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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lizard" data-source="post: 4165106" data-attributes="member: 1054">Well, in the interest of honesty, I can't fully disagree...while I never got that from the AD&D books, I remember loving the original Arduin trilogy because of the things it mentioned but never explained[1] -- things like the table of coins from different lands, or the lists of inns or guilds, all with barely a half-sentence of description, did get me thinking about these things for my own worlds, though I never used theirs."White Raven" and "Golden Wyvern" don't do a damn thing for me, though. Maybe the problem isn't that they are names...it's that they are *really* *lame* *names*. (No offense meant to any designer who thought they were Really Cool...no arguing in matters of taste, and all that. I do think they fail on two levels -- they don't describe and they don't inspire. The latter is opinion; the former, I feel, is something closer to fact. )(And, come on -- are you saying that 'Hand Of The Dread Lich' wouldn't inspire you? I know it would me, perhaps more than 'Hand of Vecna'...hell, learning the *name* of the Dread Lich would be a quest in itself...)[1]In some of the stuff I did for Pelgrane's Dying Earth, I, poorly imitating Jack Vance[2], mentioned a bunch of cool-sounding names and places as fluff text. Then they said "Cool, write more about these!" Greeeeaat. Like I had any idea what they were. I always felt describing things took something out of them, that they were a lot cooler as hooks for the imagination than concretized. Once you describe Lost Talambriin, it's not Lost anymore, and thus, much less cool. But I digress. [2]As if even the best writer (which I am not) could do more than a sad, pathetic, shambling imitation of the master wordsmith.</blockquote>

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