Worldbuilding Wednesday 1/1/25: Best of Twittersnips 2024 (Magic Items)

The Helm of Silver Pride enables elderly warriors to fight as well as they did in their youth.

My favorite Twittersnip magic items of the year 2024, chosen from my Twitter feed.

 

2024 Magic Items (Best of)

Athena’s Purification Tonic: Drinkers receive wisdom and strength (+2 each) like that of the Greek goddess. Lasts for a few hours. Physical components are an owl feather and gorgon blood.

Beetle slippers are much prized by burglars

Beetle Slippers: Made of wool with glass beadwork of colorful insects, these have soft leather soles let the wearer walk up walls and on ceilings like a beetle does.

Bookmark of Bonding: Very annoying cursed item that glues together whatever two pages it is placed between. The bookmark can be slid out but the pages are bonded together and lost forever.

Concentration of Arachnia: This dark, swirling potion attracts spiders of all kinds wherever it is sprinkled.

Dagger of The Dauntless: A thief’s weapon that gives them an astounding +5 on courage while “on the job.”

Eyepatch of the Osprey

Eyepatch of the Osprey: Commonly used by one-eyed pirate captains. It gives their remaining eye the visual acuity of a raptor’s.

Flute of Cerberus: This Greek-themed musical instrument is three flutes in one, played by a common mouthpiece. It is used to charm and command any sort of canine.  It’s carved from a solid piece of obsidian.

Helm Of Silver Pride: This +1 helm allows a character of old age (65+) to fight as well as they did at age 25.

Horn of Princely Scoffing: The owner of this golden drinking horn will resist every attempt to impress them, responding with snobbish quips. Which can be either good or bad depending on the circumstances.

Lycun’s Tea of Growth: Spiritual growth, not physical. Drink the magic tea and the completion of your next adventure has a 50% chance of raising your Wisdom score.

Morsha’s Manual of Freezing: Contains all the useful ways a freezing spell can be utilized, from preserving food to fighting deities. (The owner must already know the spell to use the book.)

Oily Witch Cloth: Low level female mages use this lightly magicked material to wrap perishable items for shipment or preservation. The items will last up to 5x longer, depending on the level of the witch.

Olvin’s Guide to Vampiric Weddings: Love can strike even the Undead. This book contains helpful magic associated with marriages for these creatures along with fashion, reception, and honeymoon ideas.

Pitcher of the Halfling

Pitcher of the Halfling: Serves up to six halfling-sized portions of the kinds of beverages halflings like to drink. Recharges within 24 hours.

Plough of the Serpent: Not only furrows a field but attracts all kinds of snakes to it that will eat small vermin or poison larger invading creatures, at the owner’s choice. The serpents will never harm the wielder of the device.

Ring of Olfactory Defense: Protects the wearer from odor attacks, like from a giant skunk or siren pheromones.

Ring of Sculpting Vegetation: Made of gold and set with small emeralds. Lets the wearer create topiaries, clear paths through brush and forest, and clean up neglected gardens. (Does not work on plant monsters.)

Roc Bone Shard, Fossilized: Very rare and valuable, used as a component in flight spells where the target would normally be too large and heavy to fly.

Sagisward’s Resolute Journal: Tasks or goals written in this book have an additional 25% chance of coming to fruition when all seems hopeless. Multiple goals can be written, but as soon as one of them is completed, the book disappears.

Staff of Pollution: Has only one power but it does it well. When pointed at an area or body of water, the staff befouls it so badly that beings will flee.

Sword of Somersaulting: Only a +1 weapon, but when the owner holds it they are capable of performing acrobatic flips and tumbles every other round to avoid blows.

The Tome of Dark Places is perfect for witches

Tome of Dark Places: List of innately evil areas where dark magic spells can be crafted with ease – 25% less time and components, and 25% greater chance of success.

Unicorn Honey: Magical and very rare, made from the flowers of a plant fertilized by unicorn dung. A vital component of many healing and anti-poison spells.

