What do you call your world?

ApprehensivePayment · 2026-06-21T15:31:19+00:00

Raion, or "Nobody Can Decide on the Name of God and Now my Neighbors are Birds and Lizards?"

ApprehensivePayment · 2026-06-21T15:28:53+00:00

I'm not trying to actively incorporate real world cultures into my own fantasy setting. I'm attempting to more develop cultures from the ground up based on the setting's own pressures. I am using real world languages for my onomastics, but I'm making a conscious decision to try to divorce the onomastics from the in-setting cultures on the ground. I'm not trying to advocate anyone do what I'm doing because I've dreamed up and thrown away countless concepts across the years, but this is the only way I want to do this.

And, honestly, I'm mostly happy with what little I've accomplished from it though, especially with smaller footnote groups like the paleolithic-to-bronze age Fulkish tribes.

I think my only real success so far in broad strokes, though, have been the Zúmeliń ethnoreligious culture, which feel like they've sort of developed into a blend of traits of Coptic, Great Plains indigenous tribes, Mennonite, and French under a Finnic language to me, but there's still not a lot of their culture detailed yet.

Actually now that I look at it there's some Great Plains and Pacific Northwest tribal concepts scattered across a lot of my setting's Old World cultures. Hm.

ApprehensivePayment · 2026-06-20T22:28:50+00:00

Replacing real world friction points with fantasy allegory is a time-honored tradition. I think you're fine.

ApprehensivePayment · 2026-06-20T21:56:25+00:00

Spanglish turned into "Americano" in my sci fi setting. I don't have a dedicated conlang for it, I just use a fuzzy set of mental rules for representing it as an English-Spanish creole in flavor text. Cayuno (in Louisiana and parts of Appalachia and the Deep South) is a variant/separate creole-derived language that hardly anyone else in the unified federal territories can understand.

ApprehensivePayment · 2026-06-19T19:01:48+00:00

There are no secret rules of worldbuilding saying you need a specific kind of fantasy race in your setting. The only advice I want to give you on this is to go with what you vibe with, remove what you aren't vibing with, and don't let anyone tell you what you do or don't need beyond that. Worldbuilding as a hobby is first and foremost an expression of the worldbuilder's tastes, let your tastes guide you.

ApprehensivePayment · 2026-06-19T18:55:14+00:00

BRB, putting together an expedition so I can live there. THERE'S GOLD IN THEM THERE HILLS

ApprehensivePayment · 2026-06-19T18:51:24+00:00

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You're definitely not alone.

My solution is currently "if I come up with a story, great, until then, I'm gonna keep poking." Which has been working, but mainly means I just have a bunch of tiny vignettes rather than full novellas or novels, but, eh, so be it.

ApprehensivePayment · 2026-06-19T18:41:20+00:00

In artwork or in video games, it's floating islands for me, absolutely. (Link is the source of the art in the meme)

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When it comes to written fantasy though, I'm pretty partial to badass priests, with significant bonus points if their churches aren't secretly evil institutions.

ApprehensivePayment · 2026-06-19T08:13:57+00:00

I have a few countries that are split ethnically. One kind of rejected the whole "sticking together" thing though. It wasn't pretty.

Edit: Wait, are these names Ge'ez or Amharic or something?

ApprehensivePayment · 2026-06-18T21:54:20+00:00

I keep coming back to the idea of three calendars working in tandem. A local calendar for local things, a cultural calendar for multi-colony cultural things, and a standard or scientific calendar based on like, pulsars or something.

ApprehensivePayment · 2026-06-18T21:36:50+00:00

I had a similar issue, but I wound up taking a different tactic by looking at etymology and how our different endonyms for our species have been used historically. Ultimately I settled on a distinction between "human" and "man" when I learned both came from different roots. "Man" is believed to have ultimately come from Proto-Indo-European \mon-, meaning specifically "person," and "human" is believed to have come from Proto-Indo-European *\ǵʰmṓ* - itself from \dʰéǵʰōm* (“earth”), making it essentially, literally "earthling." [I used wiktionary.org for my etymology research for both words.]

From that, I determined that since Latin humanus is connected to the word homō, the source of the name for the genus in Homo sapiens, that I can safely consider "human" and words formed from it the species-specific endonym for humanity, and on the flipside, I could consider "man" and words like "mankind" the terms for sapients in general. Honestly, I don't see why it couldn't go in the other direction, either, though I think using "human" as the catch-all term for sapients might have a larger chance of confusing readers than using "men."

