Azhdarchid

The Ancient Secrets of Naming Things

I've been asked how I go about naming things – something that is a significant part of my job and which some writers dread (while others love). This post isn't 100% of everything I might say about the subject but it's the core lesson I have to teach.

Here's the secret to naming things:

Good names stem from good naming conventions.

Nothing will make naming things more painful than a broadly-drawn fantasy setting where everyone just has a regular English name but one letter off (Gorald, Parricia, Nichael, etc). When you give things a strong naming convention you narrow down the field and you create expectations. And expectations are the mother of rhythm. Things only sound good because the audience has been primed to the implicit presence of beats.

Strong naming conventions can carry you through naming dozens, hundreds of things. The ur-case study is our very own naming convention for Fallen London NPCs, where everyone is known by an "adjective noun" nickname: the Reliable Eggmonger, the Jovial Contrarian, the Captivating Princess. This naming convention is so strong that we can introduce one-off NPCs to the stage purely by their names, have them immediately fit in as who they are, and then vanish them off-stage never to be seen again; we do this frequently in Fallen London.

A naming convention can be a format (like the aforementioned adjective + noun), or it can mean that names have certain specific semantics. In FL, for example, some devils have actual 'given' (stolen, more like) names rather than adjective-noun monikers. We've ended up giving them all ironic names that work as English names in a vacuum, but on a devil they reference either the Biblical (Milton) or virtue (Virginia and Verity).

In more 'solid' fictional worlds, often a naming convention is culturally bound, derived from a specific language. It is 100% worth it to sketch out the bare skeleton of a conlang to use as a naming tool if you're going to be generating lots of names from a fictional culture that's meant to be verossimilitudinous (how to make a conlang is beyond the scope of this article). Names that aren't made up out of English words are (for some) the hardest to do, and rooting them in actual rules of pronunciation and word construction can be invaluable.

If there's no naming convention: Invent one. Think up a narrative of how something comes to have its name – that's valuable too, a useful tool in both brainstorming and culling. Real-world things all have naming conventions, which is why names sound like they belong to certain categories of thing. Often this leads to interesting questions about a world. All of these are names for places where you buy booze, but they all suggest wildly different things about the world the story takes place in:

The other key thing about naming things is that like any other piece of writing, it comes down to knowing what you want to express and how the reader is supposed to come to it. Which, yes, is a "draw the rest of the owl" type statement. But it is true that a name should express some mixture of:

It's impossible to actually sell all those ideas across in just a name, but it's invaluable to figure out which ones matter more; what's pushed to the foreground. Is a name a social referent or a label used only by the viewpoint character's own thinking? Is a name revealing or concealing something about this thing?

What was being expressed when this thing was being named – a wish for what the thing would become? An advertisement aimed at possible purchasers? An act of intimidation? A vow?

Like with most things in writing, there's not really advice on how to do the thing; what you need to learn is how to build the right process to do the thing. Anyway, here's some bonus case studies on what I think are successful runs of naming things in the games space.

Case study: Destiny 2

In Destiny 2 each new collection of guns has its own naming conventions tied to their origin. Those naming conventions usually don't dictate form, but they dictate semantics.

Case study: Magic the Gathering

Magic: the Gathering contains a lot of excellent naming work that also shows the power of evolving naming conventions over time as the underlying content evolves. A classic example are the split cards. These are cards that can be cast either as their 'left' half or as their 'right' half. Originally, split cards are named for idioms in English that take the form 'X and Y'. On the cards themselves, it's just the two bare words; by convention they're separated by a double slash.

Then in the Apocalypse expansion they do split cards in enemy color pairs, so those are named after pairs of opposing things:

This convention is carried through on loads of sets with split cards in various configurations. Eventually, Wizards does a mechanic called Aftermath, where split cards have one half that you can cast from your hand and another you cast later from the graveyard. This gets its variant on the naming convention, where they're named after "X to Y" idioms:

Another example of naming conventions evolving is found in lands. The original basic lands in Magic are all easy to associate with their respective colors/elements: Plains, Island, Swamp, Mountain, Forest. The original 'dual lands' are then named after more specific biomes that suggest where two of those meet. A mountain forest is a 'Taiga'; an island forest is a 'Tropical Island'; a plains swamp is a 'Scrubland.'

Many years later, the 'shockland' cycle takes place in an urban world and so the names reference a built environment rather than natural biomes – but they're all combining an adjective and a noun to suggest their color pairs. Blood Crypt is black-red while Overgrown Tomb is green-black. Hallowed Fountain is blue-white while Watery Grave is blue-black. Godless Shrine is white-black while Temple Garden is white-green. The naming conventions are so strong within their individual cycles that it's generally easier to confuse lands of the same color pair but different dual land cycles. That is, it's easier to confuse Battlefield Forge (the red-white painland) for Sacred Foundry (the red-white shockland) than it is to confuse Breeding Pool (the blue-green shockland) for Stomping Ground (the red-green shockland).

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