What is your favorite fantasy location name? Thanks so much to WorldAnvil for sponsoring this video! Visit www.worldanvil.com/supergeekmike and use the promo code SUPERGEEK to get 51% off any annual membership! www.worldanvil.com/supergeekmike
Tatooine is also an adaptation of "Tataouine," or "Tataween," a town in Tunisia near where they filmed the exterior scenes on Tatooine (some scenes in Monty Python's Life of Brian were also filmed near the same place years later). In the Berber language, Tiṭṭawin, as it was originally spelled before being corrupted into French, means "eyes" or "water springs." You never know what something might mean, but a fantasy name might not *literally* mean anything. And even if it does, that doesn't mean it has to mean anything special. "Transylvania" (yes, I know it's a real place) just means "on the other side of the woods." A lot of place names are named for a geographic feature, a river, or a tribe that lived nearby. It can also help with telegraphing the class level of the inhabitants. The local villagers might be afraid of the dread black knight who operates out of the hidden "Swamp Castle," but the nobles of Brandenburg are proud of their rich, cultured history.
11:25 I mean Tatooine is famously not "fantasy gibberish with a sci-fi veneer". It's a corruption of Tataouine, a real town in Tunisia, of which George liked the sound of the name and he was thinking a lot about North Africa when thinking how to film the scenes there. Utapau, the original name for the planet, was science fantasy gibberish xD
Only 6 seconds in but I want to say that prescription drugs often make great fantasy names, especially for extra fantastical things like mages, elves, dragons, devils/demons, etc. Some great ones I’ve found are; Ketorolac, Paroxetine, Anakinra, Domperidone (can be Dom Peridone if you want a first & last name) Edit - 0:51 well this is awkward 😂
This works well actually. Especially if you take the first half of one, and the last half of another. Or if you do them backwards, or just put the stress of a different part, take a letter out. I had a whole group go through the tomb of Su'pres'tore in a one shot I did after going grocery shopping at my local Superstore. No one figured it out until after, lol.
"Logical Names" can be as simple as naming the city at the mouth of a port Portsmouth. You could name the town were a Saint is buried after the fact that they're buried there, giving you Bury St. Edmund. Naming a town after two of the prominent features of the area, a lake and a heath (which is a low scrubland with acidic soil and low-growing woody vegetation) Lakenheath. To use a fantasy setting one, A town with a deep water port could be named Waterdeep. Honestly, people will name locations after some simple things.
Another one near where I live, during sunsets, the mountains turn a shade of pink that looks like the inside of a watermelon. The mountains were then named the Sandia mountains because of this.
Put a "th" in it and end it with "ia". Guaranteed gold. "th" is a great way to make things feel Elfish, because it's a consonant that doesn't appear in very many languages and that's very difficult to say - even a lot of native English speakers struggle with it, and English uses it all over the place, including in the abundantly common word "the". Lots of th is an excellent way to differentiate Elfish names from other races, especially constrasting against Dwarvish which you probably want to give more of a Germanic sound. "ia" at the end is a great option for larger place names and for places you want to have a somewhat grand feel, because the Romans loved to stick -ia on the end of place names which results in people usually already associating -ia words with places. And if you've hit the 26 place limit on giving things unique first letters, start using unique first letters on stressed syllables and unique syllable counts. "naKREEnia" still feels pretty distinct from both "neTRIst" and "KELdor".
a funny story: i needed to come up with a name for a city in my character's backstory, but because i still hadn't come up with a lot of details about the location yet, i actually wound up kind of doing this process in reverse-- i came up with the name "Cloudfall" just on a random lightning strike of inspiration, and then developed details about the city by thinking about why people might give a city a name like that (i.e., perhaps, a city located in a region that constantly experiences dramatic shifts in weather between sun and rain.) so i suppose the name started out as technically meaningless (since it was not grounded in anything specific about the city), but i reverse-engineered meaning after the fact based on what i associate the name with.
Cloudfall sounds like a city against tall mountains where, during the time it was being settled, the weather caused the clouds to roll down the slopes like a waterfall. Every year, as the weather gets colder, this happens, so the name of the city became, over time, Cloudfall.
Something i've found can help, that happened lots in the real world, is to take the name of a place and either partially translate it, or make it easier to pronounce in another language. For example, Baile Átha an Rí (Bol-ya Aw-ha on Ree) (Town at the Mouth of the Rí, if translated directly) became Athenry (Ath-en-rye) Cloch na Rón (Clockh nah Rone) would be Seal's rock/stone if translated directly, but it was only translated halfway, to Roundstone.
You could also stack things, as a hint that successive generations learned the name of something, then added their own word for that thing onto it. Like Torpenhow Hill, which is, effectively, "Hillhillhill Hill."
Let's make a new world... Let's call it... I'm really making something unique here! Yes! I got it! Let's call the world "Middle Earth"! Oeh! Or "The Sword Coast"!
Actually, pretty recently I got into a setting and the planet there had such a RIDICULOUS name. Something like Dirt, or Ground... Oh wait, it was called Earth!
For example of River's Rest, you can say it was the name at first, then it was changed to Riverrest. And then because it was to difficult to say, people changed it to Rivest 😄
I make this with a lots of places, and yes, it less evocative but it makes total sense and give a great sense of time progression to some places, even some milestones could have multiple names, or a name for kids and a name for adults.
Rivest isn't how people would really contract it though, the stress pattern is off. Compare to "Everest", which has similar stress pattern and which no one calls "Evest". The most contracted it gets is "Evrest", because you need a little bit of bounce off the "v" into the "rest".
Or how the Baranduin River in The Shire is changed to "Brandywine" by the time of LotR. Which is also sort of an in-universe version of the "people mocking the name, then only remembering the mocked form" process.
But really, I know there are dumb names in the real world, like how many "City of Alexandria"s do we have. Or Yorks. Or "Hilltown" And there is literally a town in New York State that is just "NEW CITY" but NO YOU STILL HAVE TO THINK ABOUT HOW TO NAME YOUR CITIES IN THE GAME
Cool advice, thanks! Toponyms - is the term for placenames and how they are categorised (for further [too much] reading xP) generators tend to incl: - Folk etymology - Shift - Manufactured - Postcolonial Toponyms - Mistakes - Postrevolution Toponyms - Memorial Toponyms
YES, The Purvan Suul Syndrome, the bane of every GM. I have a shopkeeper my players call "Icebot Pervert", a legendary blacksmith "Silly Citrus" and a headmaster of a magic school "Master Elastane" (which once devolved to "Professor Spandex").
In the 2014 Dungeon Masters Guide, they talk about naming things to match your players. Their specific example being "Not wanting to go to Gumdrop Island to meet a wizard named Ray". I then decided that a campaign I'm building will include a visit to Gumdrop Island to meet a wizard named Ray.
In adapting LMoP for my own setting, I replaced Neverwinter with Meredalin, deciding that the -dalin ending of Phandalin was just an old word from a dead language that originally meant town or village. And because it's a coastal city and the word Mere refers to a body of water it's basically just "Sea Town". In my head, Phandalin is just the shortened form of "Town of the Phandelver Pact", since it was once exactly that long ago
When thinking of fantasy place names I remember the name of the town my dad grew up in. Back during colonial America the British Crown had automatic claim over any tall white pines due to their use in making ship masts. The only such white pine found in the southern colonies was located in the middle of South Carolina and was nicknamed the King’s Tree. Over time the town that grew up nearby took on the name for itself and thus Kingstree, SC was named.
