How do you name a City?

[red_eagle123]

For all those world creators out there, how do you come up with names for cities? Do you try to just come up with something that sounds good, or do you come up with a generic 'non-real world' name (IE: Star City, Central City, Coast City, Gotham City, Metropolis, etc)?

 

If you had to rename Detroit after the catastrophe, how would you go about doing it? Just idle curiosity on my part, I'd be interested in hearing the thought processes of other world creators.

[Asperion]

Most of the time that I will run a game, I prefer to use some city that I create. Since I usually place the city in the same general area that we live in everyone ends up having a large amount of say in the way that the city is set up and the name. This leads to some extremely strange names and cities that the players travel to and the beings that they meet. In my last campaign the city that everyone was based in was called Chizlaun. The city was located one hour northwest of Flagstaff in Arizona. We used a similar process with other cities that everyone traveled to. Some of the names are Gaeristan in India, some long forgotten hidden city located in Iraq.

[dei1c3]

OK, it may not be the most original thing, but I like a good "DC-esque" city name and so usually go with the format of "[Descriptor] City" such as Central City and Coast City.

 

My current campaign is set in Pacific City, which is basically an LA-sized city located where Seattle is in real life. I've also used places like...

 

- Silicon City (a huge city of the future spanning from San Francisco to San Jose)

- Liberty City (Philly)

- Patriot City (Boston)

- Iron City (Pittsburgh)

- Confederate City (Atlanta)

- Monarch City (London)

- Imperial City (Beijing)

- Commerce City (Hong Kong)

 

For Detroit, I'd do something like Motor City, Border City or Lakes City.

 

Chris

[Collector]

What about New York?,

[Crusader108]

In my campaign world, I also went the DC-esque route for city naming (not sure I like it though...too much of a Marvel fan and spend too much time translating to real world equivalents)

 

Examples of my campaign cities include:

 

Gold Coast City (my campaign setting) --- Houston

Tea Port City ---Boston

Capital City---Washington DC

Liberty City---Philadelphia

New South City---Atlanta

Los Disneys---Orlando

Sun City---Miami

Delta City---New Orleans

Gateway City---St Louis

Hudson City (borrowed from Dark Champions)---Chicago

Lone Star City---Dallas

Tinsel City---L.A.

Motor City---Detroit (pre-Millenium City sourcebook)

[Thirdbase]

Originally posted by Collector

What about New York?,

 

How about old York?

 

Seriously, I just use real cities and ignore any mistakes that I may make.

 

I have always hated the artificial DC cities.

[death tribble]

I can understand calling American cities by the DC system like Coast City etc but renaming London Monarch City ?

 

No, no, no. This will not do.

[Hermit]

Re: How do you name a City?

 

Originally posted by red_eagle123

For all those world creators out there, how do you come up with names for cities? Do you try to just come up with something that sounds good, or do you come up with a generic 'non-real world' name (IE: Star City, Central City, Coast City, Gotham City, Metropolis, etc)?

 

If you had to rename Detroit after the catastrophe, how would you go about doing it? Just idle curiosity on my part, I'd be interested in hearing the thought processes of other world creators.

 

I prefer to read about real cities, I prefer to GM using fictional ones Hypocracy, but it works.

 

As for naming, I have used different methods...

 

1) Look at the Geography "Welcome to Two-Rivers!"

 

2) Look at other cities in the area, and go in that vein. I named a fictional city in California "Las Santos"

 

3) I decided there was a fictional founder or favored citizen for this fictional city, and named it after him/her. This is especially neat if your game world has Golden Age (or sooner) heroes who would be in the running. "MEGABERG: Population: 246,900"

 

I suppose you could even use the last as a way to make PCs nervous... "Zoriastian City? Kind of a funny name for a town in Columbia, isn't it?"

 

As for what I would have renamed Detroit? Well, Millennium City has grown on me... but other options might be:

New Detroit (sounds like something out of "Buck Rogers" doesn't it?)

Memorial City (Make it more a place based around homage to the fallen heroes and citizens than looking to the future)

Defiance, USA

[Osprey]

Originally posted by Collector

What about New York?,

 

DC calls it "Gotham City"

yep - you read that right

 

I Live in Tampa Bay.

