About the Fantasy Place Names generator

I’ve long been a fan of random generators, like Seventh Sanctum and donjon, and I’ve played around with making my own from time to time. For some reason, the idea of dithematic place names in fantasy settings lodged in my head some time in December or January, and wouldn’t be dislodged until I’d done something with it. “Something”, in this case, meant compiling a list of word stems that were (or plausibly could be) used in place names of the right kind, and thinking about how to randomly stick Stem A onto Stem B to make a coherent, useful, or just plain entertaining result.

Unrelatedly, I entered this year’s Finally Finish Something jam in the hopes of, well, having the impetus to finally finish something. I thought it might be Night of the Full Moon, the highly buggy game I made for a jam a year ago, but as January progressed it became clear that wasn’t happening. I’ve been in a period of ill health lately, and so I needed something a little less ambitious, something that still sparked my interest, and that had a “finish” state to suit the jam.

This random generator fit the situation like a hand in a glove!

Prior to this realisation, I’d been treating it as a rework or reboot of “Rulegen”, an old generator project written in Python: a “generator framework” that can have data files plugged into it to create all kinds of different generators. For the jam, though, I decided I would just write it in JavaScript, without all the bells and whistles of the framework. Polishing time could be spent on adding to the list of word stems, and maybe on prettying up the user interface.

So this is the result. It’s not going to win any awards, though I hope it’s fun or inspirational for someone… do let me know if that someone is you!