I don't comment a lot on videos Mike, but your videos are wonderful and this video is particularly helpful for me because I'm bad at name choice/creation in general. So thanks for all the videos over the (feels like this can't be true) years.
My man, these videos are helping me so much Thank you very much I'm building right now a world for my fantasy novel, and the first town I'm almost finished building is named Summa, which is a pun in portuguese with "suma" (something like "be gone", "get out", "vanish" or "disappear"), so you can see it's a pretty welcoming town for outsiders
The closest thing I know of where there are only 26 locations would be the City from the Project Moon setting, which is divided into 26 districts, each associated with a letter.
One thing that may be interesting is to define an oficial name of a city, and how different people end up saying it. Locals may be closer to the original, but travelers may choose a simpler version that ends up sticking. This could be further explored, like elfs, dwarves and humans having different names for the same place, etc. This could be a sign of a more complex issue that sparks conflict, or just a curiosity.
Love the video! As a sidenote be careful to promise to do videos if there are ties for patreon polls I only say this because Jenny Nicholson did once and then people took that to try and get everything to tie for more content so she just decided she'll choose the outcome lol
2:56 fun fact: that’s how I came up with the names of my nations in my D&D world. I used a map generator, it made 24 countries, so I used every letter once, used one for the name of the world, and used one for what a country used to be called before a cataclysm destroyed basically the entire nation.
@@dolphin64575 Looking back, I guess I missed K and Y, or ran out of countries to name on my map. The world is named Lassen. I also made sure to associate each country with a character class and one unique thing it's known for, so that is sometimes reflected in the naming choice. Aria, The Barren Sands, Ceway, The Kingdom of Dave, Esper, Frotheim, Gent'Fal, Homari, The Isloclans, Jorunst, Mulben, Nautalist' Harbor, Oxtica's Academy, Parra, The Qualar Wilds, Reftnoir, Seristan, Throzirian, Udlark, The Vowless Land (formerly Xilon), Wavelund, and Zeugma
Whitestone, for me, is a neighborhood in Queens, NYC, right next to my family's neighborhood, College Point. It's a run of the mill middle-class neighborhood, but it did feature the best German bakery ever, Stork's. Whitestone was named for limestone outcrops along the shoreline. College Point was named for the college, St. Paul's College, an Episcopalian seminary founded in 1835, that used to stand on the point, overlooking the East River.
10:56 In addition, make sure you look up your names and see if your 'totally unique Fantasy name' isn't actually a real word with its own connotations. I once named a very important NPC Bris. My players will definitely never forget them, but not for the reasons I'd like.
This video made me think back to my first crack at a homebrew fantasy setting and some of my own names for cities and locations. For example, the main city on the continent, basically the Waterdeep/Sharn/Emon of the setting, was named Dragonmoore, so you talking about how city and town names can be derived from the kind of environment there were built in, I looked up what "moore" would mean in this context. Turns out, the moors are undeveloped hilly areas and peat bogs, a far cry from the bustling coastal trade city I'd imagined. Some of the names I still remember were more deliberate in their association, however. The religious capital of the world, Xistos, was named for Xristos, the Greek word for Christ. And admittedly less imaginatively, I named an empire of minotaurs the Minoan Empire, since "Minoan" refers to the ancient civilization of Crete, where the mythical King Minos and his minotaur were said to hail from.
Love the video. Thinking of names is always the most fun but also very easy to get stumped on. I have a very similar naming philosophy where sometimes I try thinking of how a place would get it's name in places in my setting like Lakeborugh and Emeraldfeld but other times I just wanna evoke a kind of feel like with Lesgoth, Bliqin, and Kelna
12:36 As a non native English speaker, I had absolutely no clue that Emon was spelled like that until I happened to read it, and instinctually from my mother tongue assumed it was spelled Iman - my English brain just turns off for fantasy names. Even now I had to google to make sure I remembered correctly :D Great video!
I actually disagree with Mike a little bit on how easy it is to guess the spelling of Emon based on its pronunciation, mainly because the first syllable is unstressed-- meaning the vowel is reduced (unless the speaker is overenunciating a little bit). that can make it difficult to guess which vowel it's supposed to be. You might see guesses like "Amon", for instance, and i think "Iman" is also a pretty natural guess. (the general proclivities of english spelling might tip the scales slightly in favor of "o" rather than "a" for the second syllable, but i still think this is technically ambiguous in a fantasy setting.)
I will admit I once designed a (small) region where all the towns started with Ja' or Va' - because I decided it was the cultural equivalent of "-berg" or "-ton" or "-shire" in the local dialect. Then my players promptly boarded a ship for parts as yet unmapped to return a baby dragon to her homeland and all those cultural notes went out the window.
It's interesting, I at once agree with most of your advice here, but also follow almost none of it myself. I think a huge caveat on this is thay it is really advice for anglophones only. Most people who aren't english speaking are at least bilingual and that entirely changes the way brain interprets sounds, assumes spellings, recognises variations between names, etc. When I am inventing names, I am likely to draw on other languages I speak or at least have a lot of exposure to. I use the trick of reserving English names for places where the name's meaning would still be obvious in the "common" language. Different languages also have very different sound connotations. My name is an easy example... in Finnish, Ilmari is a powerful, masculine name (it's the name of a demigod hero, kinda like calling your kid "hercules" or something), but to english speakers it sounds soft and delicate! Either way, I love the video. Please make more on worldbuilding topics!
One of favorite uses of the fantasy jargon approach is with one of the countries in my world Yvalya, Vs Ys are so good at making the country feel culturally distinct and mysterious
I named an elf something that, when said aloud, sounds like "ass tree". Blessed be that everyone really liked her quirky nature, so nobody bullied her.
Whilst not a place name, the trauma on Matt's face from the name 'Purvan' and the cackles from that table is cemented in my mind as a 'yes, read this out loud'. i also have the same maturity level of Laura Bailey, so thankfully i'm my own greatest ally i also know how my group functions and what we do with character names - heck i'm generally the absolute WORST at just misreading a name and giving people nicknames Granted, we're also a group that has a giant boar show up in every campaign specifically to gore a specific player... so yeah
When it comes to fantasy gibberish, I like to imagine what the local language would sound like. Not necessarily designing a full language, but at least coming up with a rule out two about what sounds might appear together or not at all. My orcish names, for example, avoid bilabial consonants (so, no M, P or B) since they don't play nice with tusks. To borrow your Mazra to provide an example, it would not have been named by my orcs; they would have said Nazra
I ran into the pronunciation issue because I heavily based my continent on Finnish myth and folklore so all the names of the oldest cities were combinations of Finnish words. Needless to say, my players never quite got how to pronounce the western capital Fort Ihmisen, struggled a bit with the crossroad town of Reuna and absolutely NAILED the recently established Three Point Port lol
I mean, I intentionally break the rule of trying to make sure the players won't make fun of a name. Especially when I'm introducing an NPC who probably won't ever be seen again at a time when I want to break the tension a bit.
You are a brave content creator for sticking strong to your political beliefs. Most non political creators tend to shy away from any sort of political stance. You have all my respect.
All but one of my main kingdoms capitals has an official name, despite my world existing and being built for literal decades… and that name is Elvenhome, because it’s the elf capital, so there is room for improvement that’s not so literal. Thanks for helping me think a bit harder on it.
i think it's a neat coincidence that "Elvenhome" is basically a literal translation of "Alfheim". at least, that was the first association my brain made on reading it; my brain might be the weird one here.
