- Blibdoolpoolp—kuo-toa sea goddess that looks like a naked woman with a lobster head and lobster claws instead of hands.
- Yan-C-Bin—how do you even pronounce the "C"? Evil prince of air elementals (it doesn't help that that's also kind of a stupid concept.)
- Ixitxachitl—not only are demonic intelligent manta rays who are the favored children of Demogorgon incredibly stupid, but why'd they have to get this mouthful of vaguely Aztec sounding consonants appended to them? On this list, throw otyugh and svirfneblin too.
- Speaking of which, just because a name is a "real" one doesn't mean that it's a good one that anyone would be interested in. Q'uq'umatz may be an Aztec god, but as the D&D god of frog people, it should have been at least somewhat anglicized as Kukumatz or something. That at least doesn't look like a cat walked on my keyboard.
- For that matter, anything with gratuitous apostraphes, since English doesn't include glottal stops, should get the ax. Yes, Fraz-Urb'luu, Graz'zt and Drizzt Do'Urden, that means all of you. This got worse when Forgotten Realms turned uber big in 2e, but obviously G'ary Gy'gax himself wasn't immune to it. Yeenoghu isn't great, but at least it avoids that particular trap.
- Zygag. Blegh. Drawmij is just as bad. Iggwilv is nearly so.
- Yes, I know St. Cuthbert is a real person (or at least, it's based on a placename that's named for what was believed to be a real person.) That is not the name of a god in a polytheistic pantheon.
- Also for that matter; some of those pulp writers did not have a good ear for names. Cthulhu was deliberately designed to be unpronounceable, but that's just silly. Nobody will ever say a word that's unpronounceable, so it has to get linguistically "eroded" into something that actually fits the language of the people saying it. That's why in spite of its atrocious spelling, most people who care to aren't particularly bothered by pronouncing cuh-THOOL-hoo. It's not exactly how Lovecraft tried to say it was pronounced, but who cares.
- On the other hand, when I took the old Slavic god Chernobog and modified the spelling somewhat to Chernovog for my DARK•HERITAGE setting, I actually had no idea that D&D had already done so as well in the Expedition to Castle Ravenloft which, give me a break, I've never read (and which doesn't predate my setting by much either.) Heck; I came up with the idea independently, borrowing from Disney's Fantasia for crying out loud. Maybe I should adopt my original spelling Czernovog? Or Sir Walter Scott's dubious spelling of Zernebock? Or the Chronica Slavorum's spelling of Zcerneboch? In Serbian, it's spelled Crnobog, Polish Czarnobóg and in Czech, Černobůh. In Russian, Bulgarian and Croatian, of course, it's written in Cyrillic letters. I've got lots of options. I thought Chernovog was the closest to English that I'd likely get without sounding exactly like the guy from Fantasia, but it seems I wasn't the first to independently think that. Of course, their Chernavog seems to be some kind of Green Man evil druid demon-lord figure, while mine is much more like Nyarlathotep's Black Pharaoh persona and the father of the kemling race.
- It is kind of ironic that in the 3e Ravenloft they call Chernovog "the Green God" when the name, literally translated from the Slavic language, means "the Black God." But I doubt the D&D developers did very in depth research into the name; they just liked it.
- On the other hand, when C. J. Cherryh wore her Russian fantasy trilogy and used the spelling Chernevog, she knew exactly what she was doing, I think.
Tuesday, December 12, 2017
Worst classic D&D name
There's some terribly stupid names in D&D. While not meant to be exhaustive, this list is certainly a few of the worst.
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