Posted on March 16, 2018, 09:53:25 PM by Jubal
The Beauty of RSS
The Beauty of RSS
By Jubal
By Jubal
The RSS logo - look for this to find feeds!
...or at least, that's how it's marketed. There's a lot of downside to the sort of hyper-targeting that goes on nowadays, especially in that it ultimately means you have. Facebook is the most egregious example of this: which posts appear on your news feed is determined far more by what Facebook thinks is popular than what you think you want to see, making it extremely difficult to get updates from people who Facebook doesn't think you want to see news from. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this latter category is especially populated by smaller content creators, businesses, and hobbyists, who can't afford the increasingly exorbitant sums needed to pay to break through Facebook's content algorithms and build a large audience. Twitter operates a similar model, allowing promoted tweets to stay in view as others shoot down the timeline at a rate of knots. Facebook is, despite some signs that its market share may arguably be dropping, still extremely dominant in how people use the internet, both in how they discover content and how they get updates on it. In other words, if your Facebook page gets a new user, that's not necessarily a promise of future engagement: to access all of the users who've "liked" your page, nowadays, you now often actually need to pay to boost your posts in order to do so.
To put it in starker terms, Facebook is actively using the fact it controls the main platform for content finding and social updates to choke off creators who aren't prepared to pay them. Of course, they're a business, and that's their decision - but if you want smaller creators to survive, or if you just want to make sure you're actually seeing the content you want to see, it's time to start thinking harder about how you get updates.
RSS, or Rich Site Summary, is one possible answer. RSS is, essentially, a way for websites to create easy feeds for content in a format that can then be picked up by aggregators. It's essentially a standard XML sheet format that can be updated by the site, published to a known URL, and then picked up by aggregated "feeders" which can then show people the content and notify them when it's updated Created in the late 1990s, it was a major part of internet ecosystems through the mid-2000s until social media really started taking over people's content feeding habits.
So why go back to it? For one thing - no algorithms. RSS will just list the sites you add to it, and tell you when one of them updates, it's as simple as that. No more rolling a d20 to see if you're one of the lucky 10% who gets told what your favourite comic artist has actually published this week. These days, RSS feeders will sit as a little taskbar icon at the top of your web browser - you can then click on it, scroll down your list of feeds, and see what's new. I guess it's possible this could get difficult if you were trying to syndicate a really large amount of content this way, but I tend to find that I can leave off sites I check super regularly anyway and that even the fairly sizeable amount of content I look at doesn't pose a problem. For content from sites where I really need to get those updates, RSS is especially good: I won't run the risk of missing something like I would with a social media follow. It also ensures I can better support and read stuff from smaller creators, most of whom will have RSS running for their blogs or comics as it's easy to set up the feed. Even better, I don't need to give anyone my email address like for a mail newsletter - I just pick up the RSS newsletter via my reader, without risking it disappearing into the dark abyss of my inbox or cluttering things there up at the wrong time.
I mainly use the Firefox add-on Brief as my main feed reader, and I'd really recommend it. I've also got the free version of Feeder running on my chrome browser, which has a few annoying features telling me to upgrade to the non-free version but is otherwise very good. Other options for different browsers or app systems include Feedly, Panda, and Reeder. It's worth having a hunt around to find what's good for you; another advantage of RSS systems is that there's genuine diversity and choice in what's out there, and the standard XML format is open for all sorts of readers and aggregators to parse it. Once you have a reader, all you need to do is go to the URL of a feed, and your browsers/readers will offer you the option to subscribe to it. That's it!
So there you have it - the beauty of RSS. I don't think it's the only solution or part of building a more open internet, but I think it's a very good first step and I'd really encourage people to use it especially to support smaller content creators. If you liked this article, go get a reader and get finding sites to subscribe to (look for the RSS logo like the one above). And of course, make sure you add the Exilian newsfeed to get more like this in future!
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Posted on March 02, 2018, 10:54:20 PM by Jubal
The Bones of Earth 3: Worlds In Space
The Bones of Earth 3: Worlds In Space
By Jubal
By Jubal
So, having done The Bones of Earth 2 on more unusual fantasy world ideas, here are some thoughts on some sci-fi world building – how we can take into account the conditions in which planets form and their physical characteristics emerge, and some hints on how that might translate into world-building and the basis of different settings. One of the major issues with sci-fi is that we frequently have to work on an inter planetary scale, such that it's often hard to do more for planets than "this one's an ice planet" or "this one has trees", whereas of course planets should have a wide variety of different biomes. Whilst the sheer scale makes it hard to envision entire planets, thinking about how they work physically may be a helpful place to start. So without further ado...
