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<blockquote data-quote="Squizzle" data-source="post: 5048462" data-attributes="member: 76486">Look at the first Star Wars film. The names for all of the fantasy elements are very basic: Force, star destroyer, droid, blaster, hyperdrive; all words you can basically understand as a newcomer without a glossary of terms. Heck, the names for the characters are pretty non-fantastical: Luke, Old Ben, Han (with a surname that makes it basically &quot;Hans&quot;). I don't think that anyone would say that Star Wars doesn't manage to create a sense of the fantastic, even with the very simple terminology.If I ever want to create verbal oddity in-game, I act like a wan knock-off of Gene Wolfe and repurpose English. In Dark Sun, to emphasise the smallness of the known world, I would describe large distances in dekameters instead of kilometers; in a standard Points of Light setting, where civilization is sparse on the ground of a large world, I'd use leagues. I would, if feeling ambitious, play with morphology to create new terms for especially fantastical concepts, but I'd keep it simple and rare: off the cuff, as an example, to build a giant elf-people living tree-building might be to &quot;enroot&quot; it, or to &quot;perarbor&quot;, or whatever. Keep it rare, and keep it relatable, and it's less likely to confuse players or to make them roll their eyes.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="Squizzle, post: 5048462, member: 76486"] Look at the first Star Wars film. The names for all of the fantasy elements are very basic: Force, star destroyer, droid, blaster, hyperdrive; all words you can basically understand as a newcomer without a glossary of terms. Heck, the names for the [I]characters[/I] are pretty non-fantastical: Luke, Old Ben, Han (with a surname that makes it basically "Hans"). I don't think that anyone would say that Star Wars doesn't manage to create a sense of the fantastic, even with the very simple terminology. If I ever want to create verbal oddity in-game, I act like a wan knock-off of Gene Wolfe and repurpose English. In Dark Sun, to emphasise the smallness of the known world, I would describe large distances in dekameters instead of kilometers; in a standard Points of Light setting, where civilization is sparse on the ground of a large world, I'd use leagues. I would, if feeling ambitious, play with morphology to create new terms for especially fantastical concepts, but I'd keep it simple and rare: off the cuff, as an example, to build a giant elf-people living tree-building might be to "enroot" it, or to "perarbor", or whatever. Keep it rare, and keep it relatable, and it's less likely to confuse players or to make them roll their eyes. [/QUOTE]

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