Welcome to Chemnitz

After many years (is it six already?) work on my Bronze Age fantasy setting feels like having left the conceptual phase and it’s now seriously starting to take shape as an actual manuscript that people other than me could read and actually make sense of. Unfortunately, this means I have to tackle one of the most unpleasant and dreaded parts of worldbuilding: Locking in the names for things.

When I went ahead and did a serious cleanup of the messy heap of collected ideas that was the Ancient Lands a few months back, I renamed the new iteration on a completely redrawn map the Old World. But that name was always meant as just a temporary project title that would eventually be changed to a real name for the setting. Something snappy sounding that also communicates the content and catches the eye of people who might be into this stuff. Golarion or Grayhawk don’t really do that.

But coming up with names is hard. So I turned to a lesson from history. Back in 1990 the city Karl-Marx-Stadt was looking for a new name because of some political fad of that day, and in the end they just went with the simple route and named it back into Chemnitz.

Why throw away a perfectly good name and stress yourself with thinking up a new one? Welcome back to the Ancient Lands.

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