2021
Worldbuilding, Writing
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<aside> 📒 Differentiate characters and convey notions of distance, space, and time – through names
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Same post on Reddit
There are a plethora of names in your game – and on their own, they could tell a story.
When Silvio meets Aslambek, the leagues of travel loom over the introductions. Even before longships ****of ****Helga Rikmarsdottir dock, you could guess their attitude. A sole mention of “Codex Quartus”, “Spear of Apepi”, or “Sunken Xanthos” is enough to convey their antiquity.
In this post, I highlight cases in which having a naming system accentuates worldbuilding. I also made a table with names and toponyms. It has Germanic, Slavic, “rural England” (aka hobbit), and symmetrical (Rosharian) names.
If elven "Elora" is distinct enough from orcish "Grunka", you can drop the race tags and still convey the same amount of information. That is the classic use-case for fantasy names. "Tomb of Annihilation" goes in a different direction: its two dwarven guides are named Hew Hackinstone and Musharib – both are of the same heritage, but one is a foreigner and one is a chultan.
<aside> 💡 To highlight an important aspect of worldbuilding by building different people around it
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In a game of border skirmishes, giving the sides distinct names will focus attention on the nations as political players. And vice versa, if the story is about a province fighting for its identity, making its names sound similar to the capital will indicate the long history of assimilation. If class struggle is the focus of your campaign, bash together Antoinette Thérèse Charlotte de Bagatelle and Ada from Pilima.
The trick to such "highlighting" is contrast and lack thereof. For example, surface elves vs drow: "Faruk ibn Cemal ibn Abdul" vs "Hasan ibn Farah bint Safie" A tense parley proceeds between a halfling burgomaster and a goblin warlord – but they are Lotho Whitward and Cora Bronzespur. A magocratic state breeds gremlins as servants, giving them names like "Roa," "Kek," and "Chem" – and later, when the party finds a colony of runaways, no one there goes by anything shorter than "Saltaravalam".