Hello Everyone!

As I’m sure you all know by now, I tend to favor high fantasy in my writing. While I have dabbled in all kinds of other genres (including urban fantasy which I would love to work in more), there’s just something about almost pastoral world building that I absolutely love.

However, with most pre-industrial or pre-digital worlds, it can take a lot of research just to find a way to treat a character’s illness or to build a new tool that, in a modern world, would have been readily available.

For example, my most recent project deals somewhat heavily with medical sciences (considering that’s not at all the point of the story, at least) but the setting is dated around 17th–18th century. That, along with the fact that it’s a very small isolated town, really limited what I could do for the medical treatments that do pop up in the text. As such, I’ve compileda brief list of my favorite online/downloadable resources for some of the more common research needs when writing non-urban fantasy.

• Where There is No Doctor—Medical reference
  • I first was exposed to Where There is No Doctor through my position with the APHA IH. This text (which is free to download here) is a wonderful public health resource intended to provide basic medical advice to people living in isolated locations or small villages that don’t have full access to modern health care. The intended purpose of Where There is No Doctor is an incredibly respectable one. From a writer’s perspective, however, this text is also a treasure trove of information from medical practices using remedies made from the land to how cultural beliefs and superstitions may harm or help the treatment of some conditions. I do believe there are other related texts (when I did a search to find the PDF link I noticed something that mentioned Where There is No Dentist) but I’m not familiar with them so I leave you to venture into those on your own.
• “Timeline and History of Swords”
  • This one is fairly self-explanatory. The parent website, Knights Edge, is an online store for all sorts of Medieval weapons and types of armor. Now, I can’t speak at all to their store, but they have a few tabs under “history” that can be extremely helpful if you’re trying to tie the style of your weaponry to the culture and landscape you’ve created.
• “A Beginner’s Guide to Foraging”
  • Again, super self-explanatory, but survival skills are also a key part of lots of non-urban fantasy stories—especially if you’re going for a classical “quest” vibe. This blog/list from Ethical.net deals with plants that are (I believe) common to the Western parts of Europe; I plan to keep searching and update this list with resources that deal with other parts of the world, as well.
• Zompist—Language Building
  • This one obviously isn’t specific to non-urban fantasy (well, I mean none of these really are, that’s just my lame titling skills for ya) but I know a lot of fantasy requires some form of language construction so I new I had to add something. The Zompist Language Kit is a free online resource made specifically for conlangers. There is also a physical book that goes more in depth but I’m trying to keep these recommendations on the free-side (if you’re looking to purchase books I also recommend The Art of Language Invention by David J. Peterson which is what I personally turned to when I first tried language building). As for the Zompist Language Kit, however, I’ve never personally used it but I’ve heard wonderful things about it so I have no qualms about recommending it here.

Again, those are just a few resources that I’ve found that deal with topics I, personally, go back to again and again throughout my writing.

I hope that they help you, as well, and if you have any other resources that you think should be on the list please comment and let me know!