It’s good to be back in the playing-God business.
No, I’m not sitting atop a throne of skulls in some third-world hellhole, arbitrarily promoting my friends and executing my rivals. (I don’t have the resume to get that kind of gig. Besides, I hear the hours are murder.)
Rather, I’m doing the fun sort of God-playing, the one that’s all about creating worlds in my own image: New continents, nations, and cities! New rulers, heroes, and scoundrels! New technologies, magic systems, and laws of physics! Conflict! Passion! Exclamation points!
World-building, man. I love this stuff.
I did a ton of it back in the Fantasy Flight days, creating the worlds of Runebound and Vortex. This year, I even got to flesh out my own little slice of Dominaria while working on Magic: the Gathering – Tactics. And now I’m back at it for a brand new project… in which I find myself facing my old nemesis:
Naming things.
I’m traditionally not very good at names – especially when it comes to making them up on the fly. (In my tabletop RPGs, my NPCs often end up named after celebrities – not on purpose, but because those are the first names that spring to mind.) So I came up with some guidelines for myself. These might seem obvious, but they’ve helped me quite a bit over the years, and I hope you’ll find them useful too.
- Use unique initial letters. If there are four cities in a region, the name of each of them should start with a different letter. Ditto for the names of the ten regions, or the 12 clans, or the 16 Ascended Masters of Small Engine Repair. A unique initial letter gives the audience an immediate hook to remember it by.
- Ensure simple pronunciation.
Quick: How do you pronounce “Brujah?” How many other, different ways have you heard it pronounced? I rest my case. (As a corollary, don’t use apostrophes in your names. Just don’t.)
- Watch it with the Latin and Greek roots.
This is one my pet peeves, and your mileage may vary. But if I’m reading about some fantasy world with no connection to historical Earth, and I see a city called “Smithopolis,” it breaks the illusion for me, since “-opolis” is from the Greek, and there were no Greeks here. Now, if you want have a “Smith Necropolis,” that doesn’t bother me – since “necropolis,” despite its Greek roots, is an actual English word.
Any other suggestions for naming stuff? I’m all ears, people. I’ve just started my mystery project, and I’ve already got a couple hundred people and places crying out for cool-sounding, memorable names.
Tricks I have used to give a group its own flavor include: Hard consonants at the beginning like K and G; douubling uup on voowels (sounds better for names, trust me); and adding small amounts of X (but don’t try this with Q or you’ll enter Unpronounceableland, where C’baoth lives). Remember, “sexy” has an X in it.
Chuck, do you find that hard consonants at the beginning are easier to pronounce or remember?
I’m leery of double vowels since they can lead to questionable pronunciations, but I might not be very good at it. 🙂
I love this sort of stuff, too. Kind of an obsession of mine is to try out or taste different settings to see if their solid enough, that is to say- worthy of my time- to get into. Because if they are- I really do get into them.
One thing I’ve noticed for names in fantasy, mainly character names- authors can take a common name and change a small part of it to make a name that is completely unusual and original. The only example that comes to mind at this moment is a character in the book I’m reading now- Wise Man’s Fear. A character’s name is Fela. I would guess it’s just Elle with an ‘F’ stuck in front. Could go the other way, too. Han [Solo] is Hans minus the ‘S’.
I also do like old fashioned names in fantasy and sci-fi- like Paul or Jessica [Atreides] or Sam in Lord of the Rings…or Tim in Quest for the Holy Grail….
GRRM is good for doing that in his Ice and Fire books, too: Robb, Petyr, Joffrey… even Eddard and Catelyn might be “real” names, but they’re certainly unusual spellings.
Using different letters is good advice. I do that myself otherwise I tend to end up with a lot of names conglomerating around certain letters, so I try to spread them out.
This might be obvious, but say the names out loud. Who cares if it looks like you’re speaking in tongues? Names in games are meant to be said aloud. Take for example: Melnibone. I’ve heard it pronounced many different ways, but most were wrong (i.e. not my way of saying it) or Cthulhu (which we’ve both heard countless variables stated as the one true way at cons).
I’ve always had a penchant for naming things–this stems back to my love of linguistics. Good inspiration is studying a root language around which a particular society is based or something in another language which might possess the sense of what you’re after.
For example, in RunePunk, there are the Andari, a race unto themselves of once-humans, who are fluctuating a bit in and out of reality. They were designed to evoke the images of ghosts without truly being ghosts and I hunted around various languages until I settled on German as the base. I think around this time The Others had just come out or the trailers were running and I liked the idea of “others” as what they could be called, but it wasn’t too sexy. The German word for other people is andere and so I twisted it just a bit and Andari was born.
I did/do the same sort of thing for Iron Dynasty naming…I get a lot of mileage out of an online English-Japanese dictionary, putting spins on them as needs dictate.
Regards,
Sean
Comments are closed.