Friday, April 22, 2011

more dubious place names

Anthony the Pendant requested place name charts for German and Slavic type locations. Here's some quicky charts for you, dude:

400 German type places
1 Ber- -baden
2 Bre- -brucken
3 Dres- -burg
4 Dussel- -dam
5 Er- -den
6 Frei- -dorf
7 Gott- -el
8 Greifs- -furt
9 Ham- -gart
10 Han- -ich
11 Heidel- -ingen
12 Ki- -inz
13 Ma- -lin
14 Madge- -men
15 Mun- -na
16 Pots- -over
17 Saar- -rin
18 Schwe- -stadt
19 Stutt- -stanz
20 Wies- -wald

144 Slavicish places (d12 twice)

1 Brun- -ansk
2 Dub- -bove
3 Gd- -cin
4 Kolob- -lice
5 Kr- -nov
6 Med- -rzeg
7 Op- -tal
8 Po- -ynia
9 Szc- -zecin
10 Tep- -zev
11 Tren- -zilaborce
12 Vr- -zin

These sorts of things are a snap to build if you don't mind that your places are terrible fake constructions capable of inducing shrieks of terror in native speakers.  Just think of a real world analogy for your country.  Search for a wikipedia page with a title like "Cities of ____" and then start yanking apart some of the items on that list.  I made these in a spreadsheet so it would be easy to sort them A to Z when I was done.

7 comments:

  1. Wow, thank you. I owe you one, need some research done? Maybe on lamp oil or Greek fire ;D

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  2. Yeah, I think Vornheim means like "placeplace" in German.

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  3. Anonymous9:22 PM

    This is great, they should have stuff like this on the back of the DM screen! Mine will now. Thanks.

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  4. Anonymous2:12 AM

    *Shriek*
    ..but I used a similar system to replace the name generator in Warlords III back in the days...

    @Zak: It's more like "in front - home", where "-heim" really is often used in citynames.

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  5. there's a generative grammar and related random generator for typical Lombardy town names here at polygen, refresh the page to get more :)

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  6. Anonymous6:55 AM

    hmm... just... hmm... these names come out rather strange in most cases.
    an easier way would be to just get a list of German/Polish/Czech placenames, get rid of all those that are too wellknown, and use them like that (so, Berlin and Krakow might sound a bit too odd, but everyhting not internationally known might be fair game)

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  7. Anonymous12:27 AM

    actually, in addition to that: i noticed that you actually get more convincing names (at least for me) if you just mix the German and the Slavic tables. Then all of a sudden you get a lot that sounds like real placenames. Not too surprising considering how mixed these cultural regions really were.

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