Fantasy Town Name Generator

Most fantasy town names follow the same recipe as real English villages: a feature of the landscape or the name of a founder, joined to a word for the kind of settlement. Tolkien's Bree, Bywater and Hobbiton, D&D's Phandalin and Greenest, and nearly every town on a published campaign map are built this way. The endings do quiet work. A -ford or -bridge town sits on a river crossing, -wick and -haven suggest trade or a harbour, -moor and -fen mean wet, lonely country, and -hollow, -dale and -glen put the place in a valley. Possessive names like Miller's Crossing or Hangman's Rest imply a story about whoever the place is named for.

The names here cover the spread a game master or novelist actually needs: plain English-style compounds for the heartland, market towns with prefixes like Market, Chipping and Saint, bleak outposts like Plague Hollow and Gallows Hill, and settlements with elvish, dwarven, Norse, Slavic, desert and far-eastern flavours for the edges of the map where another culture lives.

When you pick one, think about who founded the town and what it is for. A fishing village, a mining camp and a pilgrim town should not sound alike. Two or three syllables, easy to shout across a market square, is the sweet spot.