The Campaign Builder's Guild

I love building campaign settings, but I find it very difficult to come up with names for them. This results in a lot of documents on my computer full with very unimaginative titles.

I'm sure I'm not the only person with this problem, so I'd like to ask the following questions, in hopes that it will help erode the writer's block that world-builders like myself have been having.

1) How did you develop the name for your campaign world?
2) Do you have any advice on naming a campaign setting?

My theory is by learning how other world-builders named their settings, I can get a better feel for how I can name my own.

I have this problem all the time. I even had a discussion about it on the mIRC with Polycarp, TMG and some others about what makes a good setting name.

Basically it boiled down to, what do you prefer? A setting named descriptively, so that the name gives you a bit of an idea what is in it. (The Bronze Setting, Clockwork Jungle, Cadaverous Earth)

Or maybe your setting just has its own name (Like Celtricia). Sometimes this is derived from in setting places like the name of the planet or plane.

Or maybe you just named with something you thought sounds cool.

I've tried most of these different ways. I find I'm not terribly good at naming stuff and usually it takes me a while. My prefered method is just to pick something I like the sound of. By this I mean the way the word sounds, not necessarily what the words mean.

Divergence - This one was named to represent how divers the setting is. Originally was called Diverse(combination of Universe and Diverse... which is Diverse :P)

Prismatic - This one was named in relation to the themes of the setting.

The Bronze Setting - Originally a temporary name it kinda stuck. Also representative, since bronze is the most common metal in the setting, and technology is very low.

Hen Mut and Corcadia - Name because I liked the way the word sounds. However both words are things in the setting.

Hexx - It was originally named Hex (because it's about a hex-shaped desert, original I know), but got changed.

The Calm - Now this is a name that's bugged me. I never really liked it, and I can't really find a cool name that I like. The Calm in the Eye of the Realmstorm basically describes the state of the world in the setting.

That's about it. I still have a bunch of un-name settings that haven't been posted, and I'm unsure how I'd go about naming them.

I've always found world names kind of an odd convention. After all, we call our world by another word for dirt. It's just that thing we walk on. We only have cool names for places far away from us.

None of my worlds so far have names. I might name a campaign based on what the players are likely to do in it, and I should probably name my system work at some point, but any given world is just "the world" unless there are a few of them.

As for nation or city names, I borrow words in other languages with intentional spelling errors and whatever changes make it sound cool (and hide the borrowing). Though I only rarely use city or nation names for the setting where stuff happens in game.

Naming has always been one of by big problems, and the setting's name is no exception.

I tend to believe there are Five types of names for settings (from weakest to strongest):

- Descriptive Names that describe theme (Oriental Adventures, etc.)
- Meaningless names that sound cool (i.e. Forgotten Realms, Dragonlance, Dark Sun, Warcraft, Star Trek, Star Wars, Twilight, etc.)
- Names of an important concept/feature of the setting (i.e. Planescape, Legend of the 5 Rings, Battlestar Galactica, Dragonball, etc.)
- Name of a Large Geographical Body or World (i.e. Eberron, Greyhawk, Ptolus, Kara-Tur, etc.)
- Combination of 2 or more of the above

Naming your setting after a theme is not advisable because it never conveys the right message to a broad amount of people. For example, if you named your setting 'American Adventures,' what would people think? Some would think Colonial Americans Colonizing a new world, others the Wild West, still others 19th century steam punk, while still others World War II... There's just too much breadth in generic names to truly pin down the distinctiveness of your own setting without necessitating the need for an entire sentence long title.

Meaningless names that sound cool are popular, especially with companies that sell their settings commercially. The terms typically sound very fancy and evocative yet, most often, don't really tell you anything about the setting. Does anyone really look at the forgotten realms and think - wow, these places sure are forgotten!

Naming your setting after a particular element or concept that's common in your setting is always going to be a solid choice, if and only if the element or concept has a unique name (i.e. naming your setting Warp Drive, Magic Sword will not do). The danger with this naming scheme is that if the element or concept is not pervasive enough, most people will just interpret the name as a 'meaningless name that sounds cool.'

Naming your setting after the world or its principle landmass is the most common for settings because, in all honesty, its the easiest. Further, the method gives the creator a near infinite base of potential names. There are just so many Forgotten Realms-es out there before everyone's setting feels generic.

