Transcript
I was born in San Francisco and my dad was born in Oakland. So I grew up rooting for the Oakland Raiders football team. That’s American football, just to clarify. And there probably couldn’t have been a cooler sounding “fantasy-ish” type of team name, right? Coupled with their cool as hell emblem – I mean, c’mon, it’s a ——ing pirate! – and their just badass colors – silver and black – there was no better football team for me have grown up watching.
Now, that team has moved cities a couple of times and at one point they almost became the Irwindale Raiders. And their words were gonna be “We do not sow.” And Irwindale sounds about as close to Icewind Dale as we’re ever gonna get in real life, right? So I was down for that move. I mean, I don’t watch football … I don’t really watch any sports, surprise surprise, but we’re all about names today. I think the poor Raiders are now in Las Vegas, which makes sense I guess. All pirates and scoundrels basically end up in Vegas at some point in their career, right? Las Vegas Raiders … nope, no ring to that at all.
Also, Las Vegas sucks and is a blight on humanity. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a necessary manifestation of the human shadow self, but good lord the vibes in that place are the opposite of soul-enriching.
But there’s just something fun and visceral about names and naming stuff, especially for stories, and for tabletop games, which are story-adjacent, right? For me, coming up with names is one of the most fun things to do. And I have a couple of techniques I use help with the whole name-generation process. And nope, none of these involve ChatGPT or fantasy name generators.
Greetings good humans and welcome to Tabletop Alchemy, where we share tips and tricks and other things to help us all have more fun gaming. And writing. Basically telling stories, right? And we thank our patrons, who probably need a cool group name of their own. One more item on the to-do list. Your support is much appreciated.
All right, today I thought I’d share some of the things I do when coming up with fictional names for fictional places and fictional people and fictional items in my fictional fantasy worlds and stand-alone stories. These ideas I think can be great for writers as well as gamers and Dungeon Masters.
There are three main activities I do when trying to come up with names. And while, as I mentioned, I don’t use ChatGPT or fantasy name generators, three tools I do use are 1) a thesaurus; 2) as thick of a baby name book or I guess nowadays as thick of a baby name database – as I can find, and 3) Google translate.
Now, these things I’m gonna tell you about, I just kinda really like doing. They’re fun for me. You may not like this kinda stuff at all or you may well find ChatGPT and/or fantasy name generators perfectly fit your vibe. Rock on, that’s totally cool. Whatever works, works.
So this first technique I typically use for location names. Of course, you can certainly mix and match all of these methods to come up with any kind of name. But yeah, for this first method, I grab my favorite thesaurus. I’ve got a physical copy and a Kindle copy and it’s called The Synonym Finder. Any thesaurus can be a good tool for this but I find generic sites like thesaurus.com quite a bit lacking, so I stick with this thing.
A convention I use a lot is putting two words together to make the name of a place or location. And I’ll just start writing down lists of words. I typically have a theme or feeling in mind but the cool thing about this list generation is that it’s basically stream-of-consciousness. So ideas and trends that you gravitate toward will start to form as you go.
So I might be looking for a village name. Maybe I think of the word “vale” which is kind of a common fantasy location type of word, right? So now I’ll want to make that place “Something” Vale. I might start listing colors. Scarlet Vale. Crimson Vale. Indigo Vale. It doesn’t matter what these sound like, or if they’re good or stupid or anything, we’re just letting thoughts flow, laying words down to see what comes out. Of course “Shadow Vale” is gonna come up. Typical fantasy name right, Shadow Vale, very generic but it’s got a vibe. So now I’ll dig into the thesaurus – the – the – this is really hard to say, the, thesaurus. Say that fast, the thesaur- oh my god, that is uh, that’s tough. That’s a doozy. So now, I’ll dig into thee thesaurus. See, I knew I could do it.
We’ll look up “shadow” and start writing down interesting synonyms that catch our interest. I just start noting words I like or feel like might be inspirational, they may not necessarily be something fitting for a location name, but you know, it’s just cool to note things down that are interesting in the moment. I like shade, haven, bield – now that’s a weird one, but I could see that being used in a town name or something like that – and of course I like the classics here, specter and phantom, and this is another weird one that just sorta makes me wanna take note: mien, and then cast and guise, these could come in handy for artifact or item names, maybe. I like the sound of artifice, and stalk has some interesting connotations and this one, chase, coupled with the previous mention of trail, even though intended I think as verbs, I totally saw a trail named “Something Chase”, like, “That bastard fled down Orickson’s Chase, after him!” And Orickson’s Chase is some kind of cliff-sided overgrown edge-of-the-mountain trail that descends into a valley of deep forest or something.
These are good ones here too, augur, nebulous, murk – that could be another great location name, like Bugson’s Murk or the boat disappeared into the weeping moss of the Greensteel Murk. It’s a swamp or something, right? We’ve got gossamer and phantasm and chimerical, which of course comes from chimera, and arbored, that’s a good one, and umbral – which umbral was definitely the inspiration for my fantasy world’s God of Magic and Mystery, Umbrael.
So I might just jot these words down and then start coupling them with other words to make names, either for places or items, even people. Shadow Bield sounds kinda cool … it’s not quite right, but you get the point.