In My campaign, It's called "Palo Fuego"

 

The process:

1) "Tampa" is rumored to be an indian word : "Fire Stick"

(Indians first saw muskets there)

2) Florida has a lot of Spanish culture.

3) "Fire Stick" in spanish is "Palo Fuego"

[dei1c3]

Originally posted by death tribble

I can understand calling American cities by the DC system like Coast City etc but renaming London Monarch City ?

 

No, no, no. This will not do.

LOL! You probably wouldn't care for what we called Paris then.

 

As for New York...now that you mention it, I don't think I've ever set a campaign or scenario in New York. Instead, I tend to make my cities the "New York of their world". For instance, when I lived outside Philly, we played in Liberty City, which in that world was the largest U.S. city instead of New York.

 

Maybe, being from Boston originally, I am biased against NYC. Or maybe because Gotham City is already a great name. If I had to, I guess I could call it Apple City or something.

 

Chris

[Blue Jogger]

If I had to rename Detroit, I would go with something that would inspire new hope like Iron City, after all don't they still have iron factories there?

[megaplayboy]

"Our city is named after its founder, Louis Campaigne, a great French-American. No one could ever remember the 'e' at the end, though, so we dropped it."

 

 

 

[assault]

Originally posted by megaplayboy

"Our city is named after its founder, Louis Campaigne, a great French-American. No one could ever remember the 'e' at the end, though, so we dropped it."

 

 

 

 

I like!

 

It even makes perfect sense.

 

On alternate New Yorks: obviously both Metropolis and Gotham City are New York in drag. In fact, prior to 1941, there were explicit references locating Batman's activities in New York. I'm not sure exactly when Superman's home town was named Metropolis, but it wasn't in Action Comics #1. The city there is unnamed, but it seems to be intended to be New York. (or perhaps Chicago? Did Chicago have high rise buildings in the late 1930s?)

 

As for Australian cities: there was an interesting little TV series made a couple of years back called 'Cybergirl'. (It's being repeated at the moment on Saturday mornings.) It's a kids' show, involving an alien 'cyber-replicant' that runs away to Earth, pursued by two other more primitive models. The title character then becomes a superheroine of sorts, though she doesn't actually use her powers much, since they tend to draw attention from her hunters.

 

This is explicitly superhero genre material. It was filmed in Brisbane, Queensland, which was renamed 'River City' in the series. This allowed the producers of the series to Americanise aspects of the city (but nobody would be fooled), while, of course, allowing various city officials to be protrayed in a negative light...

 

Anyway, I've been toying with the idea of using 'River City' in my universe for a while. Whether or not I do, in the context of the present discussion, I would like to stake a claim on the name: River City is in Queensland, Australia.

 

So there.

 

Alan,

posting from Drayton Swamp, 130 km from River City.

[Dr. MID-Nite]

This may be hard to believe, but I stole the name of the campaign city from the movie "Mothra". In it, the title monster attacks a fictional city which looks a LOT like New York. The city....Newkirk City...kind of stuck a chord with me and I used it for the start of my campaign.(The group has since relocated to Millennium City.)

 

Rob

[Rook]

I use a fictional name only for the city in which the campaign is set. My campaigns have been set in a fictional city called Olympus. It is situated on the east coast somewhere south of Washington (it replaces Norfolk, VA in my campaign world, though I never really say this).

 

If you want to rename several real cities, I would recommend looking up city nicknames and basing their new names on these, if possible. This is how DC came up with Gotham City (and possibly others).

[Publius]

I use Crescent City, which is located along the Great Lakes and kind of rolls up Chicago and Detroit into one. I have used the name Kingstown for a fictional city in the past. I usually just pick something that sounds good to me at the time, although player input is welcome as well, it is by no means the sole determining factor. Nothing is worse that choosing a name that you later come to hate or gets slapstick ("Gopher City" was suggested by one wag of mine). If there is something noteworthy about your city, founded by a Superhero for instance, than that might well influence the name of the city but you might also remember that sometimes resources/industries change and thus these aspects might have little reflection on the city's original name (unless it was renamed sometime in the past).