In my humble opinion the strongest name you can give your setting is one that combines 2 or more of the concepts from above. For example, which sounds like a better name - 'Legend of the 5 Rings' or Legend of the 5 Rings: Rokugan'? The latter of course because it combines an important legend (the 5 Rings) and the name of the principle empire. The added benefit to this is the ease of making acronyms (which are always fun!).

My own settings are a mix bag of success.

Amalga - is a setting that comprises all of the one shots I played when I first started to DM. Amalga is the name of the island on which the setting is primarily set. The name is sort of a joke, since it was derived from Amalgamation.

Karasend & the Murkmire - is a settings I designed for a short campaign, it is named after the principle Kingdom (Karasend) and the massive jungle that it borders (the Murkmire).

Oriflammes of Seladona - is named after the desert in which it is set (Seladona) and the Magical Banners Tyrants use to keep their people in check.

The Kingdoms of Aeolond - is a setting named after its principle continent (and the Kingdoms that call it home).

InnerSOL: Sagas of Leistung - is a sci-fi mecha setting that, principally, takes place in the inner-solar system. The 'Sagas of Leistung' was added to the title once I discovered InnerSol was a common name (it's also why I capitalize SOL).

A few of my settings...

The Cadaverous Earth: in 1950 Jack Vance published a short story collection set on the Dying Earth, giving a name to the subgenre that alerady included Clark Ashton Smith's Zothique, William Hope Hodgson's Night Lands, and similar works.  Because the Cadaverous Earth was essentially an attempt to take the idea of a dying far-future earth into yet more macabre territory, I named my setting as a specific allusion to Vance's world and the subgenre more generally.  As I wrote in the first post: "This is a world no longer merely dwindling, no longer dying, but rather become a great corpse peopled by maggots and worms, the fester-spawned parasites of a Cadaverous Earth. Though some semblance of life and animation - even happiness - still lingers within the walls of the Twilight Cities, the world seems to hover on the very lip of the abyss, teetering on the edge of final destruction."  Only a small religious sect in CE actually refer to it as such, though.

Tempter: This is a character-driven game rather than a setting-driven one, so I named it after the creatures the players would assume control of.  This is very similar to how Whtie Wolf named their World of Darkness games.  The name informs the reader not only of the type of creature that will be featured - a demonic one - but of their general task, the emphasis on mortal-demon interaction the game stresses.  If I'd called it something vague like "Hellspawn" then the game might just as easily have been about fighting wars with angels or running a territory in Hell (either of which actually sound pretty cool, come to think of it).

Bizarrerie: I wanted something that sounded both archaic and strange, in the same vein as Wonderland or Neverwhere, but without obviously copying those worlds.  This is an antiquated word basically meaning "oddity," so I thought it fit.  It quickly became the name for the world itself in addition to the game.

So far it seems pretty much all of the methods have been covered. Historically a lot of my settings have been named things I thought sounded cool (Haveneast) while more recently they've taken to being named after concepts or traits (Vibrant).

When it comes to the elements of the setting I am actually quite guilty of using generators and translators. This method has been the subject of more than one discussion on how useful or effective they may be, but I find they're very good for how I use them. Sometimes you can take a word onto a translation site (www.freetranslation.com is the one I use), translate it into another language and then bastardize it to make it sound just the way you want it (the usikkryte from Vibrant is "uncertain" translated using the freetranslation website with some modification). I also use the Everchanging Book of Names in fantasy settings fairly often, using some of the Middle East chapters to generate the names of angels, demons, and ancient powers.

I usually come up with the name before I even begin to develop the setting (e.g Glossolalia, Verdigris and... um, wizard). The concepts evoked by the particular word become what the setting is about. It hasn't always worked out. My original CBG setting, Dystopia, basically fell apart once I realised I didn't like dystopian fiction.

Good Question.

 Sometimes I spend hours or days on figuring out what I want to call my latest project. Thankfully, the inspiration for most of those ideas 'goes away' before I really need to call it something.

 Names just seem to pop into my head as I am writing a major part of the project. Pinnacle for example came to me when I was describing Edict's tower. World Break came to me while I was writing the myth of Hathor Worldbreaker. (I still don't like that name).
    Older worlds from my middle school days tended to rely on geographical locations. I remember a world that revolved around the number eight for some reason, and I clearly remember printing on the front of that notebook in big block letters, Octellose.
   What other ways are there to name a setting? It either pops into your head in a flash of inspiration, or makes sense through logical deduction.