Diameter and density
There are two things these affect; firstly, the planet's size, and secondly its surface pressure. Size is fairly self-explanatory – a planet with a larger area has more surface on which to fit continents, etc. Pressure is more complex but worth considering for sci-fi settings in particular: it relates quite heavily to density. If you, for example, had a planet which was the same diameter as earth but more dense, then the surface gravity would be higher. There's also the question of atmospheric density as well; a dense atmosphere will mean more pressure at surface level. This, in turn, affects how evolution might take its course at the planet's surface. A high pressure world will make it harder for plants to grow tall and animals to move, likely leading to stockier and more muscular forms of life, and vice versa. It also affects what sort of structures can be supported – exoskeletons, for example, have something of a size limit on earth, because the weight of the external plates becomes too great above a certain point. In a world with lower gravity, insectoid creatures could be much larger as a result of the lower pressure & gravity.
Volcanicity
Venus is an incredibly volcanic planet; having suffered from a form of runaway global warming as a result aeons ago, it's pretty much a sulphurous, burningly hot hell-hole. Earth, with moderate volcanicity, is considerably more pleasant. Other planets that have no volcanicity at all will often correspondingly have no atmosphere at all, which doesn't tend to bode well for the future of life thereon. In other words, volcanoes and having a hot core to a planet are vitally important to life, but within certain levels. Life evolving on a high-volcanicity planet, or whose planet somehow became more volcanic, might have need to adapt to higher levels of toxic gases and extreme heat. The reverse situation, perhaps more likely, might be if a planet with little life was "dying" as a result of its volcanoes steadily going dormant and insufficient carbon dioxide being pumped out to replace losses. Volcanoes of course also shape the landscape – be that shield volcano mountains, volcanic plains, or simply the fact that volcanic ash is rich in nutrients and tends to lead to areas of very fertile soil in the locality.Orbit
Orbit affects solar radiation levels; too close to a sun and the planet is burnt to a crisp, too far out and it is frozen solid. However, how far out that is depends on the size and heat of the star; it's also not always the case that an inhabited body will primarily orbit a star. Gas giant planets have large moons which could equally be the basis for space colonies if not life itself. Stars need not necessarily be sun-like, either, and systems with two suns certainly exist – though in a system with a much larger or much smaller star, or a binary star system, the whole planetary system could end up rather more volatile; only a third of binary star systems have planets, whereas the majority of sun-like stars have some.
Spin
Warmth and radiation levels are also affected in terms of how different parts of a planet experience them by spin. Spin is integral to planets forming – the disk of particles from which planets form is only thrown out by their star spinning in the first place, and that spin then leads to any eventual planets still having their own spin as well. A planet that spins fast will have shorter days, a planet that spins slower will have longer ones. But that's not all: a planet doesn't actually necessarily spin on exactly the same plane as the one in which it orbits its sun, and the tilt is what causes seasons – the bigger the tilt, the sharper the seasonal effects. One final thing to think about is planets that don't spin, or rather don't appear to – these "tidally locked" bodies often end up with one side constantly facing their star (an effect we can see in our own moon, one side of which is never visible from earth). This could easily lead to extreme differences of climate on a planet, with a thin "habitable" zone at the edges, and an inhospitable a hot face and cold face. Any inhabitants might either need to stay in the habitable zone, or have some pretty serious adaptations to allow them to venture into the extreme regions of their world.And there you have it! I hope this was useful, and helps you build some worlds where your characters, players, or whoever can develop in a more natural-feeling way based on the properties of the little ball of rock they're clinging to as it passes through space. Sometime in the next few weeks I'll hopefully get to finishing The Bones of Earth IV, so stay tuned for that - in the next article in this series, I'll look at different varieties and styles of maps commonly used in SFF fiction and hopefully help you get closer to drawing your own.
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Posted on February 23, 2018, 11:57:15 PM by Jubal
An Unexpected Bestiary
An Unexpected Bestiary
By Jubal
By Jubal
Animals, and our relationship with them, are always an intrinsic element of fiction or game design. We do sometimes, however, naturally tend to stick to what we know. In SFF, hippogriffs are probably more common than, say, armadilloes, partly because hippogriffs are really cool but also because we don't have concepts for what other real species are and how to fit them into a creative archetype. I'm going to do a bit of work to rectify that here, with this unexpected bestiary - behold, seven interesting animals and how you might use them in writing and design!
