Okay, so yesterday I was messing around, trying to come up with some cool names for a little fantasy world thing I’m building. Thought it’d be fun to share how I did it, kinda like a brain dump.
First thing I did was just brainstorm a bunch of words that felt “fantasy” to me. Things like “shadow,” “wind,” “stone,” “moon,” you know, the usual suspects. I literally just typed them into a text file. No fancy tools yet, just getting the juices flowing.
Then, I started thinking about the kinds of places I wanted to name. Were they forests? Mountains? Cities? This helped me narrow down my word choices. For a forest, I leaned more towards “leaf,” “root,” “whisper,” and stuff like that. For mountains, I went with “peak,” “cliff,” “ice,” and so on.
Next, I wanted to add some flair. I started playing around with prefixes and suffixes. Like, instead of just “wind,” I tried “Windhaven” or “Shadowmere.” This is where things got a little more interesting. I was just throwing stuff at the wall and seeing what stuck.
After that, I tried combining words. “Stone + field” became “Stonefield.” Not groundbreaking, but it’s a start. I played around with different combinations, trying to find stuff that sounded good. Sometimes it worked, sometimes it didn’t.
I also looked at real-world place names for inspiration. I’m not talking about copying them, but just getting a sense of how different cultures name their locations. Stuff like adding “shire” or “ton” to the end of words.
To make it all a bit more organized, I decided to use a spreadsheet. I had one column for the original words, one for the prefixes/suffixes, and one for the combined names. This helped me keep track of everything and see what I had already tried.
I even tried flipping some words around, or misspelling them slightly. Sometimes a little typo can actually make a name sound more unique and fantasy-like. “River” becomes “Rivar,” something like that.
Finally, I just read all the names out loud. This is super important because a name might look good on paper, but sound terrible when you say it. I cut out anything that was hard to pronounce or just didn’t sound right.
It’s not perfect, but I ended up with a list of pretty decent names that I can use for my world. Stuff like:
- Whisperwind Glade
- Shadowpeak Pass
- Moonstone Valley
- Evergreen Reach
The key takeaway? Just mess around! Don’t be afraid to try weird combinations and see what happens. The more you experiment, the better your names will be. And don’t overthink it too much, just have fun with it.
That’s pretty much it! Nothing super fancy, but it got the job done. Maybe next time I’ll try using some online name generators, but for now, this worked for me.