I recall the IRC discussion that Llum mentioned.  My position, as I can recall, was that descriptive names are better than fictional proper nouns.

I see a setting name as something "out of character," something used entirely for advertising - as beejazz said, we call our world by another word for dirt, and that's true of most human cultures.  Certainly nobody in the Clockwork Jungle calls their world by that name.  I'm in favor of descriptive names because they convey an immediate meaning, something that grabs a reader before they even click on your thread or read your wiki pages.  It's purely an advertising consideration, and I just think that descriptive names make better advertisements.

That might sound a little bit crass, but if names aren't for getting people's attention, what are they for?  In previous campaign settings I made and played with, neither I nor my players cared what the setting's name was - we referred to it by the name of a major continent, or a principal city, or "that desert game" in the case one particular setting.  If you're just making a world to play in with friends, a name isn't necessary - unless you want advice at the CBG, and then it just might be useful in grabbing a little extra notice.

BUT - and this is just my own little personal pet peeve - avoid colons at all costs.  At all costs!  Colons are for the titles of pretentious liberal arts theses (I should know, I wrote one).  Colons are for people who are too witty for their own good - they make a witty title but realize it's so witty that nobody will "get" it, so they cram in a second title.  It's like explaining a joke - and you know what happens when you explain a joke?  You ruin the joke.

Quote from: EEIn my humble opinion the strongest name you can give your setting is one that combines 2 or more of the concepts from above. For example, which sounds like a better name - 'Legend of the 5 Rings' or Legend of the 5 Rings: Rokugan'?

oh no you didn't[/i].   :censored:

Like I said in my post, there's only so many cool/meaningless/generic names out there. At some point it will just get silly as people grasp for the right key words to get people interested, not to mention you're immediately setting yourself up against an endless slew of Movie, video game, comic and book titles that are all more popular than your little setting and can force you to change the name of your setting if you every want to publish your work. By combining a cool/meaningless/generic name with a proper noun you make for a better (and more unique) package.

I don't think Colons are pretentious at all. If used responcibly, they can really add a lot to a title. Of course you could just as easily use a dash, which would make adding additional postscripts to your setting's title a lot less wonky looking.

'Forgotten Realms - Aiber-Toril: Underdark'
'Legend of the 5 Rings - Rokugan: Lion Kingdom'
'Warhammer 40k - Ultima Segmentum: Bug Fleet'

Mmm, look at all of those nice dashes and colons, don't they look smexy? :)

My setting names tend to be rather descriptive of the setting. In the case of my current one though it is an interesting situation in that I wanted to convey multiple concepts to really put across the feel of the setting. You can't do this easily with English without getting a real mouthful (it's important to keep your setting name sweet and simple). So I went with Latin to get Mare Eternus. Mare simply means a great body of water like a sea or ocean while eternus translates to several things and in feeling evokes the concepts of eternity and endlessness in both time and bounds. The ultimate name describes an ocean that is infinitely large and infinitely old, precisely the key descriptors of my setting. I guess you might call it slightly pretentious using Latin. However I tried hard to find words that would be easy to understand. Most nerds can figure out what mare means in a heartbeat (at least those who know any lunar geography) as for eternus even an Average Joe can get that one since its where we get the word eternal from. So then in short I would say several things, each to take or discard as you please.

1) Keep it simple: It seems weird at first but people are drawn to a short one or two word named book/setting/whatever. We like to know what we're looking at quickly and if a setting has a name that is 5 or 6 words long it takes longer to figure that out, which can rub people the wrong way unconsciously. Note an exception here, this is counting the focus words in your name not the entire name. Words like 'the', 'of', and 'and' are filler and your brain will skip them over without issue.

2) Think hard and do your research: This is the name that everyone will pin to your setting you don't want to look back on it if you're ever published and regret calling it that.

Quote from: SamuraiChicken1) How did you develop the name for your campaign world?
2) Do you have any advice on naming a campaign setting?

1) I had some names in mind but was undecisive so I posted a thread here asking for help with it :)

2) Be sure of the scope of the world that this name will cover, not only initially but later also. If your setting initially focuses on a particular continent, for example, then using that continent's name for the setting itself might seem sensible for a while. This can create a major problem later down the road though, should you ever wish to expand the setting to cover new areas.