One of my friends is running a game that takes place in a domain of the Feywild that only has about 10-12 different named locations. A few cities, lakes and rivers, and forests and mountains.
Being multilingual also complicates things when you're picking names. For example, to someone who doesn't speak Swedish, K'varn might sound like an intimidating, mysterious/alien being, but kvarn literally means mill (as in windmill) so it doesn't have quite the same effect if you know that 😂 A good rule of thumb is, don't borrow words from other [existing] languages if you don't know the meaning behind it
I once couldn't come up with a name so I named the capital of an empire Capital. I thought it was cute I thought it was clever, my players mocked me for this for years.
I play on discord, using dicebots. I've just started automatically typing in the proper nouns to the game chat alongside reading them - Both mine and from modules - considering how frequently my players ask for the spelling (even with the easy modern english names) since we're all in the discord text chat while playing anyway. As for Fantasy Gibberish, when I'm not going from pure improv in which case I'll roll on Mythic GME's name table for my Fantasy Gibberish, I'm always wanting to make a simple naming language for regions to derive names from. ...Using the Welsh Ll in a name might have been asking for trouble (NPC name that was _meant_ to be for a single adventure, not place name, but I wound up rolling up something that made most sense referring to that character reintroducing the name), particularly now I've got an association for that faction with 'Pokemon-name style mixtures of English and Welsh word fragments' - And that's not the biggest reason I'm hoping that faction never comes up again.
Actally, many names in Critical Role seem to have actual meanings in Arabic, and for a nerdy, fun-loving person like Matt Mercer-who even had a dog named Omar-it doesn't seem like a coincidence 11:21 E.g. Emon means faith, Tal'dori could be from Tal in aranic meaning hill (usually a grassy one with fertile land). Am mostly spitballing here by i think the point still comes across.
distinct names are the exact reason my homebrew world has a limited number of named towns - yeah yeah, dangerous wilderness and whatnot, i want my players to *remember* the places they go
To be honest I often just look up a map of british towns and villages, cause some locations sound like fantasy names and they can allow that verisamilatude from having a name with a clear meaning and then having the decay of a name that comes with time as people and language changes so does the name and as it gets repeated letters and parts become removed.
I have a couple of key tricks that I use to create fantasy names one sometimes I go to fantasy name generators, That's when I don't have an idea for the actual location itself descrition For example one of my more urban towns I picked UA name generator and it gave me Graveyard and gravel stones as some of the suggestions and it gave me an idea of calling it grave town known for its large collection of graveyards means N tombstones and that's sometimes how I flow give me the name of a town and then I can give you some more status for another campaign that I'm working on the kingdom is literally Shahra Only replacing the S with the letter Z, And the kingdom is on the right hand shaped continent with several cities that look like giant rings when you look from the sky. Sometimes it's my basic function of hey I'm going to be lazy but I might as well be creatively lazy. [And yes I use type to speech so it really helps for me to practice speaking certain things]
I always liked how Stargate SG-1 took a few of the off-world names from real places or people. Kelowna is a real place in BC and is a fantastic fake planet name. They named another one after a writer, Tichenor, and did stuff like this in a few other places.
I cheat a lot and give place names fantasy flavor by literally using canon words from the D&D language vocabularies. Sometimes they get smashed together in a weird way, but that's how they start. For example, a primary location in my campaign is "Fae Shanta" which is elvish for "first tree" because it's a city in the branches of a giant tree that has Yggdrasill-y connotations in the setting. An island is called "K'hrekim" which smashes together the draconic words for "hoard" and "coin" to imply an item of relatively minute value, but that one protects for the sake of pride/honor, a name it was given by the draconic speaking empire for ~colonialism~ reasons.
Generally, I try to stick to some kind of language convention for an area, then I think of the first major settlement in that area, and why it was founded. Maybe it was an event, or it was a geographic location/feature, or a use/purpose for the settlement. Then I just riff on those until they sound right or match the other locals around it. This can mean there are places with similar names. It's never really ben a problem, and the ways it has feel natural, so I don't worry about it. (I also use the same names for NPC's in the same campaign or adventures, because people have the same names sometimes. Is this something you are always told not to do in writing? Yes. Is this in no way how the real world works and people navigate it just fine? Also yes.) Most important thing though: Is say it out loud. This goes for everything. If you can't say it, you cannot sell it. Maybe you can only say it an a certain elf accent, that's fine. But you gotta be able to say it. And if you can't (cause its draconic and they have different vocal cords or whatever) then you come up with an alternative you can say, or you rework it. (For "Riverrest" I would go with Rivarest, or even Riva's Rest, as the name changed over time. So people might go "Who is Riva?" But it's actually just a language shift. Or maybe the other way around. Either way, it's the double R that's causing the trouble.) I say let the players make fun. That's what people do. I actually don't care how people spell things. I always tell them "Spell it how you heard it. That's how _you'll_ remember it." None of these words are really English anyways. I think Howard wanted you to think of the Cimmerians, not the Sumerians. The Cimmerians were a real people. They weren't quite like Conan's fictional people, but they were a "barbaric" steppe people of antiquity. Very different from the Sumerians who were hailed as great thinkers, city builders, and the founders of civilization. Howard even had a fictional history idea where his Cimmerians and Turaneans were the progenitors of the Scythians of our own age. (Remember Conan's Hyboria is a pre cataclysmic time prior to our own history.)
For making names I'll often think of a handful of thematic words and start throwing them into google translate to a ahndful of different languages, (I know it's not super reliable but from my general experience with learning french and testing it, it handles single words decently enough, it;s mostly missing context in sentences that make it super inaccurate) and I use words from things like french, latin and greek to find some root syllables to use as a base to make a name out of, then changing some letters out to bridge things together so they sound nicer. It's worked out decently, my only big mistake so far still fairly early in my homebrew setting is the mining town of "Rylbahn" has a confusing name because it sounds like "Raubahn" from final fantasy xiv, which is something I really should have forseen, given I always rename mechanus to Temporos in any game I run using dnd cosmology since Mechanus is too close to "mechonis" from xenoblade chronicles.
Tatooine isn't gibberish with a sci--fi veneer. It's a sci-fi veneer spelling over the real world location Tataouine, a city in southern Tunisia where the idea for the underground dwellings of Lars and Beru was inspired. Just FYI.
For what it's worth, I didn't guess the spelling of Ank'harel correctly. The way everyone says it, I guessed it was An'Karel or An'Qarel. I didn't think the 'k' was on the left side of the apostrophe.
can i steal the name River's rest for a town in my world map? been trying to think of a name for a town placed next to a river, and some mountains near a boarder, it is meant to be a trading town, a stop for people who come by land and i do find the name fun to say (but then i do roll my rs)
I'm dyslexic and trilingual, I truly mean no offense but some of this advice is a bit vague and might not be helpful for everyone, so here is how I make dyslexic friendly and less language specific words: (disclaimer: this is based on my personal experience, and all the languages I speak are Indo-European and use a version of the latin alphabet so my advice might not apply to languages that fall outside of this very specific category) 1-Keep it short- Ideally keep the word 2 or 3 syllables long, depending on the situation 4 is also fine, but above 5 is way to much and it's very likely people will just abbreviate it to the first few syllables (does not apply to compound words or names with multiple words, in that case it's better to keep multi-names at only 2 words) 2- Less consonants- consonants changes the most from language to language, this is even more accentuated for sounds made from more consonants bunched together (like, th, ph, bl, rr, tt) so breaking consonants apart with vowels makes it easier to pronounce and to write. In general vowels are always a safe bet. 3-Repetition is your friend- using the same letter or same syllable multiple times in the same world not only makes it easier to remember it also gives the word a sense of rhythm. Some examples of nonsense fantasy words following that method: Gevida, Setar, Atito, Deg, Kigo, Ejio, Bo Gati, Musisi. Since languages issues affect my day to day I have put a lot of thought into this topic, those a absolutely not hard and fast rules, those are just some tips that I hope might help dyslexic/multilingual dms and players, and help those who aren't any of those things understand our thought process a bit more and make for a more accepting environment.
