Hand Drawn Map tips?

[NeonKnight]

5. Lastly how the crap do you guys name half of the stuff you make? Map names, City names, lakes, rivers etc.

This is the one thing I have been personally asked a lot, so here is an answer I put forth to another group I belong to regarding naming of areas.

For me, when I was creating my world, names were kinda easy.

A few examples:

Empire of Brighton, saw the name Brighton on a sign post as a street name.

Ferringio was just a play on the name Ferigno (guy who played the Hulk on the TV Series).

As I got older (yes that campaign world is over 20 years old), I started thinking, how do we, as humans in the real world come up with city names? In our English speaking culture we have a tendency to name them after eaither people, other places (England has York, The US has New York, England has Jersey, US has New Jersye, France has Orleans, US has New Orleans), or after prominent physical/environmental features: Swiftwater, Bridal Falls, etc.

So, Kingdom names aside, place names are easy.

The name of the Human city should be First Landing (as Grey Fox was saying to me the other day), because it makes sense from a entymolgical point of view. Its where the first arrived, it would be their biggest settlement, as a lot of the first timber for construction would have come from the dismantleing of the ships they arrived on, etc.

A web search on Toponymy (the scietific name for the study of place names), brought me this little gem regarding place names in Britain:

Quote:

Places were originally named in Old English, Norse, Scots, Welsh, Gaelic or Cornish, according to landscape features (topography), nature of settlement (habitat – city, town, village, fortifications) or the people or tribe living in the area, often combining two or three descriptive terms in one name. These names were then influenced and modified at various historical periods through language shift driven by socio-economic and political changes.

These sometimes introduced new language influences, such as French from the Norman Conquest.

So, if you have names for towns villages, etc called Walden's Bridge because some guy named Walden built a bridge and a village srpung up there because it was a good crossing point, so be it. Even the name of the game "Neverwinter Night" is based on the city of Neverwinter in the Forgotten Realms, so named because even though it is far north, it seldom experience Winter in it;s full force.

So, for example, in Britain, there is this place called Oxford, which obviously was named because it originally was a good place for herdsmen to bring the Oxen across a river.

Here in the province of British Columbia, I was born in they city of Prince George, which was originally known as Fort George (Named after the Prince of England, named George).

All around Prince George are communities with names like MacKenzie (Named after the explorer of the same name), Fort St John, Fort St James, Dawson Creek, and the youngest, the mining town of less than 30 years, Tumbler Ridge. Even Canada was named (incorrectly) because the local natives invited the French Explorers back to Can-na-ha (or something of that effect), which in their language meant Village or Group of Huts.

So, when naming your areas, feel free. Look at the names of things around you and switch some letters or excagerate other parts of it.

For instance, I am looking at my MONTITOR as I write this. Monitor has a cool sound, so change a couple of letters and I have Monather, or Monistor, or reduce to two sylables, Montor. I guarantee, when people see that name on your map, they are not going to go: "Hey you just changed a few letters in Monitor! You Suck!" Nope, never will happen.

Finally, use a bit of immagination when naming areas too. Swift Current is a cool name for a small town/village on a river. So what if there are umpteen million real world Swift Currents, it is a descriptivename. Why do you think there is practically a Springfield in almost every one of the states in the US

So, think of geographic features and simply name communites after them. This gives you BlackRock, Red Rock, Greenfields, Blue Water, Windbluffe, Blue Lake, Pineglen, etc.

Best of luck!

[landorl]

For town names, I like to do a combo job. I will pick a culture that I want the current kingdom to resemble. For instance, I have been working on a map, and I view the kingdom as having some vague similarities to the Welsh people, so I looked up a lot of Welsh towns, and simply used names similar to those. I then had some towns that were named in the more "modern" common tongue of the area. A lot of those were people names with some sort of functional name like Boris Bridge, or Wheedon's Crossing.

In addition, what I first did for my world is to create the global map in CC2/3, and then work on the continents from there. I am only doing hand drawn maps on my kingdom level maps. Later on, I may come back and do a hand drawn map for each continent showing a general overview of the continent.

[RobA]

And for street names and city districts, location and vocation tend to lead the pack:

Market Street
River Road
High Path

Coopers Lane
The Millway

and vocations often extended to communities.... Milton (Mill Town) for example.

A nice way to extend this is to come up with your own prefixes and suffixes and mix them up with words.

-Rob A>