Evil Castle Name Generator

An evil castle name does three jobs at once: it tells the reader who rules there, it warns them what the place does to visitors, and it sounds wrong in the mouth in a way a heroic castle never does. Fiction's most famous examples are all very short on comfort. Barad-dûr simply means 'dark tower', Minas Morgul is the 'tower of sorcery', the Dreadfort is named for the fear it produces, and Castle Ravenloft is a pun on a crypt.

The most reliable technique is the dark compound: a word of rot, blood, bone, ash, gallows, thorn or night fused to a landscape or structure word such as moor, fen, crag, hold, spire or keep. Dreadholt, Gallowmere and Mourncrag all work because they are pronounceable in one breath. Epithet names take the opposite route and describe the castle's reputation outright: The Weeping Spire, The Iron Maw, Keep of the Sleepless Eye. A third style borrows real-world menace from Transylvanian, Slavic, Germanic or Latin forms, so Hrad Vlkodrak, Burg Totenstein and Castellum Noctis feel like places on an old map rather than inventions.

The list mixes all of these with harsh constructed-language names (Kar'Vesh, Zûl-Ghorath) for settings with their own tongues, and castles named for the villain who holds them.