Capybara
Let's talk about capybaras. They're often seen as a bit of a joke animal, if they ever come up in popular culture - they're basically giant guinea-pigs, some people might say, and those people would be more or less right. But it's worth thinking about them beyond that - not least in that they're really pretty sizeable. They're a good four feet long, live in herds, are at home on land or in water, and are pretty hefty - a large, barrel-chested capybara could easily weigh more than a smallish human. To my mind, they represent a whole array of interest in terms of being an alternate large land animal to the usual run of pigs, sheep, horses, etc.
Most of the interesting literary uses for the capybara I think involve swapping them (potentially further up-sized) into roles more commonly done by other creatures in human society. That could simply be as a farmed herd animal, but it could certainly also be as a cart-pulling creature or even a mount. I can somehow see dwarfs riding capybaras - their somewhat stoic outlooks upon life would seem to coincide nicely. I can definitely see the idea of capybaras, which are very heavily built, as working animals though, and they'd definitely present an interesting and clear "we're doing something different here" when it's a bunch of cross-looking giant rodents rather than carthorses lugging the folded-up trebuchet toward the enemy castle.
Emu
Not many species have taken on a modern human army and fairly clearly won. Emus are on that list. Whilst the Emu War has been covered better than I can here, I think emus are really worth looking at and thinking about from a writing perspective. For one thing, they're simply impressive and somewhat dangerous animals - they've got a hell of a kick, with sharp talons, they're fairly intelligent for birds, and can be over 6 feet tall. In a pre-modern society where people were shorter on average, that's a pretty intimidating creature to say the least, especially in large numbers.
Emus, and flightless birds generally, are sometimes re-envisioned as mounts in modern fiction (hence the chocobo), but I think there might be more interesting uses for them that double down on their independence, intelligence and/or dangerous nature. If you're a GM seeking an early-game quest for your adventuring party, trying to nest-hunt from some emus (and given that emus have huge, beautiful green eggs, one can imagine why you would) is the sort of thing that players may find sounds a good deal until they have a flock of birds half a foot taller than they are scratching into their faces. You could even go the whole hog and really make them properly semi-intelligent, perhaps set as guardians of some sort - there's a certain majesty to a bird that size that would allow for some nice intimidation tactics if a line of them suddenly appeared working in obvious formation to ward your characters/players away from an abandoned temple or stone circle or sacred rock or whatever.
Markhor
Markhors are basically what happens when you try to imagine the final Pokemon evolution of a goat. They're the national animal of Pakistan, and are mostly found in mountainous regions of central Asia. They're fairly imaginative in what they consider food - they are goats after all - but tend to graze from trees, bushes or ground-plants in the mountains. In the colonial era they were highly prized as animals to shoot, for obvious reasons considering the resulting trophy (and also thanks to their highly alert nature and mountainous homes, which meant they provided a genuine challenge). The name literally means "snake-eater", perhaps from an apocryphal explanation of how they got their giant curling horns - and yes, this makes them even cooler than they look to start with.
I think there are tons of ways you can and should use the markhor in writing and fantasy settings. They are absolutely freaking majestic, for starters, and as a mount they could work nicely for many character types - the noble wilderness leader riding up on his horse is one thing, but it adds a certain amount of punch to have him riding up on a beast that looks like it was invented for the cover of a metal album. There's a myth that markhor spit is good for treating snakebite, which could also easily be woven into a tale somehow. All in all, they're just an animal that is somehow powerful and evocative simply from its looks, and that shouldn't be passed up so much by writers.
Marbled Polecat
The Marbled Polecat is a small ferret-like creature native to the near east. As you can probably see from the picture, it's extremely distinctive, with a dappled golden back and a clearly defined set of black and white facial markings. They dig burrows and live in semi-arid areas where they eat mice, ground squirrels, and other such small mammals; they're fairly solitary creatures, and are more fierce than their size would necessarily suggest was wise, both to one another and to anything threatening them.
I can discuss this one in writing terms quite easily, since I have written about a marbled polecat! In my case, I created a fictional one as a wizard's familiar in the children's book I'm slowly writing, which I think is an excellent use for them in literary terms. They have a certain amount of interest beyond that of a normal polecat (and polecats are inherently at the interesting end of pets/familiars). Using a marbled polecat in this way does, I think, add a certain spark to a character - in my character's case, he's a fairly genteel sort of magician whose ownership of Fessyah the marbled polecat (or arguably her ownership of him) helps hint that there's a lot more to him than meets the eye. I just think these are such visually charming animals that they're very good for stealing the scene, wherever and whenever they turn up.
