Fantastical Fraud and Folklore

I've had fraud on the brain recently. Folding Ideas recently put a video out on Mantracks, fake fossils and the creationist cranks who try to profit off of them, building roadside museums and doing lecture tours and leading expeditions. I also started listening to Bigfeets, a podcast discussing the TV show Mountain Monsters. Imagine…Finding Bigfoot, but instead of scientists trying to prove a creature's existence, it's a group of hillbillies (or more accurately guys in hillbilly cosplay) trying to catch and murder a host of creatures, improvving their way through life-or death battles with the cryptids of Appalachia. Both of these together got me thinking…your Standard Elfgame World is gonna be full of these people. 

Gregor MacGregor, who convinced a bunch of British colonists to die on the Mosquito Coast because he said it was pretty nice. 

We live in a world where people are not generally in danger of being immolated by a warlock. We don't have dragons, or tieflings, or any of that nonsense, but we are all still capable of falling for conspiracy theories or believing in things that are nonsense. To my mind, that should only be amplified in a world where the realm of the possible is greatly amplified. After all, if real medieval people believed that witches and stuff existed, what would people who did have a local witch come up with, and how would people play off of that?

How do you know if a wizard is lying when he says he can curse your town with boils? You don't have his character sheet, your average peasant can't pop open the rulebook. Best just to be safe and pay the man. Maybe the milk of the Mosquitillo has medicinal properties, or maybe it doesn't exist.

Small towns tend to have their own monsters, at least in the US. Jackalopes, Skunkape, Bigfoot, the Mothman, our backcountry is littered with these kinds of critters. To towns having to contend with monsters at spearpoint, what's another one or two you can't see?

What a lovely koala. I hope it isn't carnivorous...

Obviously these kinds of things shouldn't be around all the time. Constantly getting bamboozled is no more fun in a roleplaying game than in real life (unless you're playing into being a rube, in which case hell yeah). But a little bit of petty crime and unnecessary lying can go a long way to making a world feel lived in. 

With that in mind, here's some Fantasy Grifts and Creatures That Don't Exist.

1d10 Fantasy Grifters

1. A dwarf selling an “Enchanted Sword”
2. A charming half-orc taking clients on an “Authentic Dungeon Delving Experience”
3. A gnome selling healing potions diluted with water 
4. A half-elf offering an introductory adventuring course
5. An adventuring party running a Ponzi scheme on their patrons, offering generous returns on investment 
6. A museum of oddities featuring three taxidermied creatures from the next chart 
7. A “wizard” collecting apprenticeship fees before skipping town 
8. A vendor of (fake) treasure maps 
9. An adventurer trying to impress a tavern server with tales of valor battling a creature from the next chart 
10. An adventurer selling parcels of land in his “newly-conquered” territory

1d8 Creatures that Don't Exist

1. The Vilstret, a humanoid creature of woven grass
2. Naskabis, small rat-like beasts that eat socks
3. Toonols, draconian worms nine feet (three meters) long
4. Yugbarks, shimmering carnivorous birds the size of a house 
5. Purple Dragons
6. Finteriks, horned carnivorous humanoids two and a half feet high
7. Gunpowder Snakes, who crawl into barrels of gunpowder and eat it
8. Song Serpents, who swim alongside sinking ships and mourn those who will soon drown