a cesspool of interwebness

Fantasy World Design - Pt. 2

Posted by Late Evening Jay On 2013-04-07 1 comments

What's in a name?

As my Iron Heroes game continued to expand into a long running full fledged campaign (3 years now) I was occasionally inclined to invent new areas fairly spontaneously. I would sometimes scan my library of resources and pull something off the shelf and tweak it a little or inclusion. Also I would be influenced by cool things that had recently crossed my path. This created a problem - names of things, people and places in this world I had created were drawn from other game designers source material.

It started with my decision to have magic reborn into the world, and I selected Arcana Unearthed for this. Inside it had a few non-human races which I thought I would modify slightly and implement, thus my world had Sibeccai (and later Mojh, although mine work slightly differently). I've also subsequently imported the various kinds of Faen, although they are simply called faeries in Anthemios.

This continued... I have a city called Port Melnibone and an island nation called Pan Tang. Also a Witch King named Zhengyi, which I now recall comes from an old AD&D module series called The Bloodstone Wars. It's been 20+ years since I played that module series and it still stuck with me and got re-used.

As I continue to formalize the setting - and look at what system to implement the game with - I'm forced to decide how to proceed here. Should I start renaming places, race and people to remove these references or should I leave them in place for the most part? I'm not sure how seriously I want to pursue publishing yet, but if I did want to I would almost certainly have to remove these references.. or would I?