Toponomy, or How to Name Places!

[jturner]

I'm with Avalanche - why waste time being creative when the real world has so much fantastic inspiration?

When I create a fantasy or sci-fi world, I make a list of prefixes and suffixes along a theme. For example, my current project has a country whose language and culture is inspired by Welsh. So, looking at a map of Wales, I make a list of prefixes that sound nice, like...

Caer
Aber
Llan
Rhad
Ystal

...and some suffixes...

ymney
avenny
aron
leth
wy

...and maybe a few extra syllables to throw in the middle...

yn
ein
drin

...then I put them into Excel and use that as the basis for a random name generator. So, you get Aberymney, Llandrinaron, Rhadynleth, Caeravenny, and so on. I've noticed that, in general, big cities tend to have shorter names than small villages, so I might cut some down to Ravenny or Andrinon or Rhynleth. They're probably nonsense in the Welsh language, but if your intended audience doesn't know, then who cares, right?

You don't need too many word-pieces before you get a name generator with hundreds of permutations, but which have a kind of cohesion. And don't forget multi-word names, with the equivalent of "Port X" or "X's Landing" or "Mos X" (of Star Wars infamy).

My first language is English, and to my ears countries like Armenia, Pakistan and Finland have beautiful place names. I think you just need to open an atlas and be shameless in your exploitation.

[Mistindantacles]

Not to necro an older thread - but what a great topic!

Having made too many D&D adventures to bother counting them - mostly homebrrew - this topic was of particular interest.

Like some others, I employ a convention to base names - characters, places, and landscapes - on other real world languages. In addition to modern languages (mostly European), I'll delve into older, even extinct, languages as well: Latin, Greek, Old/Middle English being the most common exmaples. I've even used Aramaic, various North American Indian tribal languages, and old Norse.

But I use these as a starting point only. The internet is a wonderful thing (for example: it brought me here, to all you fine folks); it makes it easy to find translations from English to these other languages. From there, I can begin to meld words or parts of words together to fit the particular linguistics that I am looking for.

So that's what I do.

Like I said: what a great topic!