As of last Saturday, I've completed my 4th session "behind the screen"; running Lost Mine of Phandelver as a warm-up, while I construct a homebrew world from scratch for the follow-up campaign. The biggest lesson that I keep re-discovering is that "details matter, but some matter more than others". I can spend all day modeling cities, creating new items, mechanics, and all of the "substance", but without prose, poetry, and engrossing narration, the world will never come to life.

So, my hope is that you will share with me your favorite compilations of poetry, short stories, and artwork. Especially those that include powerful depictions of individuals and scenery (Both cityscapes and landscapes).

While I am specifically interested in a buffet of bite-sized creative works, please feel free to share anything that you feel is too moving to ignore.

Thank you!

Compiled Resources:

Poetry

Member Poetry: 

Published Poetry

Short Stories

Member Stories

Published Stories

Artwork

Here are some poems I have written. I hope you like them!

Balanced Tides
(elven poem)

Twilight is balance
Between day and night
Gray is balance
Between dark and light

Never dimming, never growing
Never speeding, nor ever slowing
All are in balance, and balance is in all

Walls of Stone, Halls of Light

Walls of stone tower high above
Shield us, defending us
From those who would ruin
Our halls of light

Our palaces touching the sky
Our homes of wood and bronze
Our smiths and farms
And our holy temples

But our walls stand strong
Mantled with the courage within us
We will never fall
So long as we stand tall

So long as we unite
So we can fight
Those who siege our walls of stone
And reap our halls of light

Invisible cities by Italo Calvino

Its a fictitious dialog between Marco Polo and kublai khan where polo describes, I think it was more than 50, cities he imagines. Even in translation, the writing is wonderful. There’s a lot of allegory, but you can take it at face value for descriptions of fantastical cities. 

Thanks for the contributions, Thauraln and Xalthu!

I've added them to the OP for easy access. As people add more, I'll continue to build the list.

Skimming through an entry of Invisible Cities, I really appreciate how the fantastical description of the city is captured through a third person's perspective. Getting a sneak peak into someone else's mind, along with the nostalgia and regret of missed opportunities, adds an immediate layer of familiarity and appreciation that a casual visitor would never have the time to develop on their own.

While Tolkien is best-known for his prose, he was also quite a poet. Here’s a link to his poems, 50+ I think, from The Lord of The Rings (there’s more poems in his other works, but I couldn’t find them as easily). Spoilers for LotR, obviously.

http://tolkiengateway.net/wiki/Poems_in_The_Lord_of_the_Rings

Here's a few of my own bard songs as well. I'm no Taliesin (the Mabinogion figure, not the Critical Role player), but I hope you enjoy them!

The Blood of an Orc

 The Halflings' Dance

 Big Old Troll

 The Last Lord of Ilmaren

Poem by the character, Fisher Kel Tath of the Malazan Book of the Fallen, 

Author Steven Erikson, also an rpg player.

”In my dreams I come face to face
with myriad reflections of myself,
all unknown and passing strange.
They speak unending
in languages not my own
and walk with companions
I have never met, in places
my steps have never gone.

In my dreams I walk worlds
where forests crowd my knees
and half the sky is walled ice.
Dun herds flow like mud,
vast floods tusked and horned
surging over the plain,
and lo, they are my memories,
the migrations of my soul.”

Also, Dancers at the End of Time is a great collection of short stories from a time before the fantasy writing tropes had calcified. The ideas are wilder, if that’s possible. 

good luck!

On the side of the wall in the outhouse. 

Roses are red

Violets are blue

While you are reading this you are peeing on your shoe

Ok not terribly funny I suppose. Well yes it is, I had a player wizz on his shoe. 

I tend to write a lot when building a session.  I feel you are much better off creating your own written content, that way you won't feel as encumbered. 

This is what I wrote for my Halloween session last year. 

