Settlements Names

I went to the woods last holiday. My mother in law lives on a farm near a small town in the countryside of Goias, which is a smaller state in the center of Brazil. The farm is not active and the natural environment there is very well preserved. There are lots of natural places and settlements, and I found it quite funny how the people around there name these places.

In hexcrawl, pointcrawls, or any exploration games, the authors (me included) tend to name the settlements with epic names such as: Thunder Peaks, Spine of the World Mountains, Hills of the Green Wastes, etc. I imagine this as in an MMO RPG, or any electronic RPG really, when you “discover” a new settlement, a name with a good typography appears on the screen. As a GM, I named places like that when the players reached the location: “So, you enter in the Giant Rock Mountains”. Yeah, I know, this is just a detail, and doesn't have a real impact in the game or adventure. But knowing how people named the settlements in the woods near my mother in law’s farm, made me think that regular adventurers/characters wouldn't call these places with Epic names.

The names that I found there were: The old man's comb field, Guaraci Island, Sitting dog rocks, vulture's hole and little snake island. These all resemble experiences, or geographic marks of the places. Some of them have these names because of real stories that happened in the near past. These are all mundane names and not epic at all, it makes more sense in the real world. Most of all, they were named by the local people or explorers, not by a map made by a poetic cartographer.

The point here is: let your players name the hexes, places, and settlements of your games. Make them comfortable to name it with whatever they believe resembles these places the most (encounters, experiences, geographic characteristics, etc.). Be clear about the mundane and believable tone of it. This should make them more comfortable, make the places their own, and overall refresh their memories and build reference points.

Edited by Carlos Bertliz

Second Illustration by Dyson Logos, with commercial license usage.

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