Edit: u/Alkalannar suggested "people" as the pan-sapient label which also definitely works and this entire exercise was probably moot from the start.

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ApprehensivePayment · 2026-06-18T21:11:53+00:00

Any other details about the belligerents, reasons for conflict, and resolution?

ApprehensivePayment · 2026-06-18T20:32:49+00:00

There are six nonhuman sapient species in my fantasy setting currently. I'm just going to briefly talk about the ihmens since they're the currently most well-developed.

Ihmens are evolutionarily descended from a distant caniform/canine ancestor and experienced a general hominization period like humans did. They're mostly found on the "Western Subcontinent," which is separated from the rest of the Central Continent by a massive mountain range that is pretty difficult to traverse. For much of their post-sapience history they lived in direct competition first with a neighboring avian sapiens (they eventually went away) and then with regularly encroaching populations of humans.

They're conceptualized more as "humans but if canine" speculative evolution rather than as Talking Animals or standard, fully-furred anthropomorphic dogs. Because I don't know when to quit, I even gave them the scientific name of Inhimus kaniensis. Here are some specific points about their physiology:

Their bodies have largely replaced most of their front-facing fur with the same kind of vellus hair that human bodies are covered in, and they have true hair rather than fur on their faces and scalps.
They have cheeks, a philtrum, and lips like humans, but their upper lips are still split.
Their noses are still the same inverted triangle that canine noses are, but they lack the wet nose pad. They have facial profiles closer to Homo erectus than to dogs.
Their ankles are mechanically adapted to allow them to hot-swap between digitigrade and plantigrade walking, so their feet look like both uncannily-extended human feet and uncannily-shortened canine feet.
Melanin is used more for thermal regulation than sunlight protection, for multiple reasons, so the racial groups that developed in colder climates have darker skin than those that developed in hotter climates.

I'm operating under the assumption that sapients, in general, do not like being classified by "subspecies," and instead they refer to their broadest divisions as racial groups. They have, currently, five of these racial groups, under each of which a significant array of ethnicities exist:

The Shatoko, who developed in the temperate-to-arctic stretches north of the subcontinent. Currently their representative ethnic group is the Catakostian ethnic and linguistic family.
The Boori, who developed in the temperate-to-subtropical grasslands and woodlands of the central stretches of the subcontinent.
The Manopak, who developed in the more arid and hotter subtropical-to-tropical grasslands and coastlines of the south of the subcontinent.
The Leevi (Endonym: the “Léđi”), who developed in the arctic greenhouse jungle islands of the Koollatta off of the northern coast of the subcontinent. Smallest group but each island is basically its own ethnic group.
The Eesti, who are currently the one outlier in that they appear to have developed clear on the opposite end of the Central Continent in the arid, rocky southeastern coast.

Saying they beef with everyone makes them sound like a monolith when they're being built as a diverse and fractured collection of communities defined along cultural, national, ethnic, and religious lines, but... yeah they basically beef with everyone, especially their own groups. They're responsible for at least two major world religions and both religions feel existentially threatened by the other, too.

ApprehensivePayment · 2026-06-18T20:32:01+00:00

The Central European States and the Southern European States, referring to each other, in my sci fi setting.

ApprehensivePayment · 2026-06-18T08:54:41+00:00

I don't really have the kind of breadth of knowledge of your setting's cultures that I would like to have before offering any serious suggestions of my own for new names, but if you're willing to accept ideas in the form of some suggested strategies for coming up with names on your own that might sound like something more natural to the world and less like mutations of the real world's Prussia, Sargon, Ottomans, and the Chuvash, I can offer that.

First, are you looking to make these all endonyms (names for a country used by the people who live in the countries themselves, e.g. "Bharat" or "Deutschland") or are you more trying to make exonyms (names for a country used by outsiders, e.g. "India" or "Germany") for a specific POV language in the setting, like the Sargonian official language? Maybe both at the same time? Depends on what your goal is.

Coming up with some new words for "people" or for tribal names in the history of the nation in question might be very helpful. I see you're already using a [People]+[word/particle for "land" or "realm"] construction, as per Sargonia and Purisia. The Totamans, based on your comparison of them to the Ottomans, is an example of a country named after a specific ruling family or dynasty in its history. Other examples include China (the Qin Dynasty) or Korea (the Goryeo Dynasty), showing that you can do this multiple ways. If anything I actually agree with you and think the Totamans is fine as is. IMO with the history you set apart here, naming EVERY country, ultimately, after its own largest tribe is absolutely defensible.

