Fantasy Town Name Generator
Town names for your map, your campaign or your novel. The default style joins plain words the way English place names were made, from what was there: a ford, a hill, a mill, a keep. Change the style for Nordic fishing towns, desert oases, elven cities or dwarven holds.
Common tongue: plain fantasy names.
What real town names are made of
Most real town names describe the place as it was when it was founded: Oxford was a ford for oxen, Ashby was a farm by the ash trees. Fantasy towns sound right when they do the same. A name like Millshore or Swiftpeak tells a traveller what to expect before they arrive, and it gives you something to describe when they do.
Endings carry a lot. In the Old English style, -ton and -ham are farms and homesteads, -bury is a fortified place, -ford is a river crossing and -wick is a trading post. In the Nordic style, -stad is a town, -vik a bay and -nes a headland. Keep a region's endings consistent and the map reads as one country.
Naming a whole map
Name the capital and the largest towns first, and give them the shortest names: people say them most. Smaller places can carry longer, odder names, because a remote village is allowed to sound strange.
Two towns in one region shouldn't share a first syllable unless they're related, as with an Upper and a Lower, or an old town and the new one built beside it.
Names are the start
Make the whole world: a map, its peoples, its magic and a villain with a plan. The free world generator names its towns and regions with this same engine, in the style you choose.
In the World Studio you build a world on a real map, set its rules in plain words and invite players. An AI game master voices every character while the game engine keeps the map, the fights and the money honest.
More name generators
Questions
- What's the difference between the town styles?
- Each style is learned from a different list of place names. Common tongue joins plain English words (Millshore, Gloomwall); Old English sounds like real English villages (Darlow, Craftford); Nordic, Celtic, Germanic and the rest follow those traditions; the fantasy styles (elven, dwarven, orcish, draconic) are learned from invented names.
- Can I generate village names and city names too?
- Yes. A town name works for a place of any size. There are separate pages with defaults suited to villages and to cities, and you can switch styles on any page.
- Are these real place names?
- No, though a few will look familiar: the generator rebuilds names from the sounds of real ones, so now and then it lands on a name that exists somewhere. Search one before you print it on a map if that matters to you.
Names are generated with a port of the names generator from Azgaar's Fantasy Map Generator (MIT license, by Max Haniyeu), including its name lists.