I let a player of mine name a polity in my world, because you should include your players in worldbuilding right? He said he was from the "Country of Bob." I made it a small independent county in a frighteningly complex Holy-Roman Empire analogue and he brings it up constantly (often to by chagrin).
So, being able to guess how a word is spelled by listening and vice versa, English fails. I remember an arc where I couldn't say the BBEG names because s's and th's are hard for me, and the name was a lot of that. That arc also had stones that opened portals to other worlds, and couldn't say it, so called them Stargate. I just had to guess so much about spelling, and I was so off.
I feel like what also hurts Mazra and Ma'Tet is that they have the same number of syllables, so not only do they start with the same letter, they have the same two syllable cadence. If you had Mazra and Ma'Ka'Tet, the two names are at least a bit more distinct from each other because you can differentiate the two with how they roll off the tongue. Ah yes, the dreaded Mikuant (or however it was spelled) that came out with Matt's accent sounding like "my cunt". My go-to if I can't think of a name and want it to sound fantastical is to come up with a word, term, or phrase that's associated with the person/place, and then make an anagram out of it. For a character example (though I understand you were focusing on place names here), I made the name "Teshono Lokelin" for a former assassin turned detective. Sound like fantasy nonsense? It's actually an anagram of "One shot, one kill", a name derived from the nature of his former profession.
The Third Company was not the finest, with the players... learned that the hard way.... you are right about silly jokes... and... Is that an Otter plushy behind?
George Lucas used many foreign names in his works because these are names that are not used in Western language and therefore he did not want to evoke any particular feeling or familiarity with some of them. Obi-Wan Kenobi, Qui-Gon, Anakin, all have a East Asian sound and rhythm to them. Shaak-Ti comes from India, it's the name of a deity there. Same with Padme Amidala, Dorme, Nabe, and Naboo, all from India and Pakistan. Endor actually comes from the Bible. I have used both this method and made-up names that sound familiar to real-world geographic locations in order to evoke a sense of familiarity with the players. My homebrew fantasy world is composed of various kingdoms and empires that have a language, culture, and society that is familiar to real-world historical locations in order to be familiar to the players as they are able to better immerse themselves in it. So, mixing real-world names with fantasy ones helps to ease players into the game.
I’m torn about using English descriptive names: Portsmouth or Fernwood screams Britain to me and reinforces generic Northern European fantasy. I’d like to evoke a world that doesn’t have that vibe, but it’s also difficult and less informative to make up or find non-English names. Dragonspire nicely indicates a mountain with dragons in a way that Shilsham doesn’t.
Earth was a bunch of low-scope worldbuilding projects stapled together, is the problem. To the people who named each river, just calling it "the river" was perfectly distinct because there were no other relevant rivers.
Wait, where did you find that Howard wanted "Cimmerian" associated with "Sumerian"? Given Howard's general Orientalist bent, that doesn't sound right at all...
Remember to say them in all combinations too: Me: "The mystical artifact are call the Elemental Klee's Klee Aquos is held by the good guys. Klee Pyros is held by the bad guys Klee Airos Is sealed in a dungeon on a demiplane Klee Tarrus is missing." Players: ... Is it just Men who can't find the Klee Tarrus? Have you tried sending lesbians to look for it? Me: sigh. Son of a Bitch.
Clarification: Tatooine was named for Tatouine, Tunisia which was near the filming location in Episode 4. It's not actually sci-fantasy gibberish. Your point remains but this example was poorly chosen.
I created my world to play with my young kid cousins, but nowadays I've played for years in this world... So with time i realized that some names were too close with others from CR or LoTR. I changed some other i didn't, cause... Who cares 😂😂 My drow realm was called Rhex'Sintum, than i realized that I've heard that in C2 (that had just begun)... So i changed to Yex'Sintrum... In game reason was that that when the coup d'etat happen they changed the name Rhex'sintrum (Capital of The Crown) to Yex'sinteum (Capital of The People) 😂😂 Others are Eldoras (fukin subconscious Edoras + ElDorado), my elven realm. Continents: Paleor, Kruv'Kadash, Memey'zadarah, Breth'alia, Eachella, Drovaria, Satanuss, The Broken Isles, Iwamamoto, Vazar, Dracasia, Zion'Mezenya and Einbretchefield. Some favorite cities: Agoron, Royal River, Royal Spire, Kur Thurum and Kur Ludur, As-Mine Urat, Koszalin, Ord-Bareil, Evaron and Little Evaron, Eyopolis, Fort Cross, Zoria, Ülle, Ossyria, Black Oak, Dusty River, Ovalir, O'verius and the Three Walled Free Towns of Highwall, Oak Wall and Sunken Wall. There are more in other continents as: Daz Plucht and Daz Agurd, Zetlem, Rawon, Bryseis, Hedolim, Yex'Sintrum, Lion's Gate, Urbis Prime....
What is your favorite fantasy location name?
Thanks so much to WorldAnvil for sponsoring this video! Visit www.worldanvil.com/supergeekmike and use the promo code SUPERGEEK to get 51% off any annual membership!
www.worldanvil.com/supergeekmike
Tatooine is also an adaptation of "Tataouine," or "Tataween," a town in Tunisia near where they filmed the exterior scenes on Tatooine (some scenes in Monty Python's Life of Brian were also filmed near the same place years later). In the Berber language, Tiṭṭawin, as it was originally spelled before being corrupted into French, means "eyes" or "water springs."
You never know what something might mean, but a fantasy name might not *literally* mean anything. And even if it does, that doesn't mean it has to mean anything special. "Transylvania" (yes, I know it's a real place) just means "on the other side of the woods." A lot of place names are named for a geographic feature, a river, or a tribe that lived nearby. It can also help with telegraphing the class level of the inhabitants. The local villagers might be afraid of the dread black knight who operates out of the hidden "Swamp Castle," but the nobles of Brandenburg are proud of their rich, cultured history.
That's simple yet fantastic advice.
Thank you!
11:25 I mean Tatooine is famously not "fantasy gibberish with a sci-fi veneer". It's a corruption of Tataouine, a real town in Tunisia, of which George liked the sound of the name and he was thinking a lot about North Africa when thinking how to film the scenes there. Utapau, the original name for the planet, was science fantasy gibberish xD
Thank you for the history/behind the scenes info!
What about Dantooine, though?
Only 6 seconds in but I want to say that prescription drugs often make great fantasy names, especially for extra fantastical things like mages, elves, dragons, devils/demons, etc. Some great ones I’ve found are; Ketorolac, Paroxetine, Anakinra, Domperidone (can be Dom Peridone if you want a first & last name)
Edit - 0:51 well this is awkward 😂
You'll have to put up with questions such as "what were you on when you thought of that?" 😋
@@mdpenny42 “funny you should ask cause i was on Rizatriptan, which just so happens to also be the name of the town you all need to go to” 🤣
This works well actually. Especially if you take the first half of one, and the last half of another. Or if you do them backwards, or just put the stress of a different part, take a letter out. I had a whole group go through the tomb of Su'pres'tore in a one shot I did after going grocery shopping at my local Superstore. No one figured it out until after, lol.
