Friday, January 18, 2019

Town Name Generators, for Pseudo-Britain, Pseudo-Germany, and Pseudo-France

There was a post on the OSR subreddit the other day that linked to an article on Wikipedia about place names in Britain. The article is interesting in its own right - it talks about the meaning behind each prefix and suffix, not just listing their prevalency - but the post suggested that it could be made into a random table. So I started to write one.

But then I remembered this absolutely amazing random generator maker I've seen some blogs use to make generators. With it you can turn lines and the simplest forms of programming syntax into HTML which, in turn, turns into a button that can generate countless variations. I learned a bit of HTML a long time ago - I'm considering trying to learn it and CSS to make this blog look less like ass - but with that, even a dummy like me can make a generator.

It was so easy that once I was done making the Pseudo-British one, I clicked on a link from the Wikipedia article to take a look at some Germanic toponymy as well, and decided to turn that into a generator too. After that I figured I might as well round it out with French as well, until I realized halfway through that Wikipedia's breadth is vast but not infinite and there aren't ready-made articles on French toponymy like there is for Britain and Germany, and decided to finish the French one early and leave it at that.

Fair warning: these generators were designed to make names that merely sound like one from the country they're from, where they were designed and not hastily cobbled together. Linguistic inaccuracies abound. It's a fantasy land with elves and wizards, anyway. It would honestly be weirder if I'd tried to make it realistic, if you ask me. It does mean you can - even if it's exceedingly unlikely that you will - generate a town named "Montmont-le-Montmont". It's not a bug, it's a feature.






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