New Beginnings - What's in a Name?

I am starting the process of building a new world for my next D&D campaign. I'll be playing with some friends from high school who I haven't played with in years, and some of their friends who are completely new to D&D. Before this group came together, I really wanted to run the Dolmenwood campaign. While that campaign is fantastic,  I feel it isn't well-suited to new players. Instead, I'm starting a new world. I'll begin by fleshing out a small corner, and then expand it as I go. (If all goes well, I'll bring in Dolmenwood later.)

My starting assumptions are:

• This will be a wilderness exploration campaign.
• The party will need a city that serves as a home-base to operate out of.
• The city will be on the border of an unexplored frontier. It's not a frontier between two kingdoms; it's the frontier between civilization and the wild.
• Being as this is the frontier, it's not going to be a huge city, but it will be big enough that they probably can't sustain themselves entirely by farming. Therefore, it's going to be a port city, which will allow them access to various types of fish, seafood, etc. (That will also allow the party access to water-based adventures, exploring islands on the coast, etc.)

I have a pretty good idea of what it will look like in my mind, so right now, I'm working on the names of the area. This is always a difficult prospect for me, as it seems like the names that I select are not memorable, or clash with one another. In my last campaign, I had names like "the Tomb of Neheb" alongside "Corum's Vault." I didn't fell like those were very cohesive names.

Rather than try to invent everything whole cloth, I decided to base my names on real-world toponymy, the study of place names. Some searching online lead me to this wonderful page, which breaks down place names in the United Kingdom by origin, meaning, and even position in the world, like prefix or suffix.

Looking at the list, I chose descriptive meanings that I liked, and then played around with combining prefixes and suffixes until I got something that stuck. I also picked out a prefix/suffix, then found a match for it. The name elements will help me flesh out the description of the areas when I develop those. Here's an example of the process:

Right away, the prefix "fin" (meaning "holy") caught my attention. I scanned through the list of suffixes and found "wyck" (meaning "place"). Finwyck had a good ring to it, and I was intrigued about a kingdom that's called "holy place". What does that mean? Holy to who? It was rich with potential story ideas. I decided to add an extra "n" to end up with "Finnwyck".

Here's what I came up with so far:

• Kingdom of Finnwyck ("Holy Place")
• Duchy of Braedon ("Hilly Forest")
• Duchy of Langstead ("Long Pasture")
• Duchy of Mawrdwin ("Great Fort")

The process of choosing these names gave me more story ideas. Langstead, with it's long pastures and farmlands is the breadbasket of the nation, while Braedon is much less suited to farming because of it's hilly forests. The Queen awarded both of her children with duchies. Langstead went to her daughter, who she favored, and Braedon when to her less-loved son. We've got some intrigue there already!

Since I've settled on UK-type names for place names, I'll use the same type of names for the inhabitants. I've got a plan for those as well, which I'll share in the next post.