DarkDND

I've decided that I'll take up the further adventures of Rodrico and Francesca on the wiki that I designed especially for taking up the further adventures of Rodrico and Francesca.

Link here: http://darkdnd.wikispaces.com/

Sorry for the lame name, DarkDnD. I had to think of something quick and that's what I got. That brings to mind another thought I've had about designing fantasy worlds. Few fantasy worlds lack names; it helps the reader distinguish that world from the real world, or from other fantasy worlds, for that matter. Oddly, the real world doesn't really have a name; it's just "the world" or "earth." I sometimes wonder if Earth is a slight mistranslation of the Latin Terra; if what was actually meant was "land" to distinguish it from the oceans and seas.

In any case, it's not really a name. Even Terra isn't really a name, as some sci-fi writers like to use, it's just an ancient tradition to use the Latin name that has been revived to give a slight ring of authenticity and formality, but once you realize that Terra is just the Latin word for earth (or land) then some of that mystique dries up.

Although I certainly don't claim to have done an exhaustive survey, it strikes me that few cultures on our world (in fact, I can't think of a single one) have actually named the world anything other than variants on "the world." Why would they? As far as most of them knew, it was a singular thing. There's no need to name something if there's just one of them. Likewise, most cultures call the sun simply "the sun" and the moon simply "the moon" when translated out of their native languages; because they're also singular entities. They knew of nothing to which to compare them, so there was no need to name them.

So I've given some thought in fantasy worldbuilding exercises, either for gaming or for fiction, to the question. If the inhabitants of your fantasy world have a name for the world, why do they use that name and what does it mean? It's not enough simply to have a cool sounding name "just because." Well, maybe it is, but at least it makes me sit up and wonder why. If it's just for the reader's convenience, that's one thing, but I like to make at least a brief nod towards an "in setting" reason for the name to exist.

For my Dark•Heritage setting, the world is called Kael. However, in that setting, ancient traditions held forth that humanity originally came from another world, therefore they always were cognizant of the idea that there were other worlds beside their own. Knowing of other worlds meant that they needed to name them to distinguish them; otherwise, "the world" begs the question "which world?" Kael, therefore, is an ancient word from very primitive languages that has survived as a relic and which originally meant "new home".

The other setting I've been tinkering with lately I call Jovis. That's a name that I came up with on the fly, and it's not very clever (Jovis is based on the archaic Latin Iovis. The compound Iovis Pater—Father Jove—is the source of the word Jupiter. I used that because Jovis is a world as large as Jupiter; albeit one with a much lesser density, such that the surface gravity is the same as our world.) That's the whole sordid tale of the origin of the name Jovis, and it's really for reader convenience, and in setting the world is rarely named—except by those who travel beyond it. Which of course are very few people, but the main characters of that setting are some such people. My idea there is that few people on Jovis know or use the name Jovis, and that the characters really only learn the name from those they visit outside of the world, or from other travelers who had to come up with a name for the world.

By the way, I fully admit that DarkDnD is an even worse name than Jovis. At the time I created the wiki I had given absolutely no thought to naming the setting; I just wanted someplace I could doodle with the ideas behind it.