Classic Creatures: To Alter or Not to Alter

Thank you to Briana Vedsted for asking me to do this guest blog.  Her question was how difficult it is to give creatures new abilities.  This stems from how many classic monsters are taken and changed to give a new twist or suit a genre change.  Dragons without fire, sparkling vampires, tall goblins, and other examples can be found throughout literature.  Some are successful and others come off as horrible insults to the creature.  I’m going to start with the most extreme example from my writing: Orcs of Windemere.

I decided that I wanted to make a major change to the orcs in my fantasy world.  Now, you can change the appearance of a lot of creatures relatively easily as long as you keep a few key features.  For orcs, this is large size and pronounced incisors of either overbite or underbite variety.  I…