FUR: Worldbuilding, Pt III: People, Places, and Things
Welcome back to TwistedSpoon Studio! We've taken a few weeks off of worldbuilding in our series about FUR, the custom Magic set about the Festival of Beast Folk, but that ends today. Last week, we created a set skeleton to guide our mechanical path; today, we'll be doing something similar with the Creative. We're going to create the proper nouns-- people, places, and things-- that will appear in card names and flavor text.
A little bit of Creative goes a long way. If you see a card named "Red Dragon," you get that it's big and it's red and it flies. But if you see a card named "Shivan Dragon," suddenly it feels more real-- it's from a place called Shiv, which apparently has dragons. It's rooted in the world. If you see a card that returns a land card from your graveyard to your hand, you think "Hm, situational utility. Whatever." But if that card's flavor text is a poem comparing the people of Zendikar rising to fight the Eldrazi to a flower blooming anew in the spring, suddenly you're looking at the plane in a new light. Maybe it becomes one of your favorite cards. (Maybe it's Pulse of Murasa.)
People
As addressed in other articles, it's easy to come up with names that
accidentally sound pejorative when you append "Folk" to things. What I
want to do here is come up with cool, unobjectionable names for each of
the tribes.
First, a lot of these races have names in other places-- Aven,
Leonin, Wolfir, Kitsune, Nezumi, Orochi, etc. Why not use those? (I'll
tell you why, silly goose.) The Wolfir, specifically, exist as a result
of Werewolves being purified by the Cursemute on Innistrad (and reverted
back to werewolves and worse under Emrakul's influence). The Orochi, Nezumi, and Kitsune are from Kamigawa, and are specifically drawn from Japanese folklore. Others, like Amphirin, are used so infrequently that the audience has little familiarity with or affinity for them. Between those factors, it
doesn't feel right to use the generic race names Aven and Leonin when
other existing races can't carry their own names from other sets into
this one. However, I'm also not interested in inventing new fantasy
terms for all ten races, since some of then have prevalent names
elsewhere. Therefore, we'll stick with the simple "[Word] Folk" naming
convention.
With that out of the way, let's get to it. Sky Folk and Sea Folk are simple, evocative, and inoffensive options for the bird and aquatic tribes respectively. Wall Folk is the least objectionable way to name the small mammal group that I've found that also captures their flavor (we'll justify this in world by having the grasslands surround the City; they're called Wall Folk diagetically because they live near or even in the city's walls). We've already established Scale Folk for the reptile races; as far as I know, that's pretty innocuous, but please let me know if you feel otherwise. Antler Folk is a clean way to refer to the variety of deer folk (deer, elks, moose, etc.) in the set. Those are the groups that seem to have the most diversity; the others (wolf, fox, dog, cat, and bear) feel homogenous enough to go by the names of their species.
So the list is:
- Sky Folk
- Sea Folk
- Wall Folk
- Antler Folk
- Scale Folk
- Wolf Folk
- Fox Folk
- Dog Folk
- Cat Folk
- Bear Folk
As far as individual characters, I'm holding off on that until we get into the story of the set, which we'll start working on in Set Design. If you have any thoughts or ideas, feel free to let me know.
Places
Let's look at the world itself. What kinds of places exist in the world of FUR? There are ten main races, plus a smattering of others just for fun. These include wolves, foxes, dogs, cats, reptiles, birds, bears, rodents/small mammals, deer, and sea creatures. Clearly there are a lot of different habitats and biomes involved. Lucky for us, there are five major types of biomes (Magic really, really likes the number five). We're looking at tundra, desert, grassland, forest, and aquatic. These could be presented as five territories or nations surrounding the major Rome-like city that the set takes place in. To fit 10 tribes into 5 biomes, we'll be using three-color wedges/shards to allow two tribes per biome.
Tundra works out nicely for the wolf folk, who were inspired by the Starks from Game of Thrones. The frigid frostlands could also be home to the cat folk, since they share a color with the wolves and make for a nice contrast. Potential names combining Scottish Gaelic for the cats and German for the dogs include:
- The Starklands (Invoking the Starks of GoT for the wolves and Scotland for the cats)
- Rureif Tath ("Icy North")
- Hulende ("Howl" + "Ice")
On the opposite end of the spectrum, the desert is an obvious choice for the Egypt-inspired scale folk in white/red. Other candidates for this biome include the dog folk or fox folk. The dog folk are a better mechanical fit, and Greece and Egypt share many historical and cultural connections. Potential names combining Greek and Egyptian include:
- Rammos Desert (Arabic "Ramil" + Greek "ámmos", both for sand)
- Alherimos Desert ("Hot" + "Desert")
- Iliosahra ("Sun desert")
- Skahylos ("Lizard" + "Dog")
- Miqouna ("Scale" + "Fur")
The forest could be Temur and contain the deer folk and bear folk. This biome might bridge the tundra and desert, with green on one end and red on the other. The cultural combination evokes the ancient interactions of Slavic nomads with India. Potential names combining those languages include:
- Nestiran/Hiranesti Forest("Bear" + "Deer")
- Gozanesti Forest ("Elk" + "Bear")
- Osenvan ("Autumn Forest")
For grasslands, Bant feels appropriate. The small mammals-- I'm considering "Wall Folk" for the Redwall allusion-- are right at home here; the bird folk are the only remaining tribe that share a color with them, but we've already established that they migrated from far away, so this could be where they set up camp. Names combining Italian and Nahuatl include:
- Pacchietli ("Patter" + "Flight")
- Topototl ("Mouse" + "Bird")
- Pastuitl ("Pastoral" + "Feather")
- Xoperia ("Spring" + "Grassland")
That leaves the aquatic biome, where the Japanese-themed sea folk will live. The Chinese-inspired fox folk could live on the shore as a parallel to the geographic relationship of China and Japan; the overlapping color and a minor mechanical tie sink it home. (No pun intended. Well, maybe a little bit.) Names combining these languages include:
- Tumi Shore ("Land" + "Sea")
- Xichū ("Shore" + "Underwater")
- Haitana ("Fish" + "Beach")
- Shujimei ("Master" + "Graceful")
For the city itself, all ten tribes can be found there. The city is themed after Rome, with whom most of these cultures interacted. As such, we'll look to multiple sources to concoct the name.
- Accorda ("Accord" + "Cordata," the taxonomical group containing all vertebrates)
- Urbestiae/Urbestae (From "Urbs Bestiae," Latin for "City of Beasts")
- Ulfsbirke (An anagramic phonetication of the first of each tribe,
whatever that means)
Things
This category is pretty loose. I'm just going to throw some spaghetti at the digital wall here and see if any good words or phrases that could be something and pick through them later for potential cardnames.
- Patterpaw
- Skyfield
- Seaborn
- Verterra ("Vertebrae" + "Terra")
- Nine-lives
- Manecloak
- Terranim ("Terra" + "Anim")
- Whisperpaw
- Direfang
- Wildborn
- Feranthro ("Feral" + "Anthro")
Half Past Noun
That's all for this week. I'm a big fan of turning to other languages to create fantasy names; what's your method? How would you have split up the territories? Let me know your thoughts in the comments!
Next week, we're going to start filling out the set skeleton with evocative top-down designs. That article will feature a card-by-card breakdown with mockups. Until then, get out there and play Innistrad: Crimson Vow!
See you soon!
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