NOW LIVE! Today's the day you meet your new best friend. You don’t have to leave Wolfy behind... In 'Pets & Sidekicks' your companions level up with you!

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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Epic Meepo" data-source="post: 9382784" data-attributes="member: 57073">What’s in a Name, Part IThere are a few design decisions I need to finalize before I can say the text in my sourcebook is nearly finished. Several of those decisions involve names.As mentioned upthread, this book includes descriptions of over one-hundred cultures native to the Realms. For the most part, naming these cultures is easy. Chondathan humans are raised in Chondathan culture; shield dwarves are raised in shield dwarf culture; Serôsian sea elves are raised in Serôsian sea elf culture; etc. Each of the many peoples of the Realms has a corresponding culture.But there are six particular Realms cultures which aren’t so easily named. Three of them have never been explicitly identified as unique cultures and thus have no names; one of them has been detailed extensively but never been given a name; and two of them have established names which, for various reasons, are confusing or potentially problematic.For anyone who’s interested in the specifics, I discuss the six cultures in question in the following spoiler block. For convenience, I've given each culture a place-holder name.[spoiler=Six Forgotten Realms Cultures with Naming Issues]Abyssal Tiefling Culture. Tieflings in the Realms don’t have a single, shared culture, but some of them learn the Abyssal language and interact with Abyssal-speaking Fiends. I decided the shared attitudes of this group qualify as a distinct tiefling culture, but I don’t have a good name for it. “Abyssal” is the name of a tiefling legacy in the 2024 Player’s Handbook, and this Abyssal-speaking tiefling culture isn’t specific to that one legacy. So this culture needs some name other than “Abyssal.”Infernal Tiefling Culture. This culture has the same problem as the Abyssal tiefling culture mentioned above. I can’t call this Infernal-speaking tiefling culture an “Infernal tiefling” culture, because “Infernal” is the name of a tiefling legacy in the 2024 Player’s Handbook. Thankfully, this problem has a potential solution: the arch-devil Asmodeus meddles extensively in the affairs of most Infernal-speaking Fiends and tieflings, so I could arguably call their culture Asmodean.Kata-Turan Hobgoblin Culture. The hobgoblins of Kara-Tur aren’t called Kara-Turan hobgoblins anywhere. In fact, they’re never called anything but hobgoblins, as are the hobgoblins of Faerun. Despite this, these two groups seem to have distinct cultures. Faerunian hobgoblins are raised in goblinoid culture alongside bugbears and goblins. But there’s no evidence of this goblinoid culture existing in Kara-Tur. The hobgoblins of Kara-Tur are a distinct cultural group with no proper name.Koryoan Human Culture. This name is problematic. Why? Because Koryo is literally an alternate spelling of the word Korea. Giving a land in the Realms a name taken from a modern, real-world country is, at the very least, confusing. Korea/Koryo and the Korean/Koryoan people of the Realms need to be distinguished from their unrelated Earth namesakes in some way. That will require changing “Koryo” to some other, similar name, but there’s no obvious alternative to use.Kozakuran and Wa Human Culture. The people of Kozakura and Wa are well documented in existing Forgotten Realms lore. Sources explicitly state that these two peoples share a common culture, and said culture is described in detail. So what’s the name of this culture shared by the people of Kozakuran and Wa? We don’t actually know. As it turns out, no source provides a collective name for the people of Kozakura and Wa as a single, unified group.Orog Culture. Choosing a name for this culture should be easy. Orogs are a specific tribe of orcs in the Realms, and they have a distinctive orog culture. Unfortunately, “orog” also refers to certain elite orcs which aren’t members of the orog tribe, so using “orog” could potentially cause confusion. Thankfully, members of the orog tribe are also called deep orcs, so there’s a convenient alternative to orog. But orogs would likely call themselves orogs, not deep orcs, so deep orc is less authentic.[/spoiler]This leaves me with a lot to think about. I’m still deciding what to use as the final names of these six cultures. I’ll have to revisit them in a future post once everything is decided.</blockquote>

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