“ A culture has a tradition of wearing animal pelts as a sign of status or job. Carpenters might wear beaver skins, Masons have a moleskin hood to their cloak, Gaurdsmen might have badger pelts. Done to show the culture's respect for nature and how much of nature is equal to each other.”
“ A character who is undergoing changes of personality (like buying off mental disadvantages - flaws - or changing alignment) might confront personifications of aspects of his personality in dreams: a griffon representing the courage he needs to face a terrible foe, or a satyr standing for the lecherousness a warrior must overcome to be admitted to an order of knights who must uphold vows of chastity.”
“ There is a land far to the east that is a great, desolate, near-empty wasteland home only to barbarians, ghosts and monsters. Many nations launche expeditions to this land, seeking to find the rumored-at treasures and riches beyond it's outer fringe.”