Place-names: the naming convention

A name is almost always the first thing a person learns about a place, so it carries a lot of weight. An evocative name has the capacity to convey the "feel" of a place in a way that a bland or more rotely descriptive name does not. To paraphrase Mark Twain, "the difference between the almost right name and the right name is the difference between the lightning-bug and the lightning." 

I used to struggle so hard with names it became a genuine non-navigable impediment to my game prep—if I couldn't find the right name for a place, I would rapidly lose interest in the idea and it die on the vine. Eventually though I came to a solution: offload my place-naming to a naming convention. 

Every time I needed a new region or settlement, I used the name of a fabric type. For a stretch of years, my players sought mythic treasure in the island of Cottondor, fought witches in the blighted lands of Woolovia, explored among the ancient trees of the Gabardine Forest, and partied and schemed their way through the bustling city-state of Corduroy. I called the setting "Fabricant."

Most of the locations in my game were conceived as me thinking "I need a place for x" and then looking at a big list of fabric names, letting whatever jumped out at me guide the look and feel of the place. The trick I found was that having the name first and working backward to the details of the place is far easier than the opposite approach. You're using a name to evoke somewhere that largely doesn't exist yet, as opposed to making a place and then struggling to find a phrase or collection of syllables that truly captures it.

And even when you do have a pretty clear idea for a place, a naming convention expedites the naming process by giving some guardrails to work within.    

Why fabric types? There are a lot of them, they're usually short and easy to remember, and they often have a good sound to them. Also helps that textiles come from all over the world so there are names for all kinds of eras and cultures.

One might worry that fabric names are already known as such by the players and that repurposing them as place-names might limit their ability to buy in to the fantasy of the world. That wasn't an issue for me: what I observed is that once the players heard the names in the context of the game world, they were able to form a sort of subconscious line in their mind that delineated the fabric names from the place names. My friend Mike only came to realize the whole fabric thing six whole months into the campaign. C'est la différance.

The naming convention did run me into another issue though, and it was a rather predictable one: after a while I started to feel pigeonholed. Even with a wealth of fabric name options available, I started to feel a bit listless about the whole thing. I never broke the naming convention, but after the campaign ran its course, I never since went back to a naming convention. But the one I had was substantially useful to me for quite some time, and I would still consider using one for shorter adventures or campaigns.  

Here's the shortlist of fabrics I compiled for place-naming. A good amount of them had use in my old game, but most of them were kept in reserve, only loosely sketched out with a handful of notes based on what the word sounded like to me. See what sort of places the fabric names evoke in your mind:

Azlon 
Baez 
Bombazine 
Brocade 
Burrato 
Cambric 
Camlet 
Chantilly 
Corduroy
Damask 
Elastane
Flannels 
Foulard 
Gaberdine 
Ghalamkar 
Gingham 
Greige 
Grenfell 
Herringbone 
Hessian 
Hopsack 
Jacquard 
Jute 
Lanon 
Lawn 
Loden 
Lycra 
Merino 
Neoprine 
Poplin 
Rinzu 
Ripstop 
Saga Nishiki
Samite 
Shantung 
Sharkskin 
Spannette 
Tartan 
Tencel 
Twill 
Velour 
Voile 
Whipcord 
Wigan 
Zephyr