Cool, found a couple of new ones.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Swooper
Feel your pain about the trouble of coming up with names. I've often used made up fantasy names in the past, but my players always seem to have difficulty remembering them. So next time around I'm going to try to keep most placenames in our language (Icelandic) which seems to be what the other DMs in my group do, but with at least humans named laike thyss (inspired by Song of Ice and Fire). |
What do the other of you think about "descriptive" place names?
On the plus side, they are easy to make. On the downside, you need to translate them when you don't play in english. And quite often translated names don't sound as cool as the original. And I am targeting an international audience here, so that's something to consider.
I tend to a mixture of both. Actual names for places that have been parts of the local culture for a long time, and descriptive names for everything where the original name is not known or that are so remote that they had not been named until very recently, when adventurers started to visit them. That would mean actual names for the great forests, mountain ranges, rivers, and most old cities, and descriptive names for ruins, mountains, small lakes, caves, and so on, as well as Vandren settlements, since they were all made up on the spot when the people settled there.
And now that I think of it, I should also make words for "mountain", "hill", "fortress", and "pass" in wood elven, giant, and naga languages. That's always very cool when settings do that.