Animate Structure

Some magic is about sacrifice.  A castle can have a garrison and sit in the middle of a friendly (or at least ethnically loyal) population and change hands regularly.  A wizard's tower can stand alone for centuries.  Because every now and again, some idiot gets an army together and tries to take one.  Their legends discourage future attempts.

This is more of an item ability than a spell.  A wizard with the correct property rights may once (not once a day, once a month or once a millenium, but exactly *once*) activate a magical structure to defend hearth and home.  This takes a bit of time (one full turn, ritual casting, or however your game covers "about as long as it takes to brew a cuppa without a fire going").  The wizard must have legal title to the place, either inherited, elected, or constructed.  The structure fights as an enormous golem, running along on its pillars, columns, or flying buttresses and steamrollering anyone that doesn't get out of the way.  It moves either the length of its footprint or its height, whichever is greater, in a straight line every round.  Everything that doesn't get out of the way is essentially getting hit by a rockslide.  The building is still a building - its ability to take damage is neither lessened or increased.  The structure will fight for one round for every year that the wizard has lived in it, plus a round for every five years that previous owners in the line of succession have not used the ability.  At the end of this time the structure must make a Saving Throw - success means it still stands, if it is able to on the location it ends the duration in.  Failure means it collapses in a pile of masonry, its wizard pilot usually escaping the collapse by one sorcerous stratagem or another.  The duration on this ability means that it is normally only used in defensive circumstances.   But there was this one resurrected Pharaoh...

Saddle Cat

So, it's clearly a part of the zeitgeist.  Or at least was.  It probably still should be, what with YouTube being one giant shrine to Bastet.  So yes, it should be okay to have your character to tie a feathered mousy to the end of his lance and ride into battle upon a couch leaping, yarn chasing, cheezburger hazzin' giant kitty.

The Good:

•  Talk about riding a jumper.  Saddle cats are capable of leaping twice as high and twice as far as a light warhorse and can charge their regular move distance straight up a masonry wall or wooden palisade.
• Causes abject terror in ratmen
• No need to dismount to be sneaky

The Bad:

• They can only be ridden 2 hours a day - they choose which 2
• The fish bill.  Oh dear merciful Bastet, the fish bill.  Seems they'll go through a barrel of salted fish every couple of days, plus hard tack, jerky, and whatever the local farmers would prefer they not catch.
• Prone to dragging grooms around in their mouth without provocation.

The Ugly:

• Lock up the Familiars
• Occasionally fall through ceilings
• Dragging the groom around means it's *your* turn to clean the enormous litter box

In game terms, I'd just give them the same stats as a cavalry horse, but with twice the movement capability (jump or charge), twice the damage, no endurance, and enormous upkeep costs.  They should also be capable of stealth and very hard to surprise.

Flying Boats

Image courtesy Royal Air Force

No, not this - though a Short Sunderland is in fact magnificent.  I mean wooden ships floating through the air in much the same way that bricks don't.  It's not exactly original - if legends of the Flying Dutchman are authentic, the trope is older than steam.  I'd say it's definitely older than radio, since the first real airship flew in 1852: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giffard_dirigible

I like the idea because it is, of course, entirely impossible.  Which is what fantasy gaming should be about.  I'd like to keep them just like real boats for aesthetic reasons.  No gasbag fig leaf where the sails should be, and no on demand performance like some sort of magic helicopter.  I want them to drift inconveniently and roll precariously, with a top speed you could expect from sail and a rate of climb that wouldn't startle a balloonist.  These limits still leave a lot of possibilities:

Fantasy bomber:  You know darned good and well that the first thing primates with a height advantage want to do is start dropping stuff.  I'm going to make some excuse about hull integrity to avoid having bomb bays and keep folks from trying to land on someone else's mast, but pretty much anything you can heave over the side should hit the ground unless there's a really good excuse.

Paratroopers:  I don't like the magic-as-tech thing of handing out featherfall rings, but the first parachutes were deployed more or less right after the first aircraft (first recorded jump in 1783).  People with aircraft want a way to get out of them when things turn pear-shaped.  Besides, I find the concept of Viking paratroopers to be hilarious.

Carrier:  So I played a few too many games of Joust.  It seems like a great idea to have saddle-trained enormous birds or small dragons perched in the rigging to everyone except for the poor zlotnik that has to swab the deck.  Look here for the real version: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Macon_(ZRS-5)

Kedging:  One advantage to an air boat is that if the wind fails, you can just grab a mooring line and pull the silly thing.  Until the wind picks back up.  Which it may do without warning.  Which means you can very quickly go from desperately needing to drop the rope to desperately needing to hold on.  Have fun.