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Naming Fourth Edition
- Thread starter Khuxan
- Start date
bringerofbroom
First Post
1. Faerie / The Wild Realm
2. The Draka
3. The Shadow lands
4. The Fey / The Beautiful Folk ( Even the evil / ugly ones are 'beautiful' in order to not piss them off )
2. The Draka
3. The Shadow lands
4. The Fey / The Beautiful Folk ( Even the evil / ugly ones are 'beautiful' in order to not piss them off )
I'm A Banana
Potassium-Rich
1. Feywild isn't too bad. But something like The Primal, or Sylvania, or Arborea, or the Spirit World would have more resonance.
2. What do they call themselves (e.g.: what's draconic for them?)? Perhaps call them the Kujuta (what Bahamut "supports" in myth), or Bameh (a corruption of Bahamut), or the Athine (from Leviathan, the monster who represents the "Tiamat" role in D&D in Jewish myth). Or even combine the words, perhaps Batia, or Tiathine. Bump a few letters around to make it flow in a pronouncable way, you've got something evocative and useful.
3. The Underworld. Hades. The Dark. The Afterlife. Sheol. The Pit. Much more resonance. Shadowfell is middling.
4. Eladrin isn't too bad. Fey? Fairies? The High Folk? The People of Light? Sidhe?
Whenever I see the word "dragonborn" it makes me think of a dragon giving live birth to a person.
That's not a mental image I want.
"Feywild" works okay, mental-image-speaking, because it makes me think of thick vegetation and a pixie who is very angry. Shadowfell works okay, because it makes me think of a dark pit. But in both cases, we have such a richness of real-world myth to draw from, why would be bother re-naming it something else? Or if we're going to name it something else, why not transcribe it into Elvish or Draconic or Gnomish or Dwarvish or something.
What's the Eladrin's name for their home? What do the dragonborn call themselves? What do the ghosts speak of the land from which they come?
"Feywild" doesn't sound like a high-elvish term. "Dragonborn" doesn't sound draconic at all. "Shadowfell" doesn't sound like the whispers of a half-living spirit.
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Charwoman Gene said:
As for names:
1. Faerie. Feywild is annoying because it says "Okay, we're talking about Faerie but we need to punch it up! Give it some zazz!" Just my opinion.
2. Meh, dragonborn is fine. Whatever.
3. Lots of options, depending on which mythology you want to use. Shadowfell is fine too, if a bit overwrought. Since D&D doesn't exist in a vacuum, more obvious choices like "Underworld," "Shadowlands," "Umbra" and "Dark Side" can all be considered "taken" since they instantly evoke something else from a WOTC product or competitor's product.
4. Fey. Or some nice harmless totally made-up word, like "Finneolori" or "Eladrin"
Hussar
Legend
I'd have to vote against Sylvania, simply because of the rabbits. There's already the Sylvania family toys, and that's NOT the image I want in my game.
The problem with simply using Faerie is that it carries a lot of baggage with it. For most people, Faerie is a nice place where pretty girls with wings put dew on flowers all day long. Feywild, at least, pretty much nicely sums up what the place is going to be.
The same goes for Shadowlands. It's too heavily tied to Oriental Adventures. Besides, we're already going to have a plane of Shadow, so, it steps on those toes as well. Shadow in D&D hasn't really been about an afterlife really, since you go to whatever reward you are supposed to go to based on your alignment. That's why I don't like Shadow Fell either.
Although, this just occured to me, I missed where it said that dead souls go to the Shadowfell. Where was that mentioned?
I'm A Banana
Potassium-Rich
The thing with that is that, with an evocative name, you can make it something similar-but-not-the-same and still carry the weight of whatever baggage people bring to it.
People who assume that Faerie is a place where there are pretty girls and dew on flowers are right. But Faerie is also a plane of brutal natural expansion, rampant wilderness, etc. These images are not incompatible.
Shadowlands is actually worse than Shadowfell IMO, because Shadowfell sounds appropriately dire and dismal. But any word for a dreary afterlife works pretty well.
Think of what, say, Mount Olympus was in Planescape. It was the home of the (greek) deities, but it was ALSO what worked for the game (namely, an adventure location with a greek feel and a place to get from plane to plane easily).
A solid, evocative term can carry more than one idea. The Dryad Thread is proof enough of that, where people are saying "I've got no problem with this being A TYPE of dryad" for the twiggy monster picture posted there, and some even have no problem with it being THE dryad.
Whereas a poor name ("dragonborn") has problems even carrying it's OWN weight.
Though a lot of this is, to be honest, very subjective, no matter which way you slice it.
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ruleslawyer
Registered User
This was clearly a good gedankexperiment, Khuxan. AFAICT, I like WotC's names much more than anything else I'm seeing here.
KM, I see what you're saying, but I think that it's easier to write up precisely what something is meant to connote if you use a new term for it than it is to write up something using an existing term and try to nuance it in the way you're describing. If Faerie means cute little fairies and flowers to some people, the fact that the Faerie of legend also means inscrutable and occasionally savage power is probably not going to sway those people. A "feywild" can be constructed from the ground up and characterized by the DM to mold player expectations without running into preexisting baggage.
KM, I see what you're saying, but I think that it's easier to write up precisely what something is meant to connote if you use a new term for it than it is to write up something using an existing term and try to nuance it in the way you're describing. If Faerie means cute little fairies and flowers to some people, the fact that the Faerie of legend also means inscrutable and occasionally savage power is probably not going to sway those people. A "feywild" can be constructed from the ground up and characterized by the DM to mold player expectations without running into preexisting baggage.
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