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Dragon-Warrior.com: Bestiary of Modern Fantasy

Buy the Bestiary of Modern Fantasy.
Read an excerpt.
Kingdon of Alefgard - Review

RPGFan - Review

Bestiary of Modern Fantasy Description

This ebook is a short encyclopedia about the origins and modern usage of monsters and other characters of fantasy from mythology to the history of modern fantasy. To look at the modern usage of characters of modern fantasy key popular works including Lord of the Rings, Dungeons and Dragons, and Dragon Quest are considered.

Lord of the Rings (1954) is a novel series by J.R.R. Tolkien that for a large part created the modern view of fantasy. Lord of the Rings contains its own mythology created by the author. It is this fantasy world that most modern fantasy is based on.

Dungeons and Dragons (released in the late 1970's) by TSR was the original role-playing game (RPG) and has highly influenced the view of fantasy characters in other role-playing games (usually now as video games). Dungeons and Dragons was loosely based on the Lord of the Rings.

Dragon Quest was released in 1986 by Enix. Dragon Quest is an RPG video game series in Japan that has changed the Japanese culture and their view of fantasy. The word in Dragon Quest for heal was "hoimi." This was a nonsense word, but because of the popularity of Dragon Quest it was added to the Japanese dictionary. When Dragon Quest 3 was released, it was on a weekday. Children skipped school and adults skipped work to buy it. It caused so many problems that Japan made it illegal to sell a Dragon Quest game on any day other than Sunday or a holiday. Some Dragon Quest games have been released as Dragon Warrior in the US for the Nintendo Entertainment System, Game Boy, and Playstation. Dragon Quest is mostly based on Dungeons and Dragons, but also contains many of its own original characteristics and it is influenced by eastern culture.

To create this ebook I used several sources from websites, books, and my own experience with fantasy.

The Monsters and characters included in the Bestiary of Modern Fantasy are chimeras, demons, dragons, dragon kings, drakes, drolls (not troll misspelled), ghosts, golems, knights, magicians, poltergeists, giant scorpions, shadows, skeletons, slimes, specters, warlocks, werewolves, wizards, wraiths, and wyverns.

Review by Woodus (webmaster of the Dragon's Den)

James Gray has written his own E-book about many of the common monsters in today's fantasy realms and explained the origins of them and their uses in history, both in religion and game lore like Dungeons and Dragons and Dragon Quest.

It is a very interesting read and I would recommend it if you are at all interested in monster mythology I would take a look at it.

He covers a wide selection of modern monsters, like slimes, werewolves, dragons, ghosts, magicians and many more.

James has an introduction at http://dragon-warrior.com/mythology.html and the E-book can be purchased at Firstprint.com for only $3.