Ok /tg/, I've got a question about naming things/groups/beings in games you run.
What is better/worse:
>Naming things titles or such:
>The Risen
>The Whisperer
Or
>Made up fantasy alternative names:
>The Ilyrians
>Marrok (also called the whisperer)
The titles thing can sound kind of dumb if you do it too much, but it does generate a good image of who or what that thing/group/being is.
The fantasy names seem more "real" in setting but also don't convey any sense of what the thing is.
What does /tg/ think, is one superior or is a mix good?
>>48187819
giving thing titles like "the risen" isn't too bad you just have to watch for the pitfall of calling things something too common in fantasy or your players are liable to connect the two when you don't want them to. on the other hand naming a religion Illy'flkahdkean causes another problem of no one caring enough to learn how to pronounce the name and giving it a stupid nickname.
Both work to a degree, but I think titles work better when your saying things out loud. Names based in pretend languages or whatever might make sense, but tend to sound kind of awkward when you aren't just reading them. I might be biased since I live in a place where locations are mostly combinations of things like mount, forest, lake, park, or similar words like that
I usually reserve fantasy naming convention for character/family names and just assume locations have a convenient name in your own language
>>48187819
at laest have the decency of removing more than just one "L" from Illyrians
>>48187974
That first letter is supposed to be an uppercase i, ends up looking like a lowercase L instead
>>48187860
>>48187940
I'm actually a little surprised to hear the (initial) majority is preferring title names, I like those myself but I just worried they sounded kind of odd
I've heard people say naming things titles makes it sound like destiny where literally every plot important group, being or thing is named a generic title. Although I suppose as the first anon mentioned, this can be overcome by not using way too common/generic names
>>48187819
Mix of both. Just like we have the Rocky Mountains and the Appalachians. Not everything can be "Darkmarsh", but if you have a particularly dark marsh and think the name sounds cool, go for it.
Or name it some random mash of syllables you think sounds neat. It was probably named in a made-up language anyway, and it's not like you've got a linguistics professor grading you. I've also been known to just take words that describe the place and flip/remove the letters until I get something I like.
A place that I think is foreboding might get named "Orebog". Or maybe "Orëbog" if I really want to throw some random shit in there to disguise the fact that I made up the name in thirty seconds while typing this post.
Short answer: It doesn't matter that much so don't sweat it.
>>48188001
...oh
well
give them romphaiai
>>48188034
Taking the "The" out helps a lot. Calling something "Redbeach" instead of "The Red Beach" makes it sound a lot more like something people would call a location
>>48187819
I prefer Name (title). You get your name, and something that players can latch onto all in one.
Oh yeah Brickletittyshire the city of walls. Yeah, now I have a word, and something people will actually remember. All in one. Which leads to another.
Towns get names based on corruptions of real world words in the language of the culture it most resembles, people get slightly altered real world names GRRM style, preferably semi uncommon/archaic names to give it the slight fantasy feel, monsters and organizations have descriptive names and titles.
Lord Alfrid of Canmutha recruits the players to kill the venerable troll Yellowscale who has awoken and begun a march down river.
The farmer Erig has been found slaughtered by the wendgio Black-gnash north of Braedthen.
The smuggler Marus has found a new rout to Magastrav, but the Green Guard are on to him.
That sort of thing.
>>48187819
While it doesn't hold much water logically, I like the idea of reserving fantastical (ie. gibberish) names for a select few important things/titles/locations/institutions rather than spattering them everywhere. while people are obviously capable of memorizing dozens of new made-up terms, I think they start to check out mentally if they're having to juggle more than 2-3 at a time
You can still make real words seem "foreign" over the size of a culture by choosing how you select the names (eg. your mystical human society gives all of their leaders nebulous titles like "first guide" or "listener", your closet-case elf society names all of their towns floral things like "rose falls," "lilac cove") or, to a lesser extent, by including people's names as part of a compound (Ykful's Hill etc.)
>>48187819
A ton of places in real life are just a combination of nouns that describe what the place looks like. Here are three places near where I live that use this naming pattern:
>Windy Hill Farm
>Oak Grove
>Blackwood
Places that aren't named after the immediate area are usually named after the important people that either discovered, settled, or ruled over the region. For English naming conventions at least, this usually takes the form of their family name with the description of the place immediately following (i.e. ville for village) Here are three other examples from my local area:
>Morrisville
>Hillsborough
>Walkers Landing
ATTENSHUN
http://www.strawpoll.me/10703166
>>48187819
endeavor for the mellifluosity of your bespoke words to evoke the meaning you're going for
Most places in the world are named either after their location or a particular person. See how many country names just mean mountain.
Most people's names(surnames) stem from their profession, manners, personality, deeds, relations, nicknames.
What I'm saying is if someone has a universally attributed name, they better have a good reason for it. Look up historical figures and their kickass and/or silly nicknames that stuck for centuries.
You know what's superior? Actually having thought the languages and cultures those names come from through.
If you can't be arsed with that, which is perfectly understandable because shit takes work and education, endeavour for consistency. In the end neither of the two is inherently superior, and it rests on the execution and details. Also nothing is stopping you from using both for the sake of clarity, especially for deities or mythical heroes. Marrok the Risen sounds like a swell guy.
>>48192373
Ok, so to go off of this, if I were to be naming things during a "mythic age" where most of the beings running around are gods who just appeared out of the ether, how would I put together that sort of language?
Like, that is so far off from a normal culture in some respects, I get doing that work with mortal cultures, but what about divine cultures in "early mythic" settings or worldbuidling?
>>48192624
If the 'culture' of the pantheon survives until 'the present day' of your world, internal consistency is your only problem. And it's a rather large one, since this will be the core from which most, if not all, of your mortal languages and cultures stem. Have fun.
