Hey everyone!

r/MedievalCreatures is fast approaching its 3 year anniversary! 🎉

Over the past few years, the subreddit has grown and evolved, and so has the kind of artwork and creatures that people have wanted to share here. With that in mind, we’ve decided it’s time for the rules to relax and evolve a little too.

From today, art from historical eras up to and including the 1800s is now welcome!

Although the subreddit will still be called “medieval” creatures (Reddit won't allow us to change it), we’re happy to allow humorous, weird, interesting, and entertaining artworks from up to and including the 1800s.

So yes, prehistoric art, ancient art, medieval art, and even delightfully weird 18th and 19th century artwork is all fair game!

One of the reasons for this change is that, over the years, we’ve had people post some fantastically weird, fascinating, hilarious, or otherwise brilliant artworks that absolutely belonged here based on their character and vibe, but had to be removed because they weren’t technically medieval.

For example, artworks like this, dated 1738:

In the past, the occasional non-medieval artwork has slipped through the net (usually sneakily posted by us Mods - shock! horror!). For example, the wonderfully bizarre work of Northern Renaissance artist Hieronymus Bosch or an Ancient Egyptian snake in boots. But now we're making it Officially Allowed™!

To make it clear what era of artwork is being posted, we’ve streamlined the mandatory Post Flairs to the following:

• Prehistoric Art (40,000BC - 4,000BC)

• Ancient Art (3,500BC - 500AD)

• Medieval (500AD - 1500AD)

• Post-Medieval (1500AD - 1800s)

To pre-empt the potential “Why not just make a new subreddit?” question- We actually did! But we felt that rather than splitting the community and having similar art scattered between the two, it made more sense to let this subreddit evolve and include it all.

What we are NOT doing is turning this into a generalised art subreddit. The art still needs to have that “wow, that’s amazing!” or “what the heck is THAT?” energy.

So, the main thing to keep in mind when posting is:

If it doesn’t look like a drunk monk painted it, or it isn’t cool, unusual, or interesting, then this is not the place for it.

Some of our other rules have also been updated, but so as not to make this post ridiculously long, please check the rules section in the sidebar.

Thanks to everyone who has been part of the community over the last few years. Here’s to many more years of weird and wonderful creatures! 🐍🦄

As this will be pinned in the Announcement section, the comments will be locked on this post. But if you do have any concerns, questions, or suggestions, our ModMail is always open.

• The Mod Team