City names

[Sixchan]

I am currently building a campaign world that will have a late-medevil, early-industrial feel to it. I have a map and everything, and it's all hunky-dory, except that I can't think of any good city names. I've spent ages naming PCs and NPCs I create, and thinking of city names takes even longer. Primarily, I need city names with Oriental(particularly Japan) and European (particularly Germany) feels to them, and any help would be much appreciated. Please?

 

[Hand of Evil]

When all else fails, use real places. Check out a detailed map of Japan or Germany and look at small towns and cities, there are hundreds your players would never have hread of.

Another is an on-line translator: Put in an english word and get out a German or Japaneese one. Use simple words, like ford, waterfall, fire, ice, people, rocks, caves, and so on. Based the word on something about your city.

 

[Sixchan]

I was thinking of doing that, but my players, bar one, can speak German, and all can speak small amounts of Japanese.
And then there was the whole Rammstein incident. In a similar German-based campaign, one of the players came in saying "Hey! Look! That big city we were in four sessions ago? There's a German band with the EXACT same name!" d'oh!

I guess I could go the real name way, but I was trying to think up slightly fantasy-sounding names. What does a German fantasy-name sound like?

 

[Silver Moon]

Japanese Names

This seems as good a place as any for a shameless plug for my Story Hour - as the first eight or so chapters take place in a Japanese society - and I've made references in the DM's notes to some of my key Internet sources. Check out "Chinese Take-out" at the following link. The source about Muirsaka is terriffic, and gives information about all aspects of an ancient Japanese household. While you are they you may also want to read the story - it's rather entertaining.

The link is as follows:


http://enworld.cyberstreet.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=28642&pagenumber=1

 

[Sixchan]

I'll be sure to look them over tonight or tommorow, thanks!

Luckily, I don't have a session until January, so I might buy an atlas on Boxing day (assuming my housmates didn't buy me a bucket-load of Anime. Yeah Right. ) and start rearranging the sylables of the cities. If you can turn Kyoto into Tokyo, I can do things like Osaka into Sakao, right?

The real problem will come when the characters want to travel to the world's equivalent of of Tribal Africa. Those names are a mouthful.