#UnchartedTravel
I spent today throwing together a “pull list” of names for my IRL campaign of Uncharted Worlds that starts this Friday. I know how hard it can be to put on the spot and name things — especially locations — especially in settings that can be so removed from any context the players are familiar with. So, I spent today with some random planet generators, did some trimming, did some tweaking, did some inventing, and I share the results with you.
172 Planets, split into two lists of 86.
The first 86 are intended to be “far-flung” alien worlds, for campaigns where your space opera has no ties to Earth, Earthlings, Earth history, or the like. I’ve done my best to scour this list and remove or modify foreign language words that the generators decided sounded “weird enough” to be alien. I’m sure I haven’t gotten all of them.
The second 86 are various words, primarily but not entirely in English, that I could imagine getting bolted on far-flung space opera worlds as names. Some of them are folk lore or historical, some are simply colors, others suggest a planet’s features are responsible for the name, and others are just fun nouns and adjectives that sound great if you say them in a Darth Vader or Han Solo voice.
There’s no details to go with any of these names: they’re arranged randomly so that I or any of my players can just choose one and make up the rest as we go along. The second list is the more evocative of the two, and should definitely paint an image in the players’ minds about what the world is like, so you can mine their thoughts for details. The first list, though, GM’s will have to make use of some canny follow-up questions to figure out what the planet or system is like.
Please enjoy! If you like some of these, feel free to say so in the comments — maybe even share what kind of ideas are inspired by one of these!
I made a joke about an archeologist in Traveller’s Imperium who says that, since many thousands of years and wars and such have passed, it’s almost impossible to pin down the origin of a planetary name. The Scout Service of the time may have named a system on a whim, and could even used what they had for lunch for all we know.
And it was signed, Gord MacPherson, Head Archeologist, Makkus Magnus…
Cool list! Thanks for sharing!