City and town names: settlements, maps and ideas

Most made-up town names fail in one of two ways. They either reach for a word so strange that nobody can say it or picture it, or they are so flat that the place sounds like an industrial estate rather than somewhere with a market cross and a green. The sweet spot is a name built like a real place name: a recognisable stem, often part real word and part invented, joined to a suffix that once meant something on the land, then framed by a form that tells you how big the place is. Get that and your town sounds like somewhere with a road leading to it.

A stem, a suffix and a form

Real settlement names tend to be a stem plus a suffix that described the place: a ford was a river crossing, a ham a homestead, a ton an enclosure or farm, a bury a fortified place, a haven a harbour. Fantasy town names work the same way. Take a stem like Oak or Bridge or Salt, add a suffix like ford, haven or field, and you have Oakford, Bridgehaven, Saltfield: names that feel as though they were named for something that was there. The third layer is the form, the framing that says how large the place is. The same stem becomes the City of Oakford, Oakford Town or the village of Oakford depending on how many people live there.

Pick a kind for the flavour

Settlements vary by the land they grew on, and choosing a kind keeps a name coherent. Five flavours cover most settings:

• River. Bridges, fords and mill towns on the water: Bridgeford, the City of Rivermere.
• Trade. Busy market towns and walled cities of guilds and gates: the City of Goldgate, Bramcross.
• Coastal. Salt-worn ports and harbour towns of quay and tide: Port Saltmere, Gullhaven.
• Rustic. Quiet farming villages of green and hearth: the village of Mossfield, Oakhollow.
• Frontier. Hard mining and outpost towns of stone and ash: Ironwatch, the town of Greycrag.

If you want to hear a stretch of names in any of these styles, the city name generator builds them by kind, lets you choose the settlement form, and lets you save and refine the ones you like.

The form does the scale

The form you wrap a name in tells the reader, in a single phrase, how big the place is and what it is for. A City is a great seat, walled and many-quartered, somewhere a campaign can spend several sessions. A Town is a market place, large enough to matter on the road but small enough to know. A Port is defined by its harbour and its trade with the sea. And a Village or a hamlet is a handful of houses round a green, the sort of place that gets one scene and a memorable innkeeper. Switching only the form while keeping the stem is a quick way to show a place growing or shrinking over an age: the village of Oakford becomes Oakford Town becomes the City of Oakford as the road brings trade.

Naming a map, not just a town

If you are filling in a region rather than naming one place, keep the kinds varied so neighbours sound different from one another, and lean on the suffixes to suggest geography: ford and bridge and mere near water, gate and bury and cross at crossroads and market towns, haven and quay on the coast, field and hollow and dale out in farming country. A cluster of names that all end in the same suffix reads as one old culture, which is useful when you want a shire that hangs together, and dull when every place sounds the same. The generator gives each name a place suffix you can swap, so it is easy to build a county that feels coherent without being repetitive.

Using the generator well

Treat the tool as a map-filling machine. Choose a kind, set the settlement form, and generate a batch. Read them aloud and keep the two or three that sound like somewhere with a market day. If a stem is perfect but the form is wrong, use Refine to keep the place name and reroll the framing, or turn off the settlement title for the bare name and add your own. For more on shaping a name once you have a candidate, see the broader guide on how to name a fantasy character, which applies to places as much as people.

A few pitfalls

• Unpronounceable stems. If a player cannot say your town, they will not use it. Keep stems sayable in one go.
• Form and flavour clashing. A tiny Rustic stem framed as a great City can work, but only if you mean it. Match the form to the size of the place unless the mismatch tells a story.
• Every place the same shape. A map where every settlement is the Town of Something gets samey. Vary the forms so cities, ports and villages sit side by side.

Once you have your towns, the wider land they sit in wants a name too, and so do the people who live there. The same stem-and-suffix logic scales up to whole realms in the kingdom name generator, while the human and elf generators name the folk who walk your streets.