It would be like calling the entire ASoIaF world "Westeros" (the island where most action in the ASoIaF books takes place), to craft a hypothetical example. If the world was named that way, it would imply that the lands beyond the seas are somehow part of or subordinate to Westeros (which is very obviously NOT the case).

I think this is a very valuable discussion, as names - in general, not only for the setting as a whole - are very important, in my opinion.

However, I'm afraid I really can't contribute very well to this discussion, simply as there is NO method to the way I name settings. The first I had here, which I doubt many recall, was entitled Dark Silver, simply because it conjoured a cool mental image, regardless of how that image related to the setting.
Reth Jaleract, which followed, was the name of the continent that comprised the setting, but the actual syllables of the name itself were plucked from thin air purely according to how I liked their sounds.
Knife's Edge followed yet another method for naming in that its name was integral to the concept of the setting and yet also the in-setting name for the city itself. The city of Knife's Edge existed on a metaphorical knife's edge, and therefore both "setting" and "city" were named thematically after their situation.

As I have no consistent method, I can't really offer any advice - I still like all three named (especially Dark Silver, now that I remember it... I must use that name again, if not for a setting, then for something) and so I think it's perfectly possible to come up with names using any method, and that it's the quality of the name that is the result which is important... So just brainstorm, I guess, see what you come up with, see what you like. As a writer I'm sure you have your own opinions of what words or combinations of words work well together, so based on that you should be able to at least please yourself with your nomenclature :P

Quote from: SamuraiChickenI love building campaign settings, but I find it very difficult to come up with names for them. This results in a lot of documents on my computer full with very unimaginative titles.

I'm sure I'm not the only person with this problem, so I'd like to ask the following questions, in hopes that it will help erode the writer's block that world-builders like myself have been having.

1) How did you develop the name for your campaign world?
2) Do you have any advice on naming a campaign setting?

My theory is by learning how other world-builders named their settings, I can get a better feel for how I can name my own.

1) Eschaton is named for the end of time, since that's the story I created the setting to tell. It incorporates some elements of an old setting Kishar (the name of an Earth goddess and also the planet); but Eschaton is an alternate history on our Earth.

Eclipse was named because I expected an eclipse to be a major event in the plot of the setting. I'm looking at a new name now, though, in part because of the Twilight movie/book.

Echoes of Dreams was originally Echoes of Divinity, a grim fantasy about the return of the Dariszun (Dark Gods) to the world. When I finished the campaign I decided to reimagine the setting as a fairytale land where the supernatural came from the Dreamworld.

2) I'm mostly with Polycarp! I think descriptive names are more likely to draw people in than made up words. I think names that need colons do sound a little silly. Sorry EE, my opinion is Lo5R sounds better without any additions.

Quote from: Phoenix2) I'm mostly with Polycarp! I think descriptive names are more likely to draw people in than made up words. I think names that need colons do sound a little silly. Sorry EE, my opinion is Lo5R sounds better without any additions.

At least Legend of the 5 Rings is a term that describes something from the setting, rather than being something 'sexy' word thought up by a marketing team. :)

I suppose my personal dislike for meaningless names (like Forgotten Realms, Star Trek, Star Wars, etc.) is that we're NOT trying to sell our settings (at least not yet). I really don't think we should try to compete with Hollywood, Video Games, Books and everything else that pumps out 'sexy' keywords that describe nothing about the setting.

I'll give you an example: The name 'Clockwork Jungle' (i.e. the name of Polycarp's amazing setting) is already in use. There's a book out there called 'The Clockwork Jungle Book', which collects steam punk stories that involved animals. Cadaverous Earth is utilized by Poets and short story writers.

Unless you want to take the time to copyright/trademark the name of your setting, then it is far easier to simply use a proper noun in your setting's title, thus avoiding issues like the above. We are little people and we will not beat a company that wants to hold onto its IP. I would rather establish my setting with a proper noun than have to re-brand my setting if and when I go to publish it.

But... I'm weird like that. I don't want to stop people from naming their setting what ever they want. I just worry about things that most people do not.

Of course just naming your setting something like 'Aeolond' is not a good idea either. It describes nothing about the setting and leaves you open to the same issues from above. This is why you include some kind of descriptor, such as the 'Kingdoms of Aeolond' or the 'Divided Realms of Aeolond' or etc. That way your 'brand' is held with in a tight bubble, which means its far less likely someone will have that particular name in use.