How cheesy are the names of your locations?

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

I go with the boring and practical names -- which to me are more reflective of what names are like in their native language.

My player characters started out in Maidensbridge, have traveled through Foxton on Moss to Middleborough. Now some of them, on the run from the law, have snuck into Goblin Falls and will be ending up in Blackberry Ridge, north of Greywall in the next adventure.

There's Green Mountain, the Great Tower, Moss Pond (and the Moss River), which I'm sure some would take issue with.

All of which are more evocative than the city of The Angels, which is the biggest city near me in real life.

The only one I consider cheesy is a literary reference, the Tulgey Wood (which I included just because I love Lewis Carroll), but either my players haven't caught it or don't mind it.

 

[Shemeska]

My players wouldn't take me or the game seriously if I used cheesy names, and they'd probably look at me wierd and wait without playing till I changed a cheesy name to something they could respect in line with the tone of game they expected.

Some examples of places where hopefully the tone is more serious than not:

The Oblivion Compass - a madly spinning collection of bizarrely shaped and numbered dials and a series of gearworks protruding out of the bedrock in a small depression of land in Pluton, the third layer of the Gray Waste. The gears look like something ripping out of Mechanus, and indeed some of the gears appear to have been created from dozens of modrons welded to one another whilst they were still alive, including what looks disturbingly like a Secundus forming part of the central cog. The area is said to be haunted by the spectral figures of weeping, despondant Parai and an eternally counting Moingo as if the entire device were progressing along a single massive calculation or perhaps a countdown to some future date.

Vale of Frozen Ashes - a ruined city on Gehenna's fourth furnace populated by life-like statues of flash frozen ash resembling fiends and celestials of all types. The statues whisper maddening words of warning and terror at something they have seen but cannot describe, and all the while the ashes of the city appear to scatter by a phantom wind, aggregating and sifting, rebuilding the city grain by grain, preparing for 'something to happen once again as it did before'.

Citadel of Broken Faith - a series of three spiraling towers built atop the godisle formed from the twisted, petrified corpse of the dead god of portrals, Aoskar. The towers perch directly above the dead god's heart, flickering light out across the godflesh and into the void from a great device at their base, in partial resemblance of the Tower of Incarnate Pain's 'reflective chasm' in Carceri.

The ClockWork Gap - a bubble of stabilized space, like a divine domain or demiplane, perched above the gravity well of a singularly massive Ether Gap in the depths of the Temporal Energy Plane / Demiplane of Time. A flat disk of stone hovers in its center, a mile or so across, covered in a constantly shifting hedgemaze and a small stone keep. At the center of the keep, the disk opens above the center of the ether gap where a great clockwork device, vaguely reminiscent of a planar orrery, moves according to the mad whims of Harishek Ap Thul'kesh 'The Blind Clockmaker', a Baernaloth, whose will stabilizes the demiplane itself.

 

[Arnwyn]

My players wouldn't take me or the game seriously if I used cheesy names, and they'd probably look at me wierd and wait without playing till I changed a cheesy name to something they could respect in line with the tone of game they expected.

Some examples of places where hopefully the tone is more serious than not:

Uh-oh. Looks like you matched the OP's definition of cheesy.

 

[Anti-Sean]

I'm all for serious names, verisimilitude and all that, but the group of people I play with, myself included, can make a joke out of damn near *anything*. I like to spend a bit of time to make sure that a name sounds cool, but any time spent insuring that said cool name will be immune to ridicule is time wasted; they will find a way!

 

[Keldryn]

It wouldn't be very believable to not have any silly names...

Near the town where I grew up (William's Lake) in the interior of BC, there was an outlying town/village called Big Lake. On the shores of, you guessed it, Big Lake. Not too far from there is Likely. On the highway through the Fraser Canyon, you will fund Spuzzum. There's some pretty generic sounding descriptive town names too: Peachland, Summerland, Salmon Arm, Golden.

In Alberta, you'll find the famous Moose Jaw. Or Big Beaver, Saskatchewan. And who can possibly forget about Dildo, Newfoundland?

 

[Arnwyn]

In Alberta, you'll find the famous Moose Jaw.

That would be in Saskatchewan, not Alberta.

 

[Raven Crowking]

IMC, I have two known continents, Faerthalos and the Hêtlands.

Town and village names include Long Archer, Selby-by-the-Water (the sunken part of which is called Selby-beneath-the-Waves), Rookhaven, Wyvern's Claw (named for its one tavern) and Kell's Reach.

Place names include: Chadak-Hai, Weirwood the Great, the Grey Hills, the Trollshanks, and a lone mountain called the Horn. The Selwyn River (along which Long Archer is built) feeds into Lake Elidyr (this is where Selby is located). Within the lake can be found Tal Slathan, the isle upon which dwarven Marrowgate is lost and the town of Oakhill was sacked. The village of Gold Cove has recently been founded upon Tal Slathan based on rumours of treasure having been found there.

I was raised in Wisconsin. The question is, am I cheesy enough to claim that state as home?

RC

 

[Huw]

Avantage isn't an English word is it? That would explain why people confuse that one.

You'll find it in some big dictionaries with (archaic) or somesuch next to it. It was quite happy in the English language for 300 years until some idiot who thought he knew Latin published a dictionary and stuck a "d" in there. The new spelling caught on for some reason.

The other one which gets me is sorcerer. Unfortunately, the correct spelling (sorcer*) is now unrecognisable, so I'm forced to use the one I know to be wrong

*Think archery-archer, jewellery-jeweller. Sorcerer is incorrectly derived from sorceress.

 

[Woas]

Wow, I'm really cheesey with names because I've actually used names of real cheeses in my game!

They tend to be the more 'fancy' cheese names so my players never know.

I've tried making more unique names for places/regions/towns/individual NPCs in my games, but I find my players just end up forgetting them and just giving them their own names like "The place we got those magic items. You know, from the old guy with the beard". So I stopped doing that and just give places names that are easier to remember like Bellhold or Sagebush and hte like. I don't think of these kinds names (standard noun-verbish type names) as 'cheesey' at all but actually make for better verisimilitude since the players will actually remember and use them, and not reduce unique names like Port Sizaddunzûl to "That place where there is a big enough temple to get raised."

 

[Huw]

Wow, I'm really cheesey with names because I've actually used names of real cheeses in my game!

Good idea, since most cheeses are named after places to begin with, you're almost guaranteed a decent name.

Incidentally, we named a cluster of servers at work after cheeses.