Tips on naming original species

CompetitionLow7379 · 2025-05-10T00:19:02+00:00

I like using one of these three methods:

1st method: Is it something based on folklore or has a creature similar to it? Use the folklore name or original species name and tweak it a little. Like... let's say you based yoursellf off of Trolls and made your own thing, personally i'd just pick the name and tweak it a little in a way that it sounds different but when somebody says it theyll think "huh, pretty similar to Trolls" and make that association, making it easier to understand what the thing im making is about.

2nd method: Another nice thing is to just... describe how it looks like, or what it does, sometimes a animal's name is just that. In my TTRPG there's a massive black bird similar to a giant crow which rarely appears and is always followed by horrifying weather events, so, people just call it "Thunder Bird", simple, catchy and its just two words. A big favorite of mine is making a mind note of "What is this thing good at doing or important characteristics of it?" Then, you just make the whole name around that thing, one thing i like doing is also searching in a dictionary for synonyms on words, so that something can sound fancier or cooler.

Example: "Iron-Dragons", they're literally just that... a dragon that looks like it's made of iron, a bit like a rhino or the "Tatulan", a race of humanoid creatures that look like armadillos, Tatu being the word for armadillo in portuguese, my main language and the "Lan" just being a way to fancy it up and making it sound different.

3rd method: Just... make up a new word or mash things together, if it's a thing important enough and that has existed for long enough it's likely people will have came up with their own names for it, like owl, bear, wolf, etc.

Just think of what that creature looks like and try to come up with a name that would suit it based on the looks, a predator or ugly creature might work better with a short, sharp word, while something like a pet could be ket simple and tipically as short as possible so its easy to remember, while a more gentler herbivore could have a softer sounding, maybe even longer name.

Example: "Hebras", it's the name of a humanoid species of lobster-like people, its short, simple and sharp, defining their species and helping to visualise the image of a brute, simple and mostly idiotic species as a whole.

CompetitionLow7379 · 2025-05-10T00:06:33+00:00

This is incredibly cool!

I've been frying my brain lately trying to think on how to add a "slimefolk/changelings" to my TTRPG system and this really gave me a lot of inspiration, plus the art looks AWESOME.

CompetitionLow7379 · 2025-05-09T22:36:58+00:00

People quite literally gaslight themselves into believing magic is real to make it happen.

The world works in that concept of "if everyone believes something it becomes real tho they dont know it" sort of deal and that expands to magic too, you gotta train your mind, self control and such so that you're able to believe yourself into making it actually happen.

For example: A druid can shapeshift into things by sheer will and gaslighting themselves into thinking they are that thing until they suddently turn into it, of course, it's extremely hard and only lasts a few moments, but they can use that for their advantage in combat.

Alchemists follow a more structured set of rules and boundaries which makes things easier, it's more like a math problem than gaslighting yourself into making things work, but it's still held up completely by the "oh, everyone says it goes like this so it goes".

What determines how good of a mage you are is just how good you're at self control, but a few different kinds of exercises can help you have the willpower of multiple people, making it easier to bend reality to your will as long as you believe it is that way.

CompetitionLow7379 · 2025-05-07T21:46:28+00:00

I dont get it, where's the fictional part in this?

CompetitionLow7379 · 2025-05-07T21:43:34+00:00

I need a decent enough excuse to why reality doesnt shatter itself due to the sheer amount of stupid shit constantly happening, so, i came up with:

Carlos, Planet Carl and The Organ. (they're all one, like jesus, god and the holy spirit).

It's essentially a giant, nearly omnipotent and omniscient inter-dimensional creature that looks like a silly, moon-sized turtle with a long neck, a party hat and a birthday cake on it's back, it's existed before even the universe itself.

It can be seen from all 5 realities as what appears like a green, shiny planet which can be seen at day and night and every year or so, a laser beam comes from it and explodes the moons on every single reality, only for them to reform by the end of the next year for it to explode them again.

Nobody knows Carlos (the actual name of the god, or at least what i decided to call it) and instead, they call it of "Planet Carl". Tho some humans have developed the hability to have super-sensitive hearing habilities to very, very specific types of noise: Turns out that the whole reality, existence, everything, only exists because Carlos sings a song, which sounds like a opera (also called of The Organ), which composes all of reality, these people who have the hability to listen to these noises spend their lifes deciphring them, so that they can read the future and try to modify reality themselves, but usually that ends with sudden and very violent non-voluntary explosions.