 

I also use the same method (sounds-about-right, player input, etc.) for the name of neighborhoods within the city more often. Crescent City for example has Brimstone Alley, an evil looking (and smelling) section of the town where the ne'r-do-well set often gather. Keep in mind that cities are rarely monolithic, they usually have neighborhoods, or other subcommunities with independent flavors. Sometimes this will have a racial/ethnic dimension, but there are also class and even religious based divisions of neighborhoods or sections within the city. If you have a lot of super-types there might even be a section where the congregate (or even specific subsets, like the magic-types). The real reason I use fictional cities is to tap into that source, so that players can develop a sense of the city through the mosiac of these tiny portions. Give them distinctive names: Glassier Park, Ironwork, Brickstone etc. so that the players will become interested in a wealthy man who has made frequent visits to Brimstone Alley under cover of night, or the hobo whose firrst layer of clothes originally came from a shop in Glassier Park and seem to have been tailored.

[Osprey]

Originally posted by assault

On alternate New Yorks: obviously both Metropolis and Gotham City are New York in drag. In fact, prior to 1941, there were explicit references locating Batman's activities in New York. I'm not sure exactly when Superman's home town was named Metropolis, but it wasn't in Action Comics #1. The city there is unnamed, but it seems to be intended to be New York. (or perhaps Chicago? Did Chicago have high rise buildings in the late 1930s?).

 

*Ding*

Chicago is Correct!

(Though there is a smaller city in real-world IL named Metropolis)

 

For Detroit: Is "Motor City" too obvious?

[Stray Cat]

A long-running campaign with three GMs in our group was founded several years ago. We called it the Tri-City campaign. The Tri-City area is vaguely somewhere in the megalopolis between DC and Boston. The three cities that are in such close proximity are named Metro City, Golden City, and Highcastle.

 

We've also used real cities. My current campaign city is Miami. Another gm is gettin ready to revisit his New York campaign. The east coast is crowded for us. We've also had several west coast campaigns that we'll eventually return to. We have had major crossovers from almost all of them. I guess that sort of thing happens when ya play with the same group for more than ten years..

 

Another gm is creating a city in the Great Lakes region called Superior City. (I think it's near the real-world city of Duluth, and it doesn't hurt that there is already a municipality named Superior in that location.)

 

I've considered moving my Miami campaign to a fictional city too. I must say I was very impressed with Green Ronin's Freedom City sourcebook. I think it was the generic nature of the material that appealed to me.

 

Cat

[umbra]

Just be careful when making up cities, I had a former GM who thought the name Massengill sounded nice for an Amber game (not realizing where he had heard it before). He never lived that one down...

[Peregrine]

My fictional city (originally created some ten years ago, real time) is called Trinity City, located at the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers, at the site of real-world Cairo, IL. The name of the city came from its history (as it grew ahistorically from extra railroads run into the area both antebellum and later) when the area suffered less from the Great Depression than cities further east, and FDR made a speech during the 1936 elections praising 'this trinity of cities' (at the time they were Cairo, IL, West Cairo, MO, and South Cairo, KY). Within six months each city had renamed itself Trinity City.

 

Ultimately, the three cities merged under one municipal government, but that's a tale for another day.

[st barbara]

To "Assault" So when the "Danger Alert" goes of in your hero's headquarters it starts singing the appropriate song from "The Music Man" does it ? ("I say you've got trouble, right here in River City")

[assault]

Originally posted by st barbara

To "Assault" So when the "Danger Alert" goes of in your hero's headquarters it starts singing the appropriate song from "The Music Man" does it ? ("I say you've got trouble, right here in River City")

 

Why yes! However did you guess?

 

In fact, of course, we have a _much_ broader selection of tunes than that. One of the disadvantages of being superheroes in a comparatively small city is having a lot of time on your hands. Recording show tunes is just one of the ways of dealing with this problem...

 

 

Alan

[AnotherSkip]

Hmm I took Dernver and renamed it:

"Den City, the Diamond of the Rockies!!!!"

 

and how can you take _one_ of the cities in Texas and name it Lone Star City????

I'ts not bad, mind you, just kinda wondering how you could keep from slapping every one of the Lone Star State's cities with that title.....

[dei1c3]

I think the best way to avoid it is (with apologies to any Texans here) to have some kind of horrible tragedy destroy all but one of the cities in Texas.

 

I'm just KEEDING!

 

Chris

[death tribble]

I'd just give Texas back to the Apaches.

 

And no I'm not kidding.