The Kingdom of X

Lately, I've found myself pouring a lot of work into my long-standing fantasy setting again. It's inevitable this time of year. Christmas always reminds me of fantasy role-playing games (20th anniversary of my first session one month ago!) and the short days and inhospitable weather makes me turn inward. Instead of spending my weekends--or weekdays, as I lie in bed with a cold, flu, or god-knows-what--surrounded by friends, I spend them surrounded by books, folders, and piles of scribbled notes.

I want to say that it was two years ago that I designed the island of Evembre or Prospero, poring (thanks, cruiser!) through books and websites on Bolognese dialect and Sardinian in order to get the names just right. Rereading those names--Mranda, Ferrant, Qaliba--I was struck by a vague feeling of familiarity beyond what I usually get from having authored them. However, their ultimate source wasn't apparent until I found a scrap of paper with the dramatis personae for The Tempest.

Names are a joy and a problem. In our world, they are everywhere. Even dinky hills and gullies have them, althought they be only in the mouths of the children who play there or written on ordinance maps which no one much consults. To make an imaginary world feel real, it must have plenty of them--and they need to be more evocative than just "the Big Hill" or "Muddy Creek". Whenever I sit down to create them, I find myself spoilt for choice. To conjure up a specific feel, they need to obey the phonotactics and semantics of whatever speech variety I've settled on, but that still leaves literally endless possibilities. I can devote hours to noting down candidates, pondering them, tinkering with them, tasting them, only to replace them with something totally different later.

Right now, I'm working on the early history of my Western Mediterranean-style city states. The Frank-analogues who imposed a feudal culture on a Roman-analogue province have recently been changed to Lombard-analogues. I need to name the six counties of their kingdom, but have been stuck for inspiration. Last night, I was thinking of northern forest animals that could be tribal totems when I settled on the wolverine. What other creatures do I associate with him?

How about Storm, Nightcrawler, Colossus...

It's the same strategy that served me well the other time: Start with a name (e.g. Prospero) that appeals for some intuitive reason and find others associated with it in a literary source, then disguise them in such a way that they fit the linguistic culture and the source isn't blatantly obvious. In this case, I could translate the names into Old High German, Latinise them, and thence evolve them into early modern Portuguese, Catalan, and so forth.

Wanna help? Give me the names (both birth names and aliases) of the original X-men, in order of discovery. Then I'll work my magic...