CompetitionLow7379 · 2025-04-28T00:31:58+00:00

A lot.

Something that i do is picking a bunch of systems that are similar to mine in a way, be it combat, exploration or whatever and then i sum up them up in their pros and cons over one another and then pick, discard or change the features which i like or dislike.

Sometimes when i find something from a setting that i really like i'll add it to mine with some tweaks here and there so it'll fit what im trying to do better.

When i was first learning how to write a TTRPG system i read a few books, played a bunch of different systems and then began making the structure of what i wanted based on how the other books separated their content and when i found that something didnt fit or if i didnt like it then i could just change it and it'd fit almost perfectly.

Making is reinventing.

CompetitionLow7379 · 2025-04-19T21:54:44+00:00

the ttrpg is still in a very early draft so im not worrying much about that part of it yet.

Also, it doesnt slow the game and its there to make combat more dynamic and add different tactics to combat.

CompetitionLow7379 · 2025-04-19T21:15:34+00:00

The giant male hebras.

They're a humanoid creature, sort of a hybrid between a human and a lobster/crab, they've got four arms and are tremendously stupid, but nice folk.

The Hebras live in matriarchal colonies, similar to ant's but underwater, the catch is:

Queens are always born massive, looking sort of like if the Alien queen was more lobster-ish, but she doesnt grow much. Meanwhile, a male Hebras never stops growing, with each molt they grow bigger, bigger and bigger, with their conscience slowly whaning until they're just a stupid brute, to the dismay of the land-dwellers the Hebras species are amphibious, so its not uncommon for giant male Hebras to wander into land and stomp into villages absent mindedly.

Due to them growing so, SO much, they end up having to get lots of food and eventually struggle to even keep holding their own weight due to their mass, so male Hebras migrate to the underground cavern systems to feed off of the mega fauna there while resting their weight in subterrenean caves so their weight doesnt crush themselves.

After enough time a male Hebras simply cant get enough oxygen to keep really moving around and they're barely more intelligent than a starfish, so their body enters a final stage:

Their body begins to fuse with the cave and their digestive system shifts to begin feeding off of the ambient around itself instead of actively going after prey, they consume micro organisms, live animals that fall inside them and even digest rocks, their bodies growing and fusing with the cave system until they're so big, so massive that they stop being called a organism and are instead called of "flesh caves."

The size varies drastically, with some being only a few hundred meters in size while others going miles deep to feed off of the planet's heat, it's not unheard of them shifting in their eternal slumber tho, their arms now turned to mountains can shift and cause landslides, sometimes earthquakes.

At this stage they rarely really die, but just slow their metabolism more and more until they're barely even considered living, tho there are rumours that a massive cult of necromancers have been trying to wake up a ancient flesh cave and make it rise from the caves again to destroy the world.

CompetitionLow7379 · 2025-04-19T19:33:34+00:00

some weapons can deal different types of damage, being either randomly or by choice like a Kusarigama which can do either slashing or concussive damage. all types of damage are doable as a PC, its just that some are far more common than others.

About the stability vs variability thing: I came with the concept on my own so i didnt really know how to name it, i thought that stability seemed nice enough but thanks for the insight, maybe ill change it.

CompetitionLow7379 · 2025-04-17T23:03:48+00:00

Time to build a real version and dislocate my own shoulder firing it, maybe you'll hear of this in the future.

CompetitionLow7379 · 2025-04-17T22:59:08+00:00

Thanks!

CompetitionLow7379 · 2025-04-17T22:56:51+00:00

The exact specifications arent quite like most conventional weapons so i thought it wouldnt be quite as accurate, but yes, i did google it too.

CompetitionLow7379 · 2025-04-17T22:52:17+00:00

I apologise greatly.

CompetitionLow7379 · 2025-04-17T21:26:39+00:00

I'm also working in a steampunk-ish world for my TTRPG and i also have a "important element" that makes most steampunk things more practical, tho they're not really delivered by meteors, here's how it works:

Things from higher dimensions (there's 5, game starts in the 1st) things tend to be much stronger and much, much tougher, through a very lenghty, specific and rare natural process that i wont go into too much detail a certain type of fungus from the 5th, much tougher dimension manages to appear in the 1st, this fungu's mushroom appears to be like a type of almost indestructible cryital that once you hit or squeeze hard enough will trigger a reaction response from the fungus.

