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Message: <blockquote data-quote="CharlesRyan" data-source="post: 5576739" data-attributes="member: 5265">I think this is really important. Nothing makes a culture seem real like a sense of consistency to the language, and the opposite is also true. I hate, hate, hate fantasy milieus in which the names are all basically mashups of random, "fantasy-sounding" syllables--I hate reading those games, and I hate that aspect of writing for them.But I'm also no linguist.My solution is to loosely base a given fantasy culture (or at least its language) on a real-world one. I might borrow something from the modern world (like, I dunno, Slovak), or look at the historical world (say, Saxon). I don't necessarily use real words or names, but I can make them up based on the general sound and apparent rules of the model.It's not perfect, but it does a pretty good job for fantasy games.Oh, and don't happen to know a lot of Saxon or Slovak names? Here's a quick fix: Look at a map, and use the names of rivers and other natural features as examples. That may not give you an authentic list of Slovak (or whatever) person names, but it meets the goal of giving you a set of words and phonemes that sound consistent and logical.</blockquote>