10:50 is essentially the story of how my players only ever referred to an NPC as Rimbottom Darkroast
Running Phandelver, "Glasstaff" became "Glasscock" because my players didn't take him particularly seriously.
I've been waiting for this video for my entire life. Thank you.
"Logical Names" can be as simple as naming the city at the mouth of a port Portsmouth. You could name the town were a Saint is buried after the fact that they're buried there, giving you Bury St. Edmund. Naming a town after two of the prominent features of the area, a lake and a heath (which is a low scrubland with acidic soil and low-growing woody vegetation) Lakenheath. To use a fantasy setting one, A town with a deep water port could be named Waterdeep. Honestly, people will name locations after some simple things.
Another one near where I live, during sunsets, the mountains turn a shade of pink that looks like the inside of a watermelon. The mountains were then named the Sandia mountains because of this.
Put a "th" in it and end it with "ia". Guaranteed gold.
"th" is a great way to make things feel Elfish, because it's a consonant that doesn't appear in very many languages and that's very difficult to say - even a lot of native English speakers struggle with it, and English uses it all over the place, including in the abundantly common word "the". Lots of th is an excellent way to differentiate Elfish names from other races, especially constrasting against Dwarvish which you probably want to give more of a Germanic sound.
"ia" at the end is a great option for larger place names and for places you want to have a somewhat grand feel, because the Romans loved to stick -ia on the end of place names which results in people usually already associating -ia words with places.
And if you've hit the 26 place limit on giving things unique first letters, start using unique first letters on stressed syllables and unique syllable counts. "naKREEnia" still feels pretty distinct from both "neTRIst" and "KELdor".
a funny story: i needed to come up with a name for a city in my character's backstory, but because i still hadn't come up with a lot of details about the location yet, i actually wound up kind of doing this process in reverse-- i came up with the name "Cloudfall" just on a random lightning strike of inspiration, and then developed details about the city by thinking about why people might give a city a name like that (i.e., perhaps, a city located in a region that constantly experiences dramatic shifts in weather between sun and rain.) so i suppose the name started out as technically meaningless (since it was not grounded in anything specific about the city), but i reverse-engineered meaning after the fact based on what i associate the name with.
Cloudfall sounds like a city against tall mountains where, during the time it was being settled, the weather caused the clouds to roll down the slopes like a waterfall. Every year, as the weather gets colder, this happens, so the name of the city became, over time, Cloudfall.
Something i've found can help, that happened lots in the real world, is to take the name of a place and either partially translate it, or make it easier to pronounce in another language.
For example, Baile Átha an Rí (Bol-ya Aw-ha on Ree) (Town at the Mouth of the Rí, if translated directly) became Athenry (Ath-en-rye)
Cloch na Rón (Clockh nah Rone) would be Seal's rock/stone if translated directly, but it was only translated halfway, to Roundstone.
You could also stack things, as a hint that successive generations learned the name of something, then added their own word for that thing onto it. Like Torpenhow Hill, which is, effectively, "Hillhillhill Hill."
Let's make a new world... Let's call it... I'm really making something unique here! Yes! I got it! Let's call the world "Middle Earth"! Oeh! Or "The Sword Coast"!
Actually, pretty recently I got into a setting and the planet there had such a RIDICULOUS name. Something like Dirt, or Ground... Oh wait, it was called Earth!
@@ghurcbghurcb this comment sucks, and displays a misunderstanding of how language works lol
@@fergusofdalibor4264Now now Stanley, no need for harsh words!
As a westerner one of my biggest problems with the Legend of the Five Rings setting is how similar many names feel. So that's a very good point.
For example of River's Rest, you can say it was the name at first, then it was changed to Riverrest. And then because it was to difficult to say, people changed it to Rivest 😄
I make this with a lots of places, and yes, it less evocative but it makes total sense and give a great sense of time progression to some places, even some milestones could have multiple names, or a name for kids and a name for adults.
Rivest isn't how people would really contract it though, the stress pattern is off. Compare to "Everest", which has similar stress pattern and which no one calls "Evest". The most contracted it gets is "Evrest", because you need a little bit of bounce off the "v" into the "rest".
@@yurisei6732 Oh yeah, you are right, it is maybe even better name ^^
Or how the Baranduin River in The Shire is changed to "Brandywine" by the time of LotR. Which is also sort of an in-universe version of the "people mocking the name, then only remembering the mocked form" process.
I, too, have been waiting for this video for my entire life.
But really, I know there are dumb names in the real world, like how many "City of Alexandria"s do we have. Or Yorks. Or "Hilltown" And there is literally a town in New York State that is just "NEW CITY" but NO YOU STILL HAVE TO THINK ABOUT HOW TO NAME YOUR CITIES IN THE GAME
Cool advice, thanks!
Toponyms - is the term for placenames and how they are categorised (for further [too much] reading xP)
generators tend to incl:
- Folk etymology - Shift
- Manufactured - Postcolonial Toponyms
- Mistakes - Postrevolution Toponyms
- Memorial Toponyms
The starting town isn’t just riverey, it’s much riverier than the other towns. It’s the riverest
Yes to saying it aloud! An somewhat important NPC I have is named Sakkini. It's now Zucchini... Everytime haha
YES, The Purvan Suul Syndrome, the bane of every GM. I have a shopkeeper my players call "Icebot Pervert", a legendary blacksmith "Silly Citrus" and a headmaster of a magic school "Master Elastane" (which once devolved to "Professor Spandex").
This is a good channel. I like Mike.
thank you so much for taking the time to make your own captions. your efforts are very appreciated !
“Fantasy gibberish with a sci-fi vernier” is actually a very good description of Star Wars in general😂
(I think the word you're looking for is veneer?)
@@dolphin64575Vermeer?
In the 2014 Dungeon Masters Guide, they talk about naming things to match your players.
Their specific example being "Not wanting to go to Gumdrop Island to meet a wizard named Ray".
I then decided that a campaign I'm building will include a visit to Gumdrop Island to meet a wizard named Ray.
In adapting LMoP for my own setting, I replaced Neverwinter with Meredalin, deciding that the -dalin ending of Phandalin was just an old word from a dead language that originally meant town or village. And because it's a coastal city and the word Mere refers to a body of water it's basically just "Sea Town".
In my head, Phandalin is just the shortened form of "Town of the Phandelver Pact", since it was once exactly that long ago
When thinking of fantasy place names I remember the name of the town my dad grew up in. Back during colonial America the British Crown had automatic claim over any tall white pines due to their use in making ship masts. The only such white pine found in the southern colonies was located in the middle of South Carolina and was nicknamed the King’s Tree. Over time the town that grew up nearby took on the name for itself and thus Kingstree, SC was named.
I don't comment a lot on videos Mike, but your videos are wonderful and this video is particularly helpful for me because I'm bad at name choice/creation in general. So thanks for all the videos over the (feels like this can't be true) years.
My man, these videos are helping me so much
Thank you very much
I'm building right now a world for my fantasy novel, and the first town I'm almost finished building is named Summa, which is a pun in portuguese with "suma" (something like "be gone", "get out", "vanish" or "disappear"), so you can see it's a pretty welcoming town for outsiders
I ABSOLUTELY think of Meadow when I think of Las Vegas…. She was expensive, but worth every electrum piece lol
The closest thing I know of where there are only 26 locations would be the City from the Project Moon setting, which is divided into 26 districts, each associated with a letter.
