Selections from the Splendid Little Lexicon
In 2005, I embarked on what was for me an ambitious project: an exercise in world-building in the form of a lexicon, with two to four entries per letter, following (insofar as one person can) the rules of Lexicon laid out by Neel Krishnaswami. At the time I hoped to use the finished product in a putative RPG I would run, and I started with Monte Cook’s Arcana Unearthed (see also its Wikipedia page, if it still exists) as a basis.
To my surprise, I found that I’d exhausted the limits of my imagination in terms of worldbuilding about halfway through, and the project shifted focus and became much more narrative. The central theme of the finished piece was “evil is bad, and sin is inside everyone,” which wasn’t the most original of concepts I know. Rather than reproduce all eighty-odd entries here, I’ve instead copied over the ones I noted as my favorites, immediately after I finished.
“Splendid little lexicon” comes from “splendid little war,” which is how T.R. Roosevelt referred to the Spanish-American war.