sounding pairs that make for effective rhyming, especially later when the 1949 Christmas tune Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer was composed by Johnny Marks and released in a gentle, genial version by cowboy star Gene Autry.  It was that song that cemented the eight … er, nine… deer into the American consciousness. (Despite what some people say, the song was not inspired by a red-nosed drunk named Rudy, at least from what I’ve found.)

Rudolph, of course, was conceived earlier, in 1939, by retail whiz Robert L. May for Montgomery Ward, which wanted an original Christmas story for a booklet they planned to give away to customers. (Fun fact: he was songwriter Johnny Marks’ brother-in-law.) Some sites say Rudolph was written for an advertising campaign, but the truth was, it was more of a promotional one and a cheaper alternative than buying new books from publishers, which is what they had been doing on previous Christmases. So another myth busted.

Back to the original team. I couldn’t find any information about why Clement Moore named the reindeer as he did. But some creative minds have attempted to hang some personalities onto them according to their names.

Dasher: Athletic and quick out of the gate

Dancer: Graceful

Prancer: Proud and showy

Vixen: Cunning and quick like a little fox

Comet: Fast and dramatic

Cupid: Loving and full of joy

Donner: Thunder, loud

Blitzen: Lightning, like a flash

In the 1828 Moore poem, the last two were Dunder and Blixem, which were Dutch words for thunder and lightning. They were changed to Donder and Blitzen in a revised 1844 version, reflecting the German spellings, and Donder later still to Donner which is the more modern German spelling. Not sure why Moore made the jump from Dutch to German.

A curious exclusion was the reindeer’s gender. As a child I always assumed they were male-female pairs: Dasher (M) and Dancer (F); Prancer (M) and Vixen (F); Comet (M) and Cupid (F); Donner (M) and Blitzen (F). That’s just the way it was in the world: male and female, and the female-sounding names were obviously so, especially Vixen, which is a female fox, as a nanny is a female goat. But others didn’t think so. The reindeer team of the 1964 Rankin-Bass Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer is all male, even the effete Dancer and Cupid. Even in more recent movies, like a 1998 Rudolph movie, present them as all male, even Vixen, which is just… awkward.

But… did you another writer created his own Santa reindeer team?

Worldbuilding Wednesday 12/10/25: Estonian Names

Surreal illustration by Estonian artist Jaan Tammsaar

Estonia is one of those countries that, when I was growing up, wasn’t paid much attention to and wasn’t in the news a lot. Until 1991 it was part of the Soviet Block, but what it was like, I couldn’t tell you. In this sense it was similar to a backwater country on a fantasy map, one that has no geographic detail, and which is mentioned in the text only slightly. Like, say, Far Harad in The Lord of the Rings. What’s in Far Harad? Who rules it? What are its geographic features, its cities, its animal life? Tolkien never told us, in the trilogy at least.

Estonia (now The Republic of Estonian) had the ill fortune to be ruled by foreign powers for much of its existence, only emerging as its own nation in the 1990s. It’s a country with both Finnish and Baltic heritage and this Finnish side is reflected in its language and the randomgenned names below, which aren’t real yet incorporate the same phonemes. Among other interesting tidbits, it was the last European nation to be predominantly pagan and was Christianized only in the 12th century! If this isn’t badass enough, in 1989 two million people formed a human chain spanning Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania to demonstrates these countries’ unity in seeking independence from the then-USSR.

 

Estonian Names

Female

Ameise

Eskella

Geelise

Haäla

Hepi

Ineje

Meppi

Neevi

Nomi

Oluika

Osuta

Rooni

Ruika

Rullissa

Soosa

Taanje

Töpi

Tügke

Uka

 Male

Ekas

Enaake

Güdjic

Jaake

Joise

Joomas

Jövi

Kükju

Kudsi

Lovjo

Mihkvar

Okvar

Piirmas

Raägi

Rivent

Saament

Semas

Ulas

Vöglis

Below, an interesting map showing the Estonian names for the rest of Europe.

Drop and Roll

The beast-riding post made me think of this wonderful cartoon, which has been around for at least 25 years and may have been inspired by one of the Jurassic Park movies.

 

Any info on the original creator?

Worldbuilding Wednesday 11/26/25: Monstrous Mounts

Dino Riders, by Sad Irfan

Haven’t been posting much on this blog lately because I’ve been working on a novel… one aspect of which I will share here.

Figuring strongly in the novel is a decadent nation where magic-using warriors ride dragons into battle. Dragons are, in fact, bred by the island’s royal family for that purpose. So it stands that these mounts must have names by which they are referred, and that those names have a similar style so those in military know they are dragons and not, say, horses or slaves. Yet the names must also be individually distinctive since every dragon is different in appearance and  temperament, so that when a wing captain says to an underling “Prepare Warbru for riding” the underling knows who Warbru is and how he must be handled.

So I came up with a two-syllable system of limited vowels and sharp-sounding distinctive consonants, easily shouted and easily understood. The names are assigned to the dragons at birth, likely in a random fashion.

That system could work similarly for other scenarios in which monstrous mounts (think gryphons, pterosaurs, t-rexes, etc.) are bred and used for battle. (A review of one fantasy book that used the concept, The Dinosaur Lords, is here.)

This list gives an idea of it. I used vowel sounds and consonants based on the Czech language but you can just as easily substitute your own.

 

 

Names for Monster Mounts

Aadni

Ansa

Babsa

Borszi

Czaatni

Czorchi

Ebha

Essla

Hishzwa

Hwedna

Idna

Mamra

Oshzu

 Raaghi

Rozhro

Satza

Sirma

Tarctza

Totzu

Tozha

Tuctzi

Turra

Ucra

Warbru

Worta

Zwimdza