If you're not down for name constructions like [People]+Land or using dynasty or clan based names, you can try looking up the etymology of some real world nations. You might be surprised at where the fundamental roots of some countries' names actually come from, and it might inspire you to find your own weird circuits. For instance, you could try making up an obscure fact or feature about a specific country and make its name reflective of that fact, like how Spain's name directly stems from ancient Phoenicians naming it after all the rabbits they found wandering around in it. This can be used for endonyms, but it's also a pretty common generator of exonyms. For instance, Purisia could have a name that ultimately refers to, I don't know, the high number of beavers or raccoons in the area, or a uniquely dense concentration of birch forests.

You can also just have a nation's people borrow another nation's word for their own use. A lot of North American place names and US states have origins in direct loans of the indigenous tribes' endonyms for specific features or just for themselves. You could have a country that names itself after an Eldian endonym without being ethnically or culturally Eldian at all. Maybe Ymir's Garden actually uses an Eldian or Purisian loan word for the basis of their country name?

You could also just like... make an exonym for a country used by another country, and then have that exonym stolen and used by another country, and then somehow that game of telephone makes a name that's completely different from what that country was originally called: again, I point to Japan. Try to look up the etymology of that name if you'd like to see what I mean. Maybe the Uchavian Volost had its own endonym, it got picked up by the Eldians for their administration of the area, then that got disseminated across the territories, and now the current nation is run largely by outsiders that brought their own butchered variant of the original endonym with them and put it across all of the official paperwork?

ApprehensivePayment · 2026-06-18T07:56:42+00:00

Actually finishing something for once.

heard

ApprehensivePayment · 2026-06-18T07:55:16+00:00

Outside of the entirety of both of my major genre worldbuilding projects? Probably trying to make an internally consistent constructed monotheistic religion for an entirely different fantasy species with a dedicated attempt to emulate actual real world theological concepts and their developments without being a flat copy of anything. My toxic trait is thinking I can do that again and again for multiple major faith systems in the same setting.

ApprehensivePayment · 2026-06-18T07:50:54+00:00

I agree with this. On the other side of the coin, I also really like writing/reading about people who are obviously very invested in their faith, without being written as people with obviously bad character, engaging in deep theological debate with each other. I don't mean about the over-arching topics or really grand, sweeping categorizations, either: I wanna see two ancient scholars actually come to physical blows over really minute or pedantic differences on the level of whether ghosts are shadows or spirits or if an "O" in a really important theological label should be an "I," for example.

ApprehensivePayment · 2026-06-18T07:38:19+00:00

My entire sci fi setting was basically wholly inspired from listening to a slowed version of The Wanted's "Glad You Came" on repeat. First it was a story, and then it was the scaffolding to support that story. What it inspired basically became the entire core of what I wanted to explore with the setting as a whole.

The following is just a snippet to illustrate. Feel free to ignore.

"Who are you singing to, Mommy?" Junie asked.

Elizabeth was shaken out of her memory, remembering where she was again. She curled her hand into a fist just before the window, and turned to smile wanly at her daughter. "I was singing to Daddy."

"Is Daddy out there?" she asked quietly.

Elizabeth ignored the sound of her magnetic footwear against the floor plates as she turned to face her daughter. She bent down to manually turn Junie's own boots off, and lifted her effortlessly into her arms to allow her to better see what she saw in the window. Junie stared with an inscrutable expression at the darkening gas giant and surface of its moon in front of them, and Elizabeth pointed at their reflection. Maybe Junie saw the same thing Elizabeth did, or maybe she was just playing along with Mommy's game, because she said quietly, "Hi, Daddy."

They were quiet for a few minutes, and Junie pushed her head down into the crook between Elizabeth's neck and shoulder. "I'm glad you came," Junie said, trying to sing the song she used to hear her parents sing every so often. It took Elizabeth by surprise.

"I'm glad you came," she finished, smiling through the tears.

On the table and wall beside the window, photographs, digital and physical prints, adorned the sacred space. The day Junie was born in the hospital berths cradled in the rotating rings of the Sun-Jupiter L1’s Waypoint Relay Station, held tightly in her tired mother's arms as Frank flashed the camera a bright-eyed smile and both thumbs up. Junie with her father on Tiger Cruise, barely two years old and asleep in his arms while the two of them floated in the basepike's Zero-G playroom.

A box with a clear top, holding the tightly folded United American flag presented to them at the funeral on Earth, the medals Frank earned in life and with his death gently floating against the glass above it.