So this is just one example. Here’s a page outta one of my notebooks, so you know, you can see I just sorta run with stuff. Like here I went with a bunch of variations on Hollow and Croft. And then over here I went on a “garde” riff for a bit. So yeah, I just have fun with this.
Now on to method number two. Okay, for this one I’ll use a baby name site or books, whatever, and I’ll look up names from different countries, I’ll look up surnames and bastardize them with weird fantasy spellings, you know, swap out I’s for Y’s, typical stuff like that. I typically approach these conjurings from a phonetic point of view too, so that sounding them out is kinda how they’re intended to be pronounced.
But, as I mentioned in the Silver Bayonet warband video, I really like to look at that meanings ascribed to all these names. I don’t always care what they are, but a lot of times, the meaning can generate more ideas. Now because I’m doing this for fantasy type worlds, I’ll almost never use a name straight up, but I’ll come close now and then. This is all inspirational in nature rather than literal. Most of the time.
So, as a quick example, let’s google “baby names Persian”. Any initial search for the term baby names will bring up a stack of sites to choose from, I’ll just choose one and we’ll see what we get. I guess we’re going with thebump.com and yeah, you’ll probably start getting some ads for baby products, this is the internet, after all. So here we go, let’s look at “unique” names just to see what comes up. Right off the bat, I dig this name Cyrina, that’s got a pretty fantasy sound and spelling to my American ear. And the meaning is cool too, “throne or sun”. Simple, I’ll jot this name down and then maybe look at some boy names too. I like this Cye, nice and simple, and I like Pedram too. Pedram means successful, rock, stone. So a strong stout kinda name, maybe for a character like Perrin in The Wheel of Time. But it could also play against type and a character with this name has to learn how to live up to it. We can check the unisex names, take something like this Roshan, I don’t know if I pronounced that right, and swap that letter A for a Y and there’s a perfectly cool fantasy name, right? Roshyn. I like that one.
Let’s look up say German surnames, see what we get. Whoa, huge lists here, there’ll be all kinds of name inspiration we can take from this. Right at the top, Abendroth, that’s great, I’d use that as is. I like this “droth” bit, I’d keep that in mind and start pairing different prefixes with that syllable. This is all personal aesthetic of course, you just riff on what jumps out at you. But there are lots of nationalities and languages you can do this with, a fountain of inspiration just waiting for you to check out.
Again, I prefer this to random fantasy name generators. It might just be because of the extra work I’m putting into the creation of a name that makes it start to mean something to me or I don’t know. Fantasy name generators are totally fine and can create some cool sounding names too, I just feel like I get stuff that’s either too random or too similar from those types of things, again, that’s just me. I like looking at names and thinking about them and the characters they inspire or finding just that right spelling or sound for a particular character I already know the background of.
Okay, the third activity I’ll do, I use for all kinds or types of names. Meaning like names for people or places or cities or landmarks or special items, artifacts, et cetera. I really like using Google translate for seeing what other languages do with specific words I’m choosing based on their feeling to me in English. Then riffing on the word spellings or mashing up words and concepts. Again, this is mostly inspirational and what I’m working towards is a name that sounds cool but evokes a certain idea or theme or feeling. Sometimes I’ll just start making lists of possible names for the thing or person in question.
For example, let’s jump over to google translate and let’s punch in “falling light”. I think I’m gonna go with this term for the overall name of my world. Connotation-wise anyway. The end result that I settle on may not have anything to do with an actual translation of “falling light” but it’s a starting point, right? So now I’ll just run the drop-down through different languages and see what the words look and feel like. Ooh, I like this word – is it “vallend”, “fallend” from Dutch, I just like it as a word, I’ll use that somewhere. How about Latvian? Oh, kritosa, that’s cool. Maybe I do that letter Y swap and go with Krytosha for something. What if I change light to steel, falling steel. So that’s pronounced kreetosh tarosh, so I could see having some kind of magic weapon, like a warhammer or dagger called the krytosha tarosh. What if I check for water in Latvian. Udens. The warhammer Krytosh Udin, it holds the energy of the raging waterfall within it’s rune-inscribed obsidian head.
See, stuff just starts flowing and we just start riffing. It’s super fun.
A couple side benefits to just having fun riffing on names is one, you’ve got a bunch of future references, that’s always handy, and two, while you’re looking for that “just the right name” for whatever, you’re almost guaranteed to come up with names or maybe just words that start to inspire other locations or characters or things. I’ve learned that this kinda stream of consciousness, rambling list-making is kind of how I come up with a lot of stuff. And it usually just starts with me needing to go make up one name for one character.
Stream of consciousness, free-flowing thoughts, iterative generation, this is all pre-production fun stuff, the idea stage of projects. And always to me the most fun. It’s gathering the clay to put on the ceramic wheel so the shaping can begin. The best part of all this, to me, is the lack of restriction. Just picking out cool stuff that catches your eye. Later, you can start to dial all that cool stuff in to whatever specific use you’re trying to fulfill.
So, go generate some cool names for people and places and, you got it, magic items! And if you have other techniques you dig for name generation you like to use, share ‘em in the comments below, so we can all get in on the action.
See ya!