Olm
The Olm, or Proteus, is the weirder and less endearing looking cousin of the axolotl. I think that's why I like them so much - they're a classic look at what happens when evolution stays in a cave for far too long, with the lack of eyes, extreme paleness, and so on. Like many cave creatures, they look fundamentally alien to us, with adaptations for a lifestyle and setting that's very different to anything we can usually imagine. The clincher for the Olm, though, is that it has all that whilst actually also being a vertebrate with four legs and so on - many deep cave creatures are fish or invertebrates, and they look odd but they're still definitely fish, etc. For the Olm, it looks close enough to our body plan for us to read it as if anything more alien.
The number of things you could do with these in writing terms is vast. They're an alien species packed up and ready to go, if you wanted to make big sentient ones. Their strange subterranean existence could also make them sought after - they're on the list of things some arse spellbook writer will somehow make you go and swim in a cave trying to find. Fundamentally, though, I think it's how mysterious they seem that really interests me. I definitely like the idea of them being sapient, and having an agenda - not necessarily in simple terms we can understand, maybe, but with a very different outlook on the universe borne of millions of years of deep cave life.
Thor's Hero Shrew
So, I'm mostly including this because it's called THOR'S HERO SHREW, which is one of the most awesome names for a small mammal in existence. Not only that, but it thoroughly deserves it - hero shrews (there's another species, the armoured hero shrew, too) have exceptionally strong bone structures for their size - an adaptation that may be to help them worm their way into gaps in palm trees to search for grubs, but nobody's entirely sure. One of the results of this is that apocryphally at least they're strong enough that a grown man can stand on one and it can walk away unharmed.
Now, in the real world, "Thor's Hero Shrew" is a modern appellation, but I *really* want to read the story of how Thor ended up adopting a tribe of shrews or possibly somehow granting them their super-ribcages as a result of some unforeseen shenanigans. One could also further the connection in other ways, either by giving more of Thor's attributes to the shrews (can they call the thunder?) or possibly linking them to his other followers (a Viking raiding party arrives in Africa in search of Thor's sacred animal, only to find that they're rather elusive and, in fact, shrews.) Outside that, they're a useful twist on the idea of shrews being little, skittish animals - these little fluffles are very tough customers indeed.
Tragopan
Pheasants are boring, and that's a pity, because they shouldn't be. "Oh, they hunted for pheasants" is often not really seen as much of a big deal in literary terms because nowadays pheasants are common across Europe. This wasn't always the case, though: the very name "pheasant" is derived from "the bird of Phasis" - Phasis is now the port of Poti in Georgia, and was where the ancient Greeks imported pheasant meat from in large quantities as a delicacy. In fantasy terms, it's strange how little characters hunt as a pastime, considering the prevalence of hunting throughout history and folklore, and to have them hunting for anything less than a unicorn is seen as underselling things.
But what if there was a way round this, where one could find a bird with many of the same properties as a pheasant, but with brighter colouration and a cool name your readers are less likely to have heard of? Fortunately, the natural world has you covered - meet the tragopans. Mostly found in eastern Asia, the tragopans are close relatives of pheasants with amazing and striking colouration. Many of the species are now endangered, sadly, but the tragopan could certainly be a route to restore gamebirds to a more used place in fantasy writing.
That's all for this article! Let me know if you liked these and found them interesting, and I might manage some more (potentially even better researched) unexpected bestiary articles in future...!
This article is part of a series: you can also read Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and the Pangolin Special.
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Posted on February 16, 2018, 11:44:26 PM by Belchion
Vampires & Music
Vampires & Music
By Belchion
By Belchion
Vampire the Masquerade is a part of the World of Darkness, a setting for a series of Pen-&-Paper Roleplaying Games published by White Wolf where the player takes on the role of traditional horror monsters like werewolves, changelings or (most prominently) vampires. The setting more or less merged horror stories with esoterics and technophoby, strongly drawing from the cyberpunk asthetics with powerful corporations and dark cities.
In the Pen-&-Paper Roleplaying Game "Vampire: the Masquerade", one takes on the role of vampires. Most vampires belong to highly hierarchical sects called Camarilla and Sabbat. The Camarilla represents an ossifed ruling caste that subsists on favours, backroom deals, and intrigues, whereas the Sabbat represents violent political movements that attempt to overthrow the system and impose their own absolute rule.
