Where do you get good names for fantasy cities, countries, etc?

[JakOfAllTirades]

Just what it says in the thread title. I've got a fantasy setting in the works and it's off to a good start, but I'm stumped on naming cities, countries, continents, etc. And it's a real problem: I just don't seem to be able to come up with original names for any of these places that don't sound stupid or lame.

So where do you go for naming ideas for fantasy locations?

(I'm not so bad at naming characters, but places? Help!)

[FreddyNoNose]

you might poke around here:

http://www.fantasynamegenerators.com...p#.WtkGnn8h2po

[JakOfAllTirades]

you might poke around here:

http://www.fantasynamegenerators.com...p#.WtkGnn8h2po

That's quite an extensive collection of name generators. I'm sure it'll give me some ideas. Many thanks.

[brian 333]

Find an old phone book.

(Some of you may recall large paper indexes which listed most phone numbers in a region by the name of the phone customer. These were called phone books, which have now going extinct along with the trilobites who were their contemporaries.)

Along with their many uses, such as squashing bugs or being ripped in half to demonstrate sexual dominance, phonebooks are a great source of strange names the writer has never seen.

Flipping through the Yellow Pages will offer the author many options, including names which can be tweaked for flavor.

I just flipped one open and found Gootrad, a name I've never seen before. I can use it as is, or I can modify it.

The village of Gootrad.
Gootrad Trading and Merchantile.
The Trad is a vast forest where humans are uncommon.
The Gootra tribe of ogres.

Here's another:
Rotz clan.
The dwarven fortress of Rotz.
The Rotz river.
Z'tor, the city of Caves
The Orz is a vast plain in which mounted barbarians maintain a cultural empire among warring tribes.

[Goblin Slayer]

Read the epic of Gilgamesh or the Poetic Edda.

[Blackjackg]

Speaking for myself, I start with an idea and just rattle around variations in my head until I come up with something I like. Then I write it down before I forget.

For instance, I wanted a name for a coastal city that was rife with crime. Because it's a port, it's easy enough to assume that the city is going to be named "[something]port." Saves a lot of time. I wanted it to be kind of a bleak place, so I just ran through bleak imagery until I found something that was appropriately evocative without being too on the nose-- "Ashport."

Other times, I just start with one or more words or sounds that I feel connect with the tone I want, and tweak them until they're barely recognizable. For a mining city where strength is prized: Ore + Rocks + Aurochs = Orox. When I wanted to make a town ruled by a wizard, I picked out some of the wizardiest-sounding phonemes I could think of and mashed them together until I came up with Zelnath.

It's not a quick process, but it yields results that I find satisfying. And if, like me, you've got a lot of time to think while driving or on a slow day at work, it's a good enough way to go.

[LudicSavant]

Remember that the best fantasy names are evocative of the fantasy cultures and situations that produced them. Whatever your naming scheme, remember what your names say about your world and its characters.

[PhoenixPhyre]

I use real languages as the base, then translate phrases into them and massage until it's pronounceable.

Lake Coin'in is shaped like a rabbit, so I translated rabbit into Irish Gaelic (I think) and massaged a bit. Same with others. Each culture has a base language.

[jqavins]

Start by creating a fully detailed fantasy language. Then, look at real world place names and determine their original meanings in the languages of the cultures that founded them. Translate those into your fantasy language and, voila, you've spent years generating a few names.

So don't do that. Most of us world builders dream of going into that much detail, but either it is beyond our capabilities, it's a greater expenditure of time and effort than is justified by the value of the result, or (most often) both.

Personally, if I'm not going all the way then I just throw random letters together until it's pronounceable and sounds OK, then embrace the cheese. Sometimes, to help keep them straight, I do them alphabetically. The cheese is already embraced, so why not?
Here are some place names:

• Agamato
• Bithela
• Calnap
• Dorperia
• Etc.

Your players might chuckle, but they won't really care.

I'm the same way with character names. I once had a character named Neognud Sretsam, because I needed a name in a hurry and the spine of the DMG caught my eye. (Look at it backwards.) Just don't be embarrassed to have lame names, and the rest is easy.

Embrace The Cheese!

Edit: Also, I will have to give that name generator site a try.

[GalacticAxekick]

Most fantasy parallels some real culture, so I borrow or modify real names.

In a vaguely European setting, I might borrow somewhat obscure European names (Bronsted, Lowry, Wernicke, Broca).

For a vaguely African setting, I might borrow names from my home country, Rwanda (Kangabe, Kirenga, Saruhara, Utemisazi)

For a vaguely American setting (that is, pre-colonial) I might adapt real placenames (Gonquin, Sissauga, Cosalish, Mexotl)

and so forth

[JNAProductions]

Donjon is what I use.

[akma]

My approach is words or phrases with real meaning.

You could try to write a list of adjectives that describes what you want to name, and from that list try to find a word or a combination of words that feels like a good fit. I try to be specific and choose something exotic that uniquely identifies the thing, but also want the name to be short, which I usually manage to do.

An example: in one of my settings there is an important race of immortals. I thought about naming them the eternals, but it felt too generic and they are not the only race of immortals in that setting. They have all sorts of different traits and connections to different things in the setting, but a thing that is both unique to them and important to their nature is their search for something to focus their life around, like a skill to hone, and when they find it they obsess over it until they die. So I called them "the focused", which I feel says so much more then just a random collection of letters that sound nice and have a vague feel about them.

[Knaight]

I'll blatantly steal real place names if I'm confident players won't recognize them. Beyond that I'll come up with cultural phonemes for specific fantasy cultures, and then build names out of them.

[RossN]

Don't be afraid to use descriptions as actual place names - the 'Rocky Mountains', 'Black Forest' and 'Yellow Sea' all exist in reality after all why should fantasy be any different?