This mission is to explore and examine The Derth House just 2 days march south of the south city gate  Near the abandoned community of Derthland is an old cemetary. The Derth Manor is on the south side of the cemetery.  For years the area around the house and its woods have been shrouded in a fog. There is a main road that runs near the house that farmers to the south use to bring their produce to the city. The cart route is still in use, however, something is disturbing their horses and oxen while enroute to the city and the farmers cannot get their produce to town.  Without this food source the city will have a difficult time with the coming winter. 

The Derth House was  built by the Derth family. They were a rich cooperative family that had tried to wrest control of they Syndicate away a hundred years ago. They were prosperous and a good size community had grown up around their land. Including a large graveyard that eventually came up right to the edge of their front yard.

They had used a variety of tactics to wrest control of the trade routes. Their Patriarch, Leo  and his wife Elizabeth Derth, were accused of demon worship and trying to summon a demon, daemon,or possibly a devil. Nobody living is certain. It is assumed that all went poorly one night on all Hallows Eve.  There were swirling clouds over the Derth land and green lightning in the sky. Then everything went quiet. For a week there was not a peep out of the Derth family.  Finally a group of 6 adventurers  were sent out to investigate.  Only 1 made it back.  She was not in good shape.  Her hair had changed color and her eyes were a different shape. She told a tale of the graveyard being uprooted in a number of places and that the house itself was alive and had gotten up on legs and moved itself and squashed the rest of her party. A truthsayer was called in to verify her rattled story, but she died that night screaming as if an army of ants are crawling under her skin. Another group of stalwart fighters were sent to investigate and none of them returned. 

Strange noises and the persistent mist around the Derth manor prompted the local community, with the help of the Syndicate to erect a wall made of iron and stone, blessed by the clerics of Yorksi. They used the excuse that it was to keep treasure hunters out. But it was always assumed it was to keep rescue parties from dying. It is said that a strange and powerful monster has taken up residency in front of the gate. To protect it, or to feed, no body living knows for sure.

As the group approaches the fence there is a mist inside the compound, but not outside, and it does not leak through the openings. A number of trees tops can be seen, and they are almost all dead.

Through the Waves, Through the Storm

Our ship left port at break of dawn,
Our sails hoisted with the figure of a swan,
And we cut through the waves, to the hidden lands ahead,
And we cut through the waves, to the horizon painted red,

Our heading, we knew not,
Only what each new day brought
As we cut through the waves, to the hidden lands ahead,
As we cut through the waves, till at last we went to bed,

When we woke, the sky was gray,
An ill omen for this day,
As we cut through the waves, to the hidden lands ahead,
As we cut through the waves, my heart was filled with dread,

For a storm was brewing, that I knew,
And the tempest grew and grew,
As we cut through the waves, to the hidden lands ahead,
As we cut through the waves, thunder boomed inside my head,

And lighting flashed, gales howled,
Above us all, the storm gods scowled,
As we cut through the waves, to the hidden lands ahead,
As we cut through the waves, my vision tinted red,

And our ship tossed and turned, 
And for land, oh how I yearned, 
As we cut through the waves, to the hidden lands ahead,
As we cut through the waves, to the gods of mine I pled,

To bring us swiftly, safely home,
Lest on this ship our spirits roam, 
As we cut through the waves, to the hidden lands ahead,
As we cut through the waves, I was dying, I was dead,

But then clouds parted high above,
But I saw not my mother, nor my love,
As we cut through the waves, to the living lands ahead,
And as we cut through the waves, at long last the skyline glinted red.

Added and updated. Keep 'em coming!

Still don't have anything for the Artwork section, so if anyone has leads on great visual depictions, please toss up a link!

I highly reccommend checking out artwork from Magic the Gathering as they produce a ton of fantasy art for all the different worlds and planes they go to. 

This is the link for an archive of their artwork.

http://www.artofmtg.com/

There is a passage in Alexander Grin's novella Crimson Sails describing a painting of a ship on a stormy sea in the protagonists mansion. It describes it in such a way that the words paint a picture and the picture erupts into motion.

Thanks! Let's see if the new buzz from Tasha's has stirred up any additional creativity.

—Lord Byron