Furthermore, all vampires belong to a clan. While players have to agree on a sect the whole group belongs to, members of different clans can and do work together. Those clans are bound by a shared clan curse and clan boon, which creates strong archetypes. By interpreting this archetype one can find ideas how to interpret vampires from this clan.
My friend Teylen recently had the idea to combine vampires and music, showing which songs fit her idea about the Clan Malkavian. I highly recommend checking her ideas, which are completely different from mine.
I decided to follow suit, albeit in a more methodical way as I lack the broad music knowledge that allowed her a more spontaneous approach. First, I defined the archetype Clan Malkav represents in my opinion, and then tried to find songs or music that fitted this theme.
Archetype
First of all, what archetype do the Malkavians represent? They are insane and they are fools, but theirs is the insanity that breaks through illusions and grants new insight. Accordingly, they are also known as seers and soothsayers. Still, they are monsters, and the Joker from Batman is as much a Malkavian as Cassandra of Troy.
The Music
Toccata e Fuga in D minor
The first piece that comes to my mind is always the Toccata e Fuga in D minor from Johann Sebastian Bach. In several beats, it sounds somewhat dissonant, and yet powerful. Furthermore, it was featured prominently in regard to several delusional film villains and, of course, some vampires.
Trout Mask Replica
Second, Trout Mask Replica by Captain Beefheart and his Magic Band. This song is famous among musicians, because the composer was completely uninhibited by any norms and traditions. He combined instruments and song without any regard to each other. And even though the album is also described as the most horrible album ever written, it still inspires musicians to this day and helps them to innovate. Just the same, a Malkavian's erratic behaviour still somehow furthers the plans of the clan as whole.
Jeanny
Falco sings in Jeanny about delusions and the escape into a dream world, from which there is no escape but death. Just like there is no escape from their clan's curse except for true death. The song is ambivalent about who is tortured by whom, just as one cannot be sure who truly controls clan Malkav.
Chain Of Fools
Aretha Franklin sings in Chain Of Fools about being bound to someone who treats her cruelly, just as Malkavians are bound to their insanity and the voices from the Malkavian Madness Network.
Cassandra
As I already mentioned Cassandra as one of the prototypical Malkavians, the song of the same name by Theatre of Tragedy fits well into this theme, given its rather macabre nature and rather depressive, yet energetic tune.
Conclusion
As ephemeral as this article might seem, it still helped me to gain a clearer picture for Clan Malkav and its role in the World of Darkness. And even if it does not have this effect on you, dear reader, I hope it will at least acquaints you with music you would otherwise not have listened to!
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Posted on February 09, 2018, 11:40:34 PM by Jubal
Realms of Myth: Somalia
Realms of Myth: Somalia
By Jubal
By Jubal
This is the first of what will hopefully be a number of articles on the folklore of different world regions that I'm thinking of doing. In particular, I'd like to explore bits of folklore that haven't made their mark on the modern fantasy and gaming scenes, and showcase some of the reasons why you might want to read and discover more about them. The worlds we know as "fantasy", which have their roots in a mixture mainly of Northern European, Greco-Roman, and western Christian myths and legends, are just based on a small portion of the world's mythical output, and I hope looking at some more in these articles will help spark off ideas for some readers.
For this article, I'm doing – there's a huge amount more to say about Somali myth than I have time to write here, and I hope I'll manage to come back and write more on it at some future point, but here are some of the themes that for me make the myths of Somalia quite so fascinating:
Folk(lore) on the move
A typical Somali landscape - in places like this, it can pay to stay on the move.
Kinfolk and close kin-groups are also a very large element of Somali myth (and one that finds echoes in some older European myth but is often quite absent from its modern fantasy variants). Part of the corollary of having a society based on small, closely related encampments and clans is that a great deal of narrative tragedy is built up from internal familial jealousies and disagreements. In one myth a character known as the "missing-fingered priest" murders his wife Falaad's brother over jealousy that he is too close to their son, for example; these sorts of close kin-politics issues are the bread and butter of storytelling, and are an intriguing look at story-driving dynamics in these sorts of smaller groupings.