They do the same thing in One-Punch Man, where they have 26 cities, each of which are named after a letter of the alphabet.
One thing that may be interesting is to define an oficial name of a city, and how different people end up saying it. Locals may be closer to the original, but travelers may choose a simpler version that ends up sticking.
This could be further explored, like elfs, dwarves and humans having different names for the same place, etc. This could be a sign of a more complex issue that sparks conflict, or just a curiosity.
Love the video! As a sidenote be careful to promise to do videos if there are ties for patreon polls
I only say this because Jenny Nicholson did once and then people took that to try and get everything to tie for more content so she just decided she'll choose the outcome lol
2:56 fun fact: that’s how I came up with the names of my nations in my D&D world. I used a map generator, it made 24 countries, so I used every letter once, used one for the name of the world, and used one for what a country used to be called before a cataclysm destroyed basically the entire nation.
Amazing. Can we see the list? I'd worry about the X and Z names being kind of similar or awkward-sounding.
@@dolphin64575
Looking back, I guess I missed K and Y, or ran out of countries to name on my map. The world is named Lassen. I also made sure to associate each country with a character class and one unique thing it's known for, so that is sometimes reflected in the naming choice.
Aria, The Barren Sands, Ceway, The Kingdom of Dave, Esper, Frotheim, Gent'Fal, Homari, The Isloclans, Jorunst, Mulben, Nautalist' Harbor, Oxtica's Academy, Parra, The Qualar Wilds, Reftnoir, Seristan, Throzirian, Udlark, The Vowless Land (formerly Xilon), Wavelund, and Zeugma
Whitestone, for me, is a neighborhood in Queens, NYC, right next to my family's neighborhood, College Point. It's a run of the mill middle-class neighborhood, but it did feature the best German bakery ever, Stork's. Whitestone was named for limestone outcrops along the shoreline. College Point was named for the college, St. Paul's College, an Episcopalian seminary founded in 1835, that used to stand on the point, overlooking the East River.
10:56 In addition, make sure you look up your names and see if your 'totally unique Fantasy name' isn't actually a real word with its own connotations. I once named a very important NPC Bris. My players will definitely never forget them, but not for the reasons I'd like.
This video made me think back to my first crack at a homebrew fantasy setting and some of my own names for cities and locations. For example, the main city on the continent, basically the Waterdeep/Sharn/Emon of the setting, was named Dragonmoore, so you talking about how city and town names can be derived from the kind of environment there were built in, I looked up what "moore" would mean in this context. Turns out, the moors are undeveloped hilly areas and peat bogs, a far cry from the bustling coastal trade city I'd imagined.
Some of the names I still remember were more deliberate in their association, however. The religious capital of the world, Xistos, was named for Xristos, the Greek word for Christ. And admittedly less imaginatively, I named an empire of minotaurs the Minoan Empire, since "Minoan" refers to the ancient civilization of Crete, where the mythical King Minos and his minotaur were said to hail from.
Love the video. Thinking of names is always the most fun but also very easy to get stumped on. I have a very similar naming philosophy where sometimes I try thinking of how a place would get it's name in places in my setting like Lakeborugh and Emeraldfeld but other times I just wanna evoke a kind of feel like with Lesgoth, Bliqin, and Kelna
I do wanna mention that for the Conan example it helps that that is set in our own world in a fictional mythic past
Currently trying to come up with the name of my setting, so good timing on this one, cheers!
12:36 As a non native English speaker, I had absolutely no clue that Emon was spelled like that until I happened to read it, and instinctually from my mother tongue assumed it was spelled Iman - my English brain just turns off for fantasy names. Even now I had to google to make sure I remembered correctly :D
Great video!
I actually disagree with Mike a little bit on how easy it is to guess the spelling of Emon based on its pronunciation, mainly because the first syllable is unstressed-- meaning the vowel is reduced (unless the speaker is overenunciating a little bit). that can make it difficult to guess which vowel it's supposed to be. You might see guesses like "Amon", for instance, and i think "Iman" is also a pretty natural guess. (the general proclivities of english spelling might tip the scales slightly in favor of "o" rather than "a" for the second syllable, but i still think this is technically ambiguous in a fantasy setting.)
I will admit I once designed a (small) region where all the towns started with Ja' or Va' - because I decided it was the cultural equivalent of "-berg" or "-ton" or "-shire" in the local dialect. Then my players promptly boarded a ship for parts as yet unmapped to return a baby dragon to her homeland and all those cultural notes went out the window.
It's interesting, I at once agree with most of your advice here, but also follow almost none of it myself.
I think a huge caveat on this is thay it is really advice for anglophones only. Most people who aren't english speaking are at
least bilingual and that entirely changes the way brain interprets sounds, assumes spellings, recognises variations between names, etc.
When I am inventing names, I am likely to draw on other languages I speak or at least have a lot of exposure to. I use the trick of reserving English names for places where the name's meaning would still be obvious in the "common" language.
Different languages also have very different sound connotations. My name is an easy example... in Finnish, Ilmari is a powerful, masculine name (it's the name of a demigod hero, kinda like calling your kid "hercules" or something), but to english speakers it sounds soft and delicate!
Either way, I love the video. Please make more on worldbuilding topics!
One of favorite uses of the fantasy jargon approach is with one of the countries in my world Yvalya, Vs Ys are so good at making the country feel culturally distinct and mysterious
I named an elf something that, when said aloud, sounds like "ass tree". Blessed be that everyone really liked her quirky nature, so nobody bullied her.
Wild mount makes me think of a bronco…. A mount that hasn’t been broken yet… aka, still wild
Whilst not a place name, the trauma on Matt's face from the name 'Purvan' and the cackles from that table is cemented in my mind as a 'yes, read this out loud'. i also have the same maturity level of Laura Bailey, so thankfully i'm my own greatest ally
i also know how my group functions and what we do with character names - heck i'm generally the absolute WORST at just misreading a name and giving people nicknames
Granted, we're also a group that has a giant boar show up in every campaign specifically to gore a specific player... so yeah
"Maybe he's actually evil..." i laugh so hard every time!
When it comes to fantasy gibberish, I like to imagine what the local language would sound like. Not necessarily designing a full language, but at least coming up with a rule out two about what sounds might appear together or not at all.
My orcish names, for example, avoid bilabial consonants (so, no M, P or B) since they don't play nice with tusks. To borrow your Mazra to provide an example, it would not have been named by my orcs; they would have said Nazra
I ran into the pronunciation issue because I heavily based my continent on Finnish myth and folklore so all the names of the oldest cities were combinations of Finnish words. Needless to say, my players never quite got how to pronounce the western capital Fort Ihmisen, struggled a bit with the crossroad town of Reuna and absolutely NAILED the recently established Three Point Port lol
This is a really good idea for a video.
I mean, I intentionally break the rule of trying to make sure the players won't make fun of a name. Especially when I'm introducing an NPC who probably won't ever be seen again at a time when I want to break the tension a bit.
I once named an NPC Terlan....they were immediately and forever known as toilet or Terlit.
You are a brave content creator for sticking strong to your political beliefs. Most non political creators tend to shy away from any sort of political stance. You have all my respect.