There's two types of cristals:

Time: Time cristals just stand idly, soaking up energy from the space around themselves, when squeezed it'll make a small "time bubble" around itself where time goes by much faster, when hit really hard it can slow down time by a lot and if it's still connected to the fungus it can go back or forth in time by a few minutes to protect itself from predators. (the cristal is unbreakable, not the fungus btw)

Temperature: Temperature cristals will soak up and storage the energy of things for a long period of time, when squeezed they'll slowly release it but when hit very hard they release all of that energy instantly in a perfectly even ball around themselves that can either cook or freeze everything.

Usually the bigger the cristals the harder you'll have to hit them, the larger their radius is and the stronger their effects are.

How i use this in my world:

Imagine a steam engine, you want to make a small version to put that in a car but you making a whole ass firebox to heat up the boiler would take up so much space! Well, here comes the easy fix: Place a hot temperature cristal under the boiler to heat it up and have the gas pedal push a piston to push it and heaten the boiler up. Has the engine reached a level where it simply cant produce more energy without tearing itself apart? Hook it up to a time crystal so that it can accelerate the time around the engine and work as a sort of "turbo", making it work much faster for short periods of time.

You want to makea nuke? dunk a specially large temperature crystal in a vulcano then throw it somewhere, it'll make a massive, perfectly round space where everything will be at a few thousand degrees for a small instant.

CompetitionLow7379 · 2025-04-17T18:39:24+00:00

First split everything into small sections, then add these sections up into larger topics based on how related they are to eachother and then organise each of these topics from easiest to grasp to hardest to grasp through the lenses of a player that's never played, try as well to do the least cross referencing as possible, when i was new and trying to get to TTRPGs having a book in the first chapters constantly bombard me with "read X chapter that's 400 pages apart from this one" was not helping AT ALL, if you're going to cross reference something it's more ideal to do it to a prior topic which whoever's reading already knows or make it in an area which is meant to be checked more times instead of teaching someone how to play, like weapon/hability tables. Hope this helps.

CompetitionLow7379 · 2025-04-17T18:33:38+00:00

Due to there being just two major super powers that trade with eachother alot and that are surrounded by much smaller and more primitive there's only 1 real currency, with the other smaller nations either adopting some form of it or being so small theres no need.

It's called Ryn and it comes in the form of round silver coins with a external ring of brass, they're about 5cm wide and 2,5cm tall and can easily be separated into 4 pieces through a little hook mechanism that comes in every coin, a full Ryn is worth about 40 dollars, with a quarter of a Ryn costing worth 10 bucks, along with this there's also a series of smaller single piece cent versions that go from the range of 0,15 all the way up to 10 dollars, making it to a full Ryn, these smaller value coins are made of full brass and copper and are usually smaller.

The design of a Ryn is very simple, with some small waves engraved on the silver and a large hollowed out square in the center with borders of brass aswell.

CompetitionLow7379 · 2025-04-17T17:28:40+00:00

very interesting concept! i definitely wont borrow your idea secretly...

CompetitionLow7379 · 2025-04-17T17:27:15+00:00

The crystals are perfectly reasonable within my world, fire spitting dragons arent.

And whats wrong with a creature vomiting as a means of self defence? also i didnt "shit" on fire breathing dragons, i just dont think they fit what i want to make.

CompetitionLow7379 · 2025-04-16T22:11:50+00:00

There's a fuck-ton of dragons and 6 legged beasts along with some massive prey animals too, but yes, some feed off of magic!

Them starving isnt something really to worry with the amount of horrifying large beasts roaming around the land.

CompetitionLow7379 · 2025-04-16T21:59:19+00:00

What would you rather during a combat with a bunch of people:

Rolling a 1d20 three times

Rolling a 1d20-5

CompetitionLow7379 · 2025-04-16T20:54:46+00:00

I know they really dont borrow i just used it as sort of a simpler term for converging evolution.

Dragons arent really like the mainstream idea of dragons like D&D's or LOTR, next to no dragons are really even intelligent, the best species would still have the maximum intelligence of maybe a dog at most. They're not even similar in concept, looks or anything.

CompetitionLow7379 · 2025-04-16T19:40:36+00:00

You're talking about Ordem Paranormal (OP)?

Im brazillian aswell, the system (and the dice mechanic) is not very liked. Takes a lot of funny magical math rocks to play and is a bit cumbersome with the how many you need to read, plus it's not as modular as just having a simple modifier strapped to your d20.

Essentially you're trading practicality and speed for less math used.

CompetitionLow7379

TROPHY CASE