Another thing it's worth thinking about is what different societies value – herds and herd animals are often looked upon in derogatory terms in modern fiction, or are almost completely absent from them – but this idea of the "adventuring" (usually upper and/or urban urban) classes who tend to be the heroes of our modern stories looking down upon the rural world is a very modern creation. Somali myth often takes us into a world where keeping a good herd of camels or other prized animals could be the difference between life and death when times got tough, and where, for exactly this reason, having a really large herd was the sign of real, practical power, writ large in the faces of grumpy livestock. It's an interesting counterpoint to the "jewels and silks" view of power that fantasy worlds often give us.
Female heroes and villains
Whilst male characters often play significant roles in Somali folklore, many of the strongest and most important characters are women, including the two most famous mythical figures in Somalia, Araweelo and Deghdeer.
The most significant central female character is Araweelo, a mythical warrior queen who according to legend created a matriarchal society. In some myths, she castrates all the men of the kingdom in order to try and better control them, a plan that is ultimately flawed when her daughter conceives via an old wise man and raises a son who grows to overthrow her. Whether Araweelo is seen as a mightily strong embodiment of feminine liberty and success or as a corpulent and dictatorial ruler may well vary according to the taste and intentions of a storyteller. Certainly, she is seen as an embodiment of power – a ruler with herds of a thousand camels who could drink as much milk as she ever desired, but whose downfall is in her excessively brutal use of that power, is a compelling centrepiece to a setting in itself.
The monster Deghdeer is another key female antagonist. Mutated into a ghoulish monster by turning to cannibalism and named for one extremely long ear which she uses to listen for her human prey, she is a far more specifically magical and monstrous terror. Like many good folkloric antagonists, she has a variety of specifically numbered, possibly magical, artefacts (a special cooking-pot, for example) that she uses to carry out her evil deeds, and a range of specific strengths and weaknesses. She's extremely strong, for example, and extremely fast, but so heavy she has difficulty turning, such that clever heroes can dodge out of her path. She's also not generally shown as very bright, as in one myth where two children each trick her into thinking they're helping her catch the other and thus escape together – though she's also capable of cunning, often putting up a whole circle of huts wherever she camps so as to make travellers believe there is a village there and tempt them closer.
These powerful female antagonists are treated as the leading characters in their respective cycles of stories (which have many variants – Hanghe for example records a significant number of different possible deaths for Deghedeer). Many of the protagonists are also female, though – one of the Deghedeer variants has a girl called Falaad as a primary character, and another has a group of girls including Deghedeer's own daughters managing to finally kill the beast that she has become.
Giants and beasts
Hyenas - much more than cackling antagonists...
Hyena-folk are another common part of Somali stories. The aggressive, cackling hyenas that a modern audience was probably mainly introduced to via the Lion King are given a great deal more complexity and interest by the Somalis, especially in their part-human variant as "qori-ismaris" – hyena-men (it is unclear whether they are regularly part-and-part or shape-shifters, and probably variable according to narrative usage). Hyena-folk are generally mistrustful of mankind, but can help and otherwise interact with them too. In one case, one grants a traveller a magic staff that gives him the ability to turn into a hyena himself (as long as he tells no humans), in another, causing problems by successfully winning the hand of a human woman, who then eventually rids herself of the unwanted husband by forcing him to abide by human and civilised customs that he cannot stand. This tension between hyenas as magical and wild and humans as settled is an interesting one to read about.
There are a number of other monsters – the monstrous "five-belly" who eats whole herds and flocks of animals, and one of whose victims results in the birth of the tiny trickster "thumb-size" who outwits bandits by simply being smaller and clever than they are, as two examples. Animal tales are also very common, and often include humans and animals (especially lions or snakes, but also smaller creatures) interacting. Certainly it's worth remembering the presence of animal actors in myth: a manticore or a gryphon of course always have a certain mystique to them, but there's a lot of power and interest vested in perceptions of real animals too, and allowing them to voice their perspective and interact with humans opens up a lot of potential stories.
I'm still very much a novice in the world of Somali myth, and I'm sure there's vastly more to discover than I know, but hopefully the above gives you an idea of some of what there is to look at. Ahmed Artan Hanghe's "Folktales from Somalia" is the source of most of the above stories, and I believe there are one or two other English-language books available (which I'm hoping to get my hands on copies of at some point)! I'd also encourage you to look at Exilian's Somali Mythology Project, which I'm hoping to do some more work on in the coming months to turn it into a useable reference guide to at least the basics of the Somali mythological world (and please do let me know if you'd like to help with that!) Mostly, though, I hope you found this interesting, and I hope you stay tuned for future articles covering some of the world's less widely known cultures and myths!
This article is part of a series: you can also read Part Two, on the myths of Asturias.