The Fall of Númenor [Reading Challenge 2024]

The Fall of Númenor

by J. R. R. Tolkien, ed. by Brian Sibley
William Morrow, 2022
[ #23  Pixies and Dryads and Elves, oh my! : A high fantasy ]

I am backposting this review, as I finished the book only a few days before the end of 2024.

Let’s hope 2025 is a little better, eh?

To begin with, let me say I’d never read anything before of the LOTR background  material — that is, The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, etc. I’d assumed it was all way too dry, going by the few glimpses I had over the years. And I do remember when The Silmarillion was first published, way back in 1977. The seismic waves it caused in fantasy fandom led to more and more Tolkien ephemera being released over the years, with Christopher Tolkien acting as father’s curator. But I was never interested enough to dive into it.

However, when the first season of The Rings of Power was released on Netflix, (which I reviewed here) I was happy enough with it to buy The Fall of Númenor, which was released, perhaps, to coincide with and take a ride on the hoopla. However I still found it a little intimidating and wasn’t inspired to crack it open until 2024.

I was pleasantly surprised at how entertaining and readable it was. Like The Silmarillian, The Fall of Númenor is a compilation of material from Tolkien’s copious background writings, the worldbuilding you could say, arranged to show the origin and the end of his equivalent of Atlantis. For me, it enriched and added to the trilogy itself.

Continue reading

World’s Oldest Ugly Christmas Sweater

Made in 1652 of felted wool and on display at the National Museum of Folklore in Gothenburg, Sweden.

NOT. (It’s AI.)

The next oldest is this child’s garment from 1740 which is in possession of the New York State Historical Society. NOT.

Worldbuilding Wednesday 12/25/24: Ghosts of Christmas Past

A blast from the past! Past years, that is, of random Christmas names for songs, scents, foods, and characters.

 

Randomgen Christmas names from years past

Species of Santa

German Christmas Cookies

Christmas Traditions Around the World

Christmas Cocktails

The Best of Twittersnips (Christmas)

Christmas Songs

Christmas Characters

Christmas Scents

Santa’s Elves

Santa’s Bad Elves

Angels

 

Passing Obsessions 12-24

The three out-of-this-world Wise Men from the Canadian TV special A Cosmic Christmas, 1977. Love that design!

This oddball Christmas special from the 1980s.

Many more oddball, lost, and forgotten Christmas specials from decades past.

All you ever wanted to know about old Christmas tree lights.

Let’s start drooling over the explosion of Betelgeuse when the supernova comes. It might be a new Star of Bethlehem!

Worldbuilding Wednesday 12/4/24: Tolkien’s Wizards

Olatos the Red, also known as “The Bean Counter.”
Lore states he was the administrator who kept all the other Wizards in line.

Since I just finished watching The Rings of Power on Amazon, and am also reading Tolkien’s compilation The Fall of Numenor, I’ve a mind to talk about Tolkien’s Wizards.

First off, there weren’t that many of them. There are only three as characters in the main trilogy: Gandalf the Grey, Saruman the White, and Radagast the Brown. In the appendices two Blue Wizards are mentioned who have gone into the far east of Middle Earth, but Tolkien explicitly states their deeds there are not known. In the Rings of Power series, which I’ll review later, it’s implied the Wizard of the Rhunic wastelands could be one. If so, it’s an interesting  theory.

Personally, I don’t think the Wizards would be corrupted so easily. They were not human beings but Maiar, a kind of demigod who worked in conjunction with Tolkien’s pantheon of greater gods. Of course, Morgoth went bad and stole the Silmaril, so who knows.

In Tolkien’s ephemera the Blue Wizards are given names: Pallando and Alatar. They, along with the other Wizards, are known also by other names in the languages Tolkien created. For this post though I’m using only the common or vernacular ones.