All but one of my main kingdoms capitals has an official name, despite my world existing and being built for literal decades… and that name is Elvenhome, because it’s the elf capital, so there is room for improvement that’s not so literal. Thanks for helping me think a bit harder on it.
i think it's a neat coincidence that "Elvenhome" is basically a literal translation of "Alfheim". at least, that was the first association my brain made on reading it; my brain might be the weird one here.
One of my friends is running a game that takes place in a domain of the Feywild that only has about 10-12 different named locations. A few cities, lakes and rivers, and forests and mountains.
Being multilingual also complicates things when you're picking names. For example, to someone who doesn't speak Swedish, K'varn might sound like an intimidating, mysterious/alien being, but kvarn literally means mill (as in windmill) so it doesn't have quite the same effect if you know that 😂
A good rule of thumb is, don't borrow words from other [existing] languages if you don't know the meaning behind it
I once couldn't come up with a name so I named the capital of an empire Capital. I thought it was cute I thought it was clever, my players mocked me for this for years.
I play on discord, using dicebots. I've just started automatically typing in the proper nouns to the game chat alongside reading them - Both mine and from modules - considering how frequently my players ask for the spelling (even with the easy modern english names) since we're all in the discord text chat while playing anyway. As for Fantasy Gibberish, when I'm not going from pure improv in which case I'll roll on Mythic GME's name table for my Fantasy Gibberish, I'm always wanting to make a simple naming language for regions to derive names from.
...Using the Welsh Ll in a name might have been asking for trouble (NPC name that was _meant_ to be for a single adventure, not place name, but I wound up rolling up something that made most sense referring to that character reintroducing the name), particularly now I've got an association for that faction with 'Pokemon-name style mixtures of English and Welsh word fragments' - And that's not the biggest reason I'm hoping that faction never comes up again.
Saying a poll being a four way tie will make all 4 videos happen has summoned a curse upon you where now every poll will tie
Tattooine is actually named for the region in Tunisia where they filmed that part of Star Wars.
Actally, many names in Critical Role seem to have actual meanings in Arabic, and for a nerdy, fun-loving person like Matt Mercer-who even had a dog named Omar-it doesn't seem like a coincidence 11:21
E.g. Emon means faith, Tal'dori could be from Tal in aranic meaning hill (usually a grassy one with fertile land).
Am mostly spitballing here by i think the point still comes across.
distinct names are the exact reason my homebrew world has a limited number of named towns - yeah yeah, dangerous wilderness and whatnot, i want my players to *remember* the places they go
To be honest I often just look up a map of british towns and villages, cause some locations sound like fantasy names and they can allow that verisamilatude from having a name with a clear meaning and then having the decay of a name that comes with time as people and language changes so does the name and as it gets repeated letters and parts become removed.
River's Rest, while maybe not a great town name, honestly feels like a great name for a tavern.
Biggest rule for fantasy names, names are a big tool to establish or enforce tone, make sure your names make sense for the tone you want.
Planet Bob, I presume?
I have a couple of key tricks that I use to create fantasy names one sometimes I go to fantasy name generators, That's when I don't have an idea for the actual location itself descrition For example one of my more urban towns I picked UA name generator and it gave me Graveyard and gravel stones as some of the suggestions and it gave me an idea of calling it grave town known for its large collection of graveyards means N tombstones and that's sometimes how I flow give me the name of a town and then I can give you some more status for another campaign that I'm working on the kingdom is literally Shahra Only replacing the S with the letter Z, And the kingdom is on the right hand shaped continent with several cities that look like giant rings when you look from the sky. Sometimes it's my basic function of hey I'm going to be lazy but I might as well be creatively lazy. [And yes I use type to speech so it really helps for me to practice speaking certain things]
I always liked how Stargate SG-1 took a few of the off-world names from real places or people. Kelowna is a real place in BC and is a fantastic fake planet name. They named another one after a writer, Tichenor, and did stuff like this in a few other places.
I cheat a lot and give place names fantasy flavor by literally using canon words from the D&D language vocabularies. Sometimes they get smashed together in a weird way, but that's how they start. For example, a primary location in my campaign is "Fae Shanta" which is elvish for "first tree" because it's a city in the branches of a giant tree that has Yggdrasill-y connotations in the setting. An island is called "K'hrekim" which smashes together the draconic words for "hoard" and "coin" to imply an item of relatively minute value, but that one protects for the sake of pride/honor, a name it was given by the draconic speaking empire for ~colonialism~ reasons.
Say It Out Loud has been the death of countless placenames
11:23 tatooine is fantasy gibberish: looks at map of tunesia
yay titan Ae
Generally, I try to stick to some kind of language convention for an area, then I think of the first major settlement in that area, and why it was founded. Maybe it was an event, or it was a geographic location/feature, or a use/purpose for the settlement. Then I just riff on those until they sound right or match the other locals around it. This can mean there are places with similar names. It's never really ben a problem, and the ways it has feel natural, so I don't worry about it. (I also use the same names for NPC's in the same campaign or adventures, because people have the same names sometimes. Is this something you are always told not to do in writing? Yes. Is this in no way how the real world works and people navigate it just fine? Also yes.)
Most important thing though: Is say it out loud. This goes for everything. If you can't say it, you cannot sell it. Maybe you can only say it an a certain elf accent, that's fine. But you gotta be able to say it. And if you can't (cause its draconic and they have different vocal cords or whatever) then you come up with an alternative you can say, or you rework it. (For "Riverrest" I would go with Rivarest, or even Riva's Rest, as the name changed over time. So people might go "Who is Riva?" But it's actually just a language shift. Or maybe the other way around. Either way, it's the double R that's causing the trouble.)
I say let the players make fun. That's what people do.
I actually don't care how people spell things. I always tell them "Spell it how you heard it. That's how _you'll_ remember it." None of these words are really English anyways.
I think Howard wanted you to think of the Cimmerians, not the Sumerians. The Cimmerians were a real people. They weren't quite like Conan's fictional people, but they were a "barbaric" steppe people of antiquity. Very different from the Sumerians who were hailed as great thinkers, city builders, and the founders of civilization. Howard even had a fictional history idea where his Cimmerians and Turaneans were the progenitors of the Scythians of our own age. (Remember Conan's Hyboria is a pre cataclysmic time prior to our own history.)
wow ... I thought for the longest time that whitestone was in wildmount LOL
For making names I'll often think of a handful of thematic words and start throwing them into google translate to a ahndful of different languages, (I know it's not super reliable but from my general experience with learning french and testing it, it handles single words decently enough, it;s mostly missing context in sentences that make it super inaccurate) and I use words from things like french, latin and greek to find some root syllables to use as a base to make a name out of, then changing some letters out to bridge things together so they sound nicer. It's worked out decently, my only big mistake so far still fairly early in my homebrew setting is the mining town of "Rylbahn" has a confusing name because it sounds like "Raubahn" from final fantasy xiv, which is something I really should have forseen, given I always rename mechanus to Temporos in any game I run using dnd cosmology since Mechanus is too close to "mechonis" from xenoblade chronicles.
Tatooine isn't gibberish with a sci--fi veneer. It's a sci-fi veneer spelling over the real world location Tataouine, a city in southern Tunisia where the idea for the underground dwellings of Lars and Beru was inspired. Just FYI.
For what it's worth, I didn't guess the spelling of Ank'harel correctly. The way everyone says it, I guessed it was An'Karel or An'Qarel. I didn't think the 'k' was on the left side of the apostrophe.
can i steal the name River's rest for a town in my world map? been trying to think of a name for a town placed next to a river, and some mountains near a boarder, it is meant to be a trading town, a stop for people who come by land and i do find the name fun to say (but then i do roll my rs)
When it comes to language, being able to roll your Rs is an unfair advantage.
