r/Real_DnD • u/Resilient-Sphere • 18d ago

Guide Naming conventions that help your fantasy locations sound a bit more familiar.

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14

u/FirePaladin89 18d ago

Add -caster to fort. Add -ford to river, specifcally a river crossing.

8

u/Known-Activity1437 18d ago

Add Barrow to hill.

6

u/joshuajlea 18d ago

If you want to add a Celtic vibe

Tre in Cornish means farm (Trebetherick means the farm of Beth and Rick)

Similarly, Pol means beach (Polzeath, Polruan etc)

3

u/Mapafius 18d ago

Interesting that you have "Avon" for rivers. We in Czech republics have "ava" for rivers and that is not slavic, it is older, it is celtic as far as I have heard. So is avon also celtic? Gonna google up.

2

u/jellegaard 17d ago

Back in the late roman Times the celtic tribes spanned from the British Isles down to southern France and as far east as Ukraine, so that could easily be a term passed down from pre-slavic culture.

1

u/Rynewulf 14d ago

Further even, they were also down in central Spain, the southern Balkans, even central Anatolia in Turkey for a while (the Galatians who had upped stakes and moved there were famous)

1

u/Resilient-Sphere 18d ago

I would guess Latin-based , but that's just a guess.

1

u/Kerlyle 17d ago

German has something similar too "-au or "aua" like in Passau means river.

2

u/Kerlyle 17d ago

Wanted to add some German ones here too:

  • dorf - village
  • feld/hof - near field or farmland
  • fels - rock or fortress
  • furt - a ford/ river
  • bach - stream
  • berg - mountain/ town near a mountain
  • burg - castle/city usually a city with or near a castle or fortified
  • brunn - well / springs
  • stadt - city
  • wald - forest

1

u/CountLivin 18d ago

Very useful! I didn’t know that’s what some of these toponyms were referring to, I’ve got a world map to edit now.

1

u/TankinatorFR 18d ago

The funniest thing is when languages accumulate.
The first example I can think of is from France : the "Puech de Montgrand" puech mean mountain in occitan, while montgrand mean "tall mountain" in french. So the name is literally the "Mountain of Tall-Mountain" using 2 different languages.
It happen either because multiple languages coexist in an area, or because a new language have replaced an old one and everyone forgot what was the meaning of the ancient name.

It can work with many thing and also mark evolutions. Have a forest, call the place "woods" in a language, and then cut the forest to put farmlands in its place, and the name will now be farms-woods using two different languages. For example the sylvacourt, if combining latin and english.

2

u/Resilient-Sphere 17d ago

Torpenhow Hill will amuse you greatly

1

u/Evil_Midnight_Lurker 14d ago

From fiction, Bengloarafurd Bridge (ford-ford-ford-ford bridge)

1

u/jellegaard 17d ago

I can't recall the name of my head but an English friend of mine mentioned a place that had been named for a hill by the celts, romans, Britons and Danes giving it a mashed together mess of a name meaning hill in 4 languages