Naming places

[Nivek]

I have a hard time coming up with names of cities, towns, countries, and what not. I tend to steal them from books or movies if I can't think of a name which I about 95% of the time.
So I was wondering if you guys have the same problem with naming your places. And also where do you get your ideas for the your names.

 

[The Ghost]

Google Maps.

I tend to have the same problem in that I also have a difficult time thinking of place names. So what I do is use google maps and scroll around the world looking at different real place names until I find the ones that sound right.

 

[diaglo]

i jot down about 30-50 names.

i use them for random NPCs the party wants to chat up
or for the name of places they can visit. adding river, mount, or polis as the need requires. or variants of them in other real world languages.

after the session i insert the new NPC or place into the campaign.

 

[Ajar]

I use real place names as my basis as well, but I generally adapt them somehow. For example, in my current PbP Iron Heroes game, I created three major nations. One was based loosely on historical Byzantium. I broke Byzantium down into syllables, tweaked them, and named my nation Karantia.

 

[Cor Azer]

In my real-world experience, places are named after one of three things:
1. The people who live there (ie. Germany - land of the Germans)
2. A famous person (local or not) (ie. St. Petersburg)
3. A local terrain feature (ie. Glendale)
(4. Sneaking in the fourth naming method - some combination of the above)


Names of civilizations or individual people is an ever-present problem in RPGs, and using real-word, but foreign, names as inspiration often works.


When I try in game to name things using the third method above, I first come up with a bunch of word 'parts' to represent various terrain features (ie, 'fryj' in the name will imply something to do with a major river, 'kjur' will invovle a nearby volcano). Then I come up with short, descrptive names of towns and such, and translate them into my vocabulary:
- the town in the shadow of the volcano becomes Kjuriyo
- the village on the river is Fryjjarwa
- the volcano itself is Kjur Peak
- the main river is Iyofryjkawa (river town of the spirits)


Using different word bases for different cultures provides consistency within the culture, but regional variety.


For greater variety, have some alternate spellings for your base vocabulary (ie. In English, 'town' and 'ton' are effectively the same, meaning 'a town (of)').

 

[weem]

For NPC names, I just come up with them off the top of my head, unless something more bizarre is in order, or if it has some theme I am not good at coming up with something for.

I do the same with cities, but I take inspiration from past games, campaign settings etc.

 

[Theo R Cwithin]

.

Google Translator.

.
IMC, different cultures, countries, peoples, etc, speak real world languages (more or less) by proxy. I just make short English phrase to describe the place (eg, green hills), think up a few synonyms as well (green/grassy hills/small mountains) then run these through the translator into the target language. Then I tinker to suit.

Simple example:
- Descriptive text is "green hills", also green= grassy, hills= small mountains, etc.
- Target language is based on Croatian.
- Google says things like: "zelena brda" or "mala travnata planine"
- I like the first one, so I call my place: "Zelenbrid", or maybe "Bridzelen".

....which I'd probably say exactly once in-game, and thereafter call "Greenhills", because that's MUCH easier for English speakers to remember.

(This is also a nice way to generate texts to use as props in-game: letters, orders, map labels, etc.)
(It's also fun if you just enjoy languages )

 

[the Jester]

Usually, I name things after features, history, people or what happens there. For example, Overland is a town that is in the middle of the plains; Wheatfield produces a lot of wheat; Lorn's Fort was established by someone named Lorn. Those are all examples from my current 1st to 2nd level group's starting area.

Other names usually have some kind of linguistic inspiration- i.e. maybe I've established that "-lose" as a suffix means "city," and one of the old cities was historically called "Var"; now it is "Varelose."

Then, other times, I use place names that are drastically different from those around them as clues; "Dasserc," in the low-level area mentioned above, is something different than the rest, and ominous stuff happens there.

 

[Jack7]

History is full of good names, and strange cuisine.

 

[Doug McCrae]

Atlas. English place names are probably the closest fit for a typical vanilla fantasy world. You can mix them up a bit, switch syllables around, change letters, if you want to hide your source but retain the feel.

Steal from fiction, though make sure they are not well known names such as Mordor. Tolkien is, nonetheless, a good source to steal from provided you go a bit more obscure. His names are first rate and there are so damn many of them.

List of fictional countries

For naming people, I've found Gary Gygax's Extraordinary Book of Names to be excellent. It not only has lots and lots of lists and random generators, it gives much useful advice on naming.

Onomastikon is a great online resource for historical names.

There are also many online random name generators such as Seventh Sanctum and Behind The Name.