Thursday, August 19, 2010

An Important Detail

While thinking about the Reign Omnisetting today, I realized it was missing a core detail. A detail that it cannot proceed without: I have to name the city. You know, the big city. The one the whole dang setting revolves around. However, this lead me to realize there are a very few basic naming conventions for fantasy cites, and they all have serious problems. Firstly, you have the City Name that is it's function. Haven. Or more often Blankity-Blank, like Hearthguard or Farwatch or Northguard or whatever. Fine, as far as the go, but bland as cardboard. The other major type is the much more broad Fantasy Name, for which the baseline is always Gondor. You can ride from, and too, Gondor. It's easy to say, easy to remember. However, since fantasy often wants to be original while also being really really generic, its usually a made up word that sounds as little like Gondor as possible. Like Malcadodintessil. You can't shout "FOR MALCADODINTESSIL!" on the battlefield, and gods help you if you are in the Malcadodintessil City Watch, because none of the other city watches will take you seriously. SO, all this to say: Help me name my city. If you can come up with a cool single or conjoined word, fantastic. If you think you have a fantasy name that sounds cool, and iconic, throw it at me. Remember: This is the Last City, the only place in the world where you can go to sleep and assume that you won't wake up staring down a thing with a goats head and panther teeth that's holding your wifes torso in one hand and her legs in the other. So a name that's easy to say would be nice, is what I'm saying.

2 comments:

  1. You should call it Gem. Nothing bad ever happens to Gem!

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  2. Rockenburg! North Radsville! Confederated States of Kickasstesia!

    There is also a third type of city-naming scheme, which is to draw from other, real-life linguistic traditions. I've recently been on a Germanic kick. Through the magic of stereotyping, they tend to communicate a lot about the city's culture, which you may want to avoid here. A "Via Verazzo" is immediately a very different place from a "Haaldenberg", not to mention the proud Fantasese city of "Velandria". In a setting with only one city, though, you might want to ignore everything I've written here, and stick to the naming conventions you've already mentioned, unless you want to give the whole thing a little Earth-style flair.

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