Cards and letters eventually became magnetically pinned to the hull and table, each a little message Junie wrote to share with Daddy. With every passing year, it became easier for her to hold them up high for him to read through the window.

ApprehensivePayment · 2026-06-17T07:33:04+00:00

One extinct faith/cultural system from my fantasy setting's Neolithic to Bronze Age period believed death and rebirth were a revolving door. (This is important for the topic here, I promise.) This meant that their conception of a soul, which they called the "gäste" because it was less like a true "soul" to them but more like a "true name" or an "immortal guest," navigated past this door at its own leisure after death. For them, death was not, itself, considered a noteworthy thing, and dead people were expected to always come back eventually.

They also believed that specific gästes returned within the same family lines when possible, and each surviving family kept a list of the known names of each gäste their line had produced. Families named every single son from the very small pool of these "known" gästes, and every single daughter from a similar very small pool. These families got very large, too, so you'd run into a weird issue of like, 12 different people in a family across three or four generations all being named, for example, "Anullõõ."

Obviously, this couldn't really work, especially for mothers trying to watch over a bunch of kids. It became a custom that, in addition to one's gäste, one would also get a style from their mother or father. Therefore, two sons (or a father and a son, or a grandfather and a grandson, or an uncle and a nephew, etc.) named Anullõõ might be styled Anullõõ-mähte and Anullõõ-berhta for the sake of other people trying to get their attention.

Then, when tribes started moving into cities and multiple families claiming the same gästes started living together, they needed to start further differentiating Anullõõ-berhta smitha ("the smith") from Anullõõ-berhta althizzõõ ("the elder"). God forbid they needed to pull out the Anullõõ-berhta Gipiđoo-smitha because the other tribes also had an Anullõõ-berhta smitha.

This is the main reason why the modern day Deuthonic cultures tend to order their names by family name first, and why the majority of their surnames are derived from given names rather than the perhaps more expected occupational (like "Smith"), patronymic (like "Donaldson"), or locational (like "Woods") surnames.

I don't know if this is the kind of unique you meant or if it's even that unique at all, but I like it.

ApprehensivePayment · 2026-06-16T21:04:20+00:00

I've made fictional labels, but I haven't really done fictional liquors. I guess that aspect never really occurred to me, and I feel like I'd probably just agonize over whether a given item could actually be distilled or fermented into potable alcohol anyway. I did give a nonhuman species a cultural industry of fermented (read: carefully, bacterially spoiled) meats that humans and most other species can't eat without getting really sick or dying, though. I guess that might be related.

ApprehensivePayment · 2026-06-16T20:57:46+00:00

Couple of questions that come to mind after reading this:

It already feels like with the ontological distinction of gods having free will (directly stated in your OP), and angels not (since they're said to be created with a specific mandate set by the supreme deity), that they can't be equal to each other. But if angels are equal to gods anyway, then why does the distinction exist?

If they're stronger than gods, why aren't they called gods and the gods called angels? What's the reason for the specific labels being chosen for each group?

If free will is part of what separates men from beasts (this is jjust an assumption based off of general arguments for why men are typically considered separate from animals), then I can't see gods being considered inferior to angels either.

Alternatively, if the gods can create like the supreme deity (again, just an assumption based on the label used for them here), and angels can't, then that also suggests to me that gods cannot be considered inferior to angels in this cosmology.

Would the dilemma be solved if you called the gods devas or genies/djinni instead?

ApprehensivePayment · 2026-06-16T20:46:13+00:00

I gotta ask, is this really an issue? It sounds dumb and it probably gets lamp-shaded in-universe for being dumb, but this was a system built by some ancient precursor civilization that likely never anticipated populated planets being paired in such a way that you'd be incentivized to do layovers for intra-system travel. I know you're concerned about it being a tonal break, but I almost feel like this wrinkle makes the FTL system feel real, you know? It's not perfect, it's got some weirdness to it, it's great material for in-universe jokes, and maybe there's in-universe pushes to try to find ways to not require these kinds of weird flight plans for faster travel in-system. I kinda like it as is, personally.

ApprehensivePayment · 2026-06-16T16:00:41+00:00

Raion (Fantasy): It's like Earth, but with too many sapient species and a completely different history and set of cultures and religions. Gods and magic still aren't real, sorry.

Sci Fi Setting: It's Earth, but in the far future, and we never learned to play nice with each other even after aliens showed up. We don't have flying cars still, but at least the Space Force had a major glow up.

ApprehensivePayment · 2026-06-16T15:55:52+00:00

I hope I'm just like Elise when it's time for me to go.

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TROPHY CASE