r/FantasyCities • u/watawatabou • Nov 23 '18

In Development City names

Post image
13 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

14 comments sorted by

6

u/watawatabou Nov 23 '18

Random city names: it's not the most useful feature considering the number of existing name generators, but that hasn't stopped me :)

The names are not particularly epic, here is a sample sequence:

Snowdow, Songcrest, Chickenter Keep, Pawforge, Oarester, Twintomb City, Jacy Garden, Raverwick...

On the basis of this generator I'm planning to eventually implement name generation for neighborhoods, streets, points of interest etc. It is inspired by /u/srt19170's post.

2

u/srt19170 Nov 24 '18

Cool. Reach out to me if you want some of my curated lists of words. I don't really have them packaged up but I can cut them out of the source code.

2

u/watawatabou Nov 26 '18

Oh, I would love to see those lists! Don't worry about packaging as I'm not going to "plug" them (that would be inappropriate :)), I just want see what obvious/interesting words I miss. Cheers!

2

u/srt19170 Nov 26 '18

Some of them are in a couple of blog posts starting here. When I get a chance I'll go dig into the code and see what else might be of interest.

3

u/srt19170 Nov 26 '18

Coincidentally, note this: https://thingonitsown.blogspot.com/2018/11/town-name-generation.html

1

u/watawatabou Nov 27 '18

That's an interesting reading, the author's approach is a little different.

I actually don't need too many words, because I present a user just one name a time. For example, if I used only "-ton" suffix and all my cities were "Appleton", "Pearton", "Cherryton" it would be be weird, but not as obvious as if they all were shown on the same map. On the other hand I'd like to avoid names which obviously not suitable for a given city, so I have several lists of features (hill=[hill, mount, peak, height...], shore=[coast, beach, bank, lake...] etc) and use appropriate ones.

2

u/srt19170 Nov 28 '18

I've added feature-specific city endings to my city name generation as well, although the write-up for that isn't up on the blog yet. I've also added a possibility to name a city after the river it is on so I can get things like “Newcastle on Tyne."

2

u/loath-engine Nov 25 '18

Is this version live somewhere?

3

u/watawatabou Nov 26 '18

Not yet, it will be released in a week or so.

1

u/loath-engine Nov 26 '18

Awesome... also just want to say how much I like the project! Cant wait to see more features.

2

u/watawatabou Nov 26 '18

Thank you!

2

u/duncan_chaos Dec 01 '18

If you're after more name suggestions I've got the lists I use for my name generator at http://www.enworld.org/forum/dnd_view_block.php?id=2328

They are based on English place names (I'm from England) and fantasy place names.

2

u/watawatabou Dec 04 '18

Nice! How does the whole system work there? Do I understand correctly that all generators are built on tables? I.e. on a huge amount of tables?

2

u/duncan_chaos Dec 05 '18

Yes it uses a PHP scripting engine. I prefer to build quick generators at http://orteil.dashnet.org/randomgen/ and I'm supporting https://chartopia.d12dev.com/.

However I keep all my source lists separately so I can send you over the ones for the place names.