 

The Forgotten Wizards of Middle Earth

Albossar

Atnerom

Dharmram the Green

Esbror the Maiar

Hilotho

Ingrangtar

Malarest

Mudamther

 Olatos the Red

Osgreth

Pathendi

Rolamsar

Sardash the Violet

Tebrador

Unéran the Gold

Vesnandru

 

AI Art Adventures: Using –sref for a Unique Style

As a Midjourney beginner trying to generate pictures with a certain “look” one of the most useful stylistic tricks is the –sref function. The reference pic can’t be any old image though. The more distinct and stylized it is, the better. The simpler and clearer it is, the better. This is where real art education has value for the user, and a very broad schooling in graphic design.

In my post on creating imaginary Velazquez paintings I touched on this, as well as in my beginning post of the series, Fiddler on the Ref. In that latter I used one image to riff on a series of six different subjects. In this post I’m going to hone in on choosing and altering a suitable style reference image.

As an example I’ll use this one.

It was most likely a throwaway illustration from the 1950s or early 1960s, created and printed in haste. The artist hadn’t bothered to refine it. But that’s what gives it is charm, IMO. It’s cheap and looks cheap. It’s also of a medium that is not being used today — the quick two-color printing press job, one of the two colors being that sickly Pthalo green. Using that image, I will generate a series of pics that looks like they came from the interior pages of one of those cheap, pulpy hardback books that used to be sold at mass market stores in 1960. The ones that are yellowing today because of all the wood pulp they used.

But my pic has that pesky lettering in it, so I’ll just Photoshop it away.

Continue reading

Two by Tolkien — Foreign Editions of The Hobbit

I recently came across two foreign editions of The Hobbit  I haven’t seen before.

First, The Little Gnome.

Cover art by Antonio Quadros

I guess the translator didn’t think the made-up word “hobbit” was understandable to Portuguese audiences?

That said, I like the cover design. It’s whimsical if misleading — hobbits had nothing to do with mushrooms, except for eating them — but it does correctly show the hairy feet, pipe-smoking, and curly hair. The overall design reminds me of the 1960s graphic artist Saul Bass.

This French edition, in contrast, shows a very grown-up looking Bilbo, a hirsute Gallic one by his hairy feet and movie-star face with its Brylcreem ‘do. I have the feeling that if he took his striped shirt off, he’d reveal a very hairy chest as well. He squats before his hobbit hole which is undersized for his height while Gandalf gives him, or perhaps that dragon, some side-eye. Gandalf too is different from the usual depiction. His pointed hat has a truncated top and his robe is more of a  cape worn over boots and trousers.  His staff appears as a walking stick.

Smaug and Rivertown are depicted accurately as in the book.

If you’re interested, here’s another French edition here and a German one.

Dragonfeast

H A P P Y    T H A N K S G I V I N G

 

Worldbuilding Wednesday 11/27/24: Haughty, Horrible, and Hilarious Hs

H, to me, is a letter with an old-fashioned vibe similar to E — a Victorian feel, honorable as well as haughty, but with touch of horror, like Charles Addams’ old New Yorker series of Addams family cartoons, the creepy family of which obviously came from old money. But H can also be hip and high, as well as hilarious and hefty. H can also have a happy, comforting feel: house, home, happiness.

Names beginning with H, however, tend to be fusty, archaic. Harold, Hortense, Herman, Hilary, Hazel, Henry, Hayley, Hilda, Helga — have Germanic or Medieval English connotations. Needless to say, many are currently back in the style. Some parents are intent on their kids sticking out.

Below, some H character names. As with the rest of this series, these are for fantasy..

 

Character names beginning with H

Male

Habtur

Hanbolt

Halnant

Hanyas

Harach

Hardua

Hejiah

Hirgam

Hithras

Hotham

Hverus

Hyden

 Female

Halverina

Hamraia

Hanafle

Harysne

Hassla

Hazyra

Hesper

Hilfleida

Hiltra

Hilvina

Hrysha

Hylekka

 Surnames

Haach

Hallanocht

Hangemoon

Hasloom

Hatchleest

Hauphilter

Heldenzar

Hessfields

Hogenbraise

Houndwhess

Huskaskype

Husulram