Go for it!
Planet Bob is a great name
I'm dyslexic and trilingual, I truly mean no offense but some of this advice is a bit vague and might not be helpful for everyone, so here is how I make dyslexic friendly and less language specific words:
(disclaimer: this is based on my personal experience, and all the languages I speak are Indo-European and use a version of the latin alphabet so my advice might not apply to languages that fall outside of this very specific category)
1-Keep it short- Ideally keep the word 2 or 3 syllables long, depending on the situation 4 is also fine, but above 5 is way to much and it's very likely people will just abbreviate it to the first few syllables (does not apply to compound words or names with multiple words, in that case it's better to keep multi-names at only 2 words)
2- Less consonants- consonants changes the most from language to language, this is even more accentuated for sounds made from more consonants bunched together (like, th, ph, bl, rr, tt) so breaking consonants apart with vowels makes it easier to pronounce and to write. In general vowels are always a safe bet.
3-Repetition is your friend- using the same letter or same syllable multiple times in the same world not only makes it easier to remember it also gives the word a sense of rhythm.
Some examples of nonsense fantasy words following that method: Gevida, Setar, Atito, Deg, Kigo, Ejio, Bo Gati, Musisi.
Since languages issues affect my day to day I have put a lot of thought into this topic, those a absolutely not hard and fast rules, those are just some tips that I hope might help dyslexic/multilingual dms and players, and help those who aren't any of those things understand our thought process a bit more and make for a more accepting environment.
I let a player of mine name a polity in my world, because you should include your players in worldbuilding right? He said he was from the "Country of Bob." I made it a small independent county in a frighteningly complex Holy-Roman Empire analogue and he brings it up constantly (often to by chagrin).
So, being able to guess how a word is spelled by listening and vice versa, English fails. I remember an arc where I couldn't say the BBEG names because s's and th's are hard for me, and the name was a lot of that. That arc also had stones that opened portals to other worlds, and couldn't say it, so called them Stargate. I just had to guess so much about spelling, and I was so off.
We were wondering what to call our world
I jokingly suggested Here
They liked it
If you are a bad guy or a snob you called it Heré of course
I´m disappointed that Purvan and Jamedi Cosko are not in this video xD
I feel like what also hurts Mazra and Ma'Tet is that they have the same number of syllables, so not only do they start with the same letter, they have the same two syllable cadence. If you had Mazra and Ma'Ka'Tet, the two names are at least a bit more distinct from each other because you can differentiate the two with how they roll off the tongue.
Ah yes, the dreaded Mikuant (or however it was spelled) that came out with Matt's accent sounding like "my cunt".
My go-to if I can't think of a name and want it to sound fantastical is to come up with a word, term, or phrase that's associated with the person/place, and then make an anagram out of it. For a character example (though I understand you were focusing on place names here), I made the name "Teshono Lokelin" for a former assassin turned detective. Sound like fantasy nonsense? It's actually an anagram of "One shot, one kill", a name derived from the nature of his former profession.
What do you mean? Purvan is a perfectly normal name where he comes from!
What vibes does this fantasy continent name evoke: Ezdrakia ? And does it sound good?
I don't think anyone who saw the Purvan scene will ever make the mistake of not pre-checking their made up names aloud! 😂
MIke Hunts!
Say the names out loud! Otherwise you can end up with a man named Nigh Sarod.
Or Purvon
The Third Company was not the finest, with the players... learned that the hard way.... you are right about silly jokes... and... Is that an Otter plushy behind?
No need to call it "Whirlpool Worldbuilding", just keep it simple:
*Whirlbuilding*
😂
HOW DID I NOT NOTICE IMMEDIATELY THAT THE THUMBNAIL WAS TITAN AE!?
George Lucas used many foreign names in his works because these are names that are not used in Western language and therefore he did not want to evoke any particular feeling or familiarity with some of them. Obi-Wan Kenobi, Qui-Gon, Anakin, all have a East Asian sound and rhythm to them. Shaak-Ti comes from India, it's the name of a deity there. Same with Padme Amidala, Dorme, Nabe, and Naboo, all from India and Pakistan. Endor actually comes from the Bible.
I have used both this method and made-up names that sound familiar to real-world geographic locations in order to evoke a sense of familiarity with the players. My homebrew fantasy world is composed of various kingdoms and empires that have a language, culture, and society that is familiar to real-world historical locations in order to be familiar to the players as they are able to better immerse themselves in it. So, mixing real-world names with fantasy ones helps to ease players into the game.
I’m torn about using English descriptive names: Portsmouth or Fernwood screams Britain to me and reinforces generic Northern European fantasy. I’d like to evoke a world that doesn’t have that vibe, but it’s also difficult and less informative to make up or find non-English names. Dragonspire nicely indicates a mountain with dragons in a way that Shilsham doesn’t.
Hehe, Purvan Suul
"Make the names distinct."
*looks at the bajillion River Rivers on Earth*
Stupid sloppy worldbuilding...
Earth was a bunch of low-scope worldbuilding projects stapled together, is the problem. To the people who named each river, just calling it "the river" was perfectly distinct because there were no other relevant rivers.
“algo to the comments and get back my rhythm” i said
Wait, where did you find that Howard wanted "Cimmerian" associated with "Sumerian"? Given Howard's general Orientalist bent, that doesn't sound right at all...
Remember to say them in all combinations too:
Me:
"The mystical artifact are call the Elemental Klee's
Klee Aquos is held by the good guys.
Klee Pyros is held by the bad guys
Klee Airos Is sealed in a dungeon on a demiplane
Klee Tarrus is missing."
Players: ... Is it just Men who can't find the Klee Tarrus? Have you tried sending lesbians to look for it?
Me: sigh. Son of a Bitch.
Clarification: Tatooine was named for Tatouine, Tunisia which was near the filming location in Episode 4. It's not actually sci-fantasy gibberish.
Your point remains but this example was poorly chosen.
I created my world to play with my young kid cousins, but nowadays I've played for years in this world... So with time i realized that some names were too close with others from CR or LoTR. I changed some other i didn't, cause... Who cares 😂😂
My drow realm was called Rhex'Sintum, than i realized that I've heard that in C2 (that had just begun)... So i changed to Yex'Sintrum... In game reason was that that when the coup d'etat happen they changed the name Rhex'sintrum (Capital of The Crown) to Yex'sinteum (Capital of The People) 😂😂
Others are Eldoras (fukin subconscious Edoras + ElDorado), my elven realm.
Continents: Paleor, Kruv'Kadash, Memey'zadarah, Breth'alia, Eachella, Drovaria, Satanuss, The Broken Isles, Iwamamoto, Vazar, Dracasia, Zion'Mezenya and Einbretchefield.
Some favorite cities: Agoron, Royal River, Royal Spire, Kur Thurum and Kur Ludur, As-Mine Urat, Koszalin, Ord-Bareil, Evaron and Little Evaron, Eyopolis, Fort Cross, Zoria, Ülle, Ossyria, Black Oak, Dusty River, Ovalir, O'verius and the Three Walled Free Towns of Highwall, Oak Wall and Sunken Wall.
There are more in other continents as: Daz Plucht and Daz Agurd, Zetlem, Rawon, Bryseis, Hedolim, Yex'Sintrum, Lion's Gate, Urbis Prime....
I do hate it in WOTC books, who have npcs with the same letter in the same chapter. Or Adventure League modules.