[Requilac]

This is kind of a cheap move on my part, but whenever I make names of locations I just choose a key feature of that area (usually an environmental one), write it backwards, then change the spelling until it sounds reasonable. And the word that comes out is your name.

For example, here are the names of the eight continents in a setting I no longer use.

Lahtoak: This is an island continent, which implies a lot of coastline, so I spelled coastal backwards to get latsoac. Phonetically this sounds a lot more like laht-soak. That’s sounds a little awkward, so I changed the spelling a little bit lahtoak.

Ohnacloff: I need a continent filled with volcanoes, I so choose the word volcanoe and spelled it backwards to get eonaclov. Phonetically this sounds more like ohn-acloff. That sounds reasonable on its town.

Soonianom: Next up is a continent which is mostly mountainous, so I chose the word mountainous and spelled it backwards to get suoniatnoum. That is awkward so let’s clean it up a bit and call it sooniatnom. The “atn” is also strange so let’s just keep the n and remove the T. That gives you soonianom.

[jqavins]

Sinaclov: I need a continent filled with volcanoes, so choose the word Galvani and spelled it backwards to get cinaclov...

Galvani? An autocorrect artifact, I presume? (But you could clean up Inavlag for a location that gets a huge amount of lightning.)

[Frozen_Feet]

I'll blatantly steal real place names if I'm confident players won't recognize them.

I don't even worry about players recognizing them, because real place names are often quite unimaginative and repetitive. Like, Shiroyama and Linnanmäki are just Castle Hill in different languages.

[MintyNinja]

For my setting I narrowed in on my inspirations for the cultures that we would play in and found the closest real-world counterparts. Then I would look up some popular shows from that region and mine their credits. For example, in my newest, as of yet unnamed culture, I'm leaning towards Spain and the names I can take from shows like Money Heist. Or for a neighbouring region I could pull from a show like 3%, which is Brazilian-Portuguese. The benefit from this is that I can preserve the similarities between nations and cultures without them feeling artificial.

[JakOfAllTirades]

Lots of great suggestions here.

Thanks, everyone.

[Altair_the_Vexed]

There was a load of argument about how to do this sort of thing on the forums a few months back - I won't link to it: it was mainly stupid name-calling, arguing about cultural appropriation, misconceptions about old World political history and such things.

Anyway, as a response, I blogged on the topic of how toponymy works in real life, and how you might apply that to a fantasy setting with sensitivity and verisimilitude.

Here you go.

[Wampyr]

Step 1: go to the forgotten realms wikia

Step 2: hit random page

Step 3: find a name on the page and change it a little bit

[ufo]

Most actual places are named for their function or meaning to the locals or the founders, so what I usually do while working on a world is give the place a generic name that describes why I put it in the world (The Commune of the Three Towers, the Elves' Refuge, Last Hope etc.) and as the location gets fleshed out, the name becomes more dynamic by including dialects or references to culture or historical events.

[Caracalla]

I like to straight-up steal from here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_o...logical_places

Biarmaland. Biarmaland's a great name, and from the link I learn it's a semi-mythical kingdom from the Norse sagas that had tons of natural resources and was wealthy by trading them with their neighbors. So boom, a nice name and a general concept right off the bat.

What else we got? Cockaigne. I read it's a land of plenty from medieval French folklore. Sounds good as your obligatory quasi-medieval quasi-Western European fantasy country, and they've already got a shtick as a breadbasket. The name might need tweaking, though, as the way it's pronounced sounds distressingly like "cocaine".

[KatteLars]

Personally I solved most of my naming issues, when I found out that in our world, people basically just name things what they look like, or what is obvious. Mostly I forgo the sillier names (that do exist) such as "Boob Mountain", but otherwise... Rocky Mountains is a great example, or Grand Canyon. Shared names are great as well, The river Po in Italy for example runs through the Po Valley (saves a lot of creative energy).

So let's say a city sits as one end of a famously large marble bridge. The bridge itself could be known as the White Bridge, the city could be the city of "Whitebridge", or maybe "Riverford" ('cause of the river crossing). The river itself could be the great "Stony River", or maybe it's coloured by iron-rich clay and is known as the "Heartblood River" or simply the "Redstream". Thinking about a geographical or man-made landmarks and naming the area that, I find actually gives a sense of realism to the setting:)

[jqavins]

or maybe it's coloured by iron-rich clay and is known as the "Heartblood River" or simply the "Redstream".

Or Red River.

[Grim Portent]

I like to do the simple sort of place names used in real life, like the above mentioned White Bridge style given by KatteLars, but I also like to translate the names into a real language belonging to one of the cultures used to inspire the NPCs in the area being named, and if the party are from the area I translate it back into English for that game.

So say we're going with Rocky Mountain, and the area is loosely based on German myth/culture, then a foreign party would have the mountain called Felsiger Berg or Felsigberg, but if they were largely from the area then it would just be Rocky Mountain again. It's likely that some places will have very similar names with a direction added to them, like a town on one side of a mountain being North Rocky Mountain Village and one on the slightly further east being East Rocky Mountain Village. Or Upper/Lower [name], which may not even correspond to their geographic location.

If I'm being really in depth with it I'll try to find some older languages relevant to the area to use for some place names and leave them in that language even if some PCs are local. Lot's of places where I live whose names originate in languages that are basically dead now. Still have simple meanings, but they aren't widely known because of the language barrier.

[jqavins]

In that vein, places are sometimes named after their founders. For example, Levittown, Charles Town, and Saudi Arabia.

Most of these methods are much better than mine, but I still say my way is alright. Embrace the cheese if it suits you.