So people may have noticed my Facebook rant today (and instuted the standard "Ignore the crazed political/economic rant of Epithail's" procedure). I need something to distract and calm me down so I thought about things that are relatively easy to deal with when I don't have books on hand (work tends to look down on you having a shelf of role playing books in your cubicle for some reason). So what I realized I'm missing is names for the various nations/islands/continents of this world as well as an overall name for it.
I started to write some stuff down and the names are coming slowly but I'm not sure how much I'm going to be able to do right now. Forcing it is only going to make things sound too forced. Naming just somehow seems far more important than what it is.
Naming truly sets the feel for what you feel you want to have in your world. A name can create a sense of mystery and raise questions if used properly. It can also break the setting by being extraordinarily too complicated or too simple. If the name doesn't fit it can ruin the immersion.
So with me being the perfectionist that I am, I'll probably end up overthinking this and people won't even really notice the effort. That's okay though, it makes me feel better about myself and that's what's important right?
I'm going to write up a list of what I have so far with a little bit more detail of the general culture of an area and use my map references from my earlier entry about the setting. Not everything has a name yet and this list will be updated over time as I figure more out.
Now most of the information about these lands is kept vague on purpose for right now because I want players to help me form the background of the world they're in. I don't want to finalize a history until players have put their mark on the world with their fantastic ideas about what culture their characters came from was like. Some of this will be predefined, but only to act as a spring board. For example, the primarily desert like continent contains Middle Eastern and Australian style cultures upon it generally lead by monarchies, while the two large jungle/rainforest islands controlled by the Orcs are ruled by Orcs with an Aztec/Mayan like culture.
And I let this entry sit and get too long and lost my motivation to put the list in here right now, but the good news is that I'm making a little progress. Probably sitting somewhere around 15% complete now instead of where I was.
I started to write some stuff down and the names are coming slowly but I'm not sure how much I'm going to be able to do right now. Forcing it is only going to make things sound too forced. Naming just somehow seems far more important than what it is.
Naming truly sets the feel for what you feel you want to have in your world. A name can create a sense of mystery and raise questions if used properly. It can also break the setting by being extraordinarily too complicated or too simple. If the name doesn't fit it can ruin the immersion.
So with me being the perfectionist that I am, I'll probably end up overthinking this and people won't even really notice the effort. That's okay though, it makes me feel better about myself and that's what's important right?
I'm going to write up a list of what I have so far with a little bit more detail of the general culture of an area and use my map references from my earlier entry about the setting. Not everything has a name yet and this list will be updated over time as I figure more out.
Now most of the information about these lands is kept vague on purpose for right now because I want players to help me form the background of the world they're in. I don't want to finalize a history until players have put their mark on the world with their fantastic ideas about what culture their characters came from was like. Some of this will be predefined, but only to act as a spring board. For example, the primarily desert like continent contains Middle Eastern and Australian style cultures upon it generally lead by monarchies, while the two large jungle/rainforest islands controlled by the Orcs are ruled by Orcs with an Aztec/Mayan like culture.
And I let this entry sit and get too long and lost my motivation to put the list in here right now, but the good news is that I'm making a little progress. Probably sitting somewhere around 15% complete now instead of where I was.
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