For some reason I'm really stuck with this one!
Do any of you guys have a process in your heads, like picking out the main themes/locations/motifs and adding another cool-sounding word?
Just in case anyone asks, my campaign is basically angels coming to Earth to stop an attack from Hell, but really just general pointers would be helpful!
Cheers!
Well your campaign should probably be called something like Heaven's Fall.
Basically, I construct my campaigns around the major theme. This is always part of the BBEG's (who is always done before the campaign starts) theme. Determining the campaign's main themes help to keep a campaign from losing focus and help to guide you when you get off track. I also break my campaigns down into generalized "Acts" which each have their own titles. From there the campaign titles just sort of naturally write themselves into existence.
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Not really I just pick up the central theme of the campaign and roll with it.
[city name] was the name of my urban campaign. Mind flayers invasion was the name of my underdark adventures to a mind's flayers city. I have a post apocalyptic campaign based on the World's End movie...simply called World's End.
If this were character names, I'd come up with a general theme for the character and then find names and words in different languages that relate to that theme. For campaigns? Yeah, I'd say just take the themes or plot and name it something related. I have a somewhat similar campaign based around banished angles coming back to take over what is essentially heaven. Aptly named Traitors to Heaven.
Just riff on it. Use a thesaurus. Go to Wikipedia. Look for inspiration where you can find it until you find the one that makes you go "that's the one!"
What is the theme of your campaign?
Well, I suspect our DM has his own personal labels for the multiple campaigns we play in, but they tend to get known by one or two defining characteristics.
Actually, now that I think about it, our Friday games are known by a person or people in the campaign, while the Monday games have more general names.
For instance, one campaign with two players playing twin sister PCs who are pretty much the leaders of the party is always referred to as the Sisters Campaign. The one where the leader is a sorcerer named Richard is the Richard campaign.
For Monday, we play in either the Desert Campaign (Since, surprise, we're in the desert) or the Evil Campaign (As our group is mostly evil, or the dark side of neutral).
One exception I can recall is our main Monday game. I remember catching a glance of the file folder on my DM's laptop, and learned he called it the Fires of Avalorn (Nation we're playing in) campaign. He has remarked that the name is a bit out-of-date, considering we've already extinguished the metaphorical fire the title refers to, and he wasn't expecting us to go further with our characters. But in the absence of a better name, I refer to that game as the Fires of Avalorn, if not just the Avalorn campaign.
For the most part? We don't name them. We refer to them as "the Thur. night(fill in system name here)game", "Daves 1e campaign", "The pirate game"(Well,it started out as Skull & Shackles & then took a few turns...:)), etc.
Sometimes I get stuck on names forever. I had one adventure; Lost Souls at the Summit, with a name that took tons of muddling over, and which I'm still not particularly happy about (but I had to finalize it in time to run it).
Sometimes names just hit me and work. I had one adventure; Hag's Head, where the title came to me almost instantly after I got the idea that it would be funny to have the players lug around the shrunken head of the villain and have her nag them constantly like an evil grandmother.
Sometimes the names come to be first, and I build the adventures around them. I have one adventure; Son of a Witch, where the title was the first thing to come to mind, and I just knew I couldn't not do something with it.
I only generally name adventures that I pre-write though. If I improvise something, I don't make an effort to name it. It only gets a name if something comes to me spontaneously.
I like to use a play on words, like "A Conspiracy of Ravens," an intrigue-heavy game set in the homebrew city of Ravenwall.
You could use a musical name. I like to put in some fiendish myconids and call the game "Mushroom Festival in Hell" (Ween). For your game maybe "Heaven & Hell" (Black Sabbath with Dio) could work.
We had a good name for our first Pathfinder campaign. It was called "The Adventures of Brother Fen & Company."
Maybe that was just my name for it - but no one else came up with an option. ;)
Up until a few months ago I was running one called "Blood of Heaven" which dealt with rescuing a little girl with a divine birthright and putting her on the throne of her country. The current one is just named after the city where adventures primarily take place, "Dar-Shalul".
I'm not sure where the inspiration for my campaign names come from. Sometimes they come after the campaign starts and I can see a sort of arc involving the players that inspires it. Other times it's the spark that creates the whole campaign.
For the most part? We don't name them.
This. Books need titles so that you can distinguish them from other books. The game we're running right now generally doesn't need to be distinguished from anything. "Hey, are you coming to the Pathfinder game tomorrow?" works well enough for our purposes.
Giving a campaign a title can also give one a sense of awe about the events or help them think about the themes presented to them. This all files under Your-Mileage-May-Vary as not everyone plays the same obviously. I've been running Crypt of the Everflame and I refer to it as the Price of Immortality campaign as that is the name of the trilogy. Would the game play just fine without it? Of course.
I've only ever named one of the adventures I created, and it was 20 years ago and more akin to a module. On the cover of the notebook I put everything in, I wrote in sharpie "DRAGONS OVER BANTUM". The adventure was centered around and near a town named Bantum, and since I had never actually used the namesake enemy of the RPG (correctly at least) I wanted to finally use a few to make the players' experience more memorable. I never spoke aloud the "name" of the adventure, but my players saw it written on the cover and it was very exciting for them because they had something to look forward to and because fighting dragons in an RPG is cool. And their excitement was in turn awesome for me.
So, I guess I did exactly what you asked about in regards to themes/locations/motifs, but there was no process involved. It came to my mind swiftly, was descriptively accurate, and I thought it sounded cool. Try to find inspiration for the title within the adventure itself, be it descriptive or suggestive. If a name you're trying out doesn't work, move on and don't try to force it. At worse, it has no name and the content will speak for itself.
My current campaign is simply titled "Earthstone", after a powerful artifact that one of the BBEGs (there have been a few) used to wreak havoc.
I don't typically name my campaigns, but this one is "the big one", having technically started in 1990, and been run off and on ever since. I only actually named it a couple of years ago. Bit of a shame, since the campaign is heading towards a significant climax (not that the players have noticed, yet) which should be a bit of a world-shaker. Which should make the next party's lives interesting since I run a persistent world campaign setting.
Campaigns get names? Seriously, I haven't named one in forever. I usually just grab the first major feature or region. Currently I'm running a homebrew called Flamenwing Castle. Its based in a megadungeon that is the ruins of an old walled town: Flamenwing Castle. Others I've had were called:
1. Archivist campaign: all the PCs belong to the Archivist's Guild
2. Dunspar campaign: main focus of the game is the city of Dunspar
3. Rukenvall campaign: all adventures take place in the county of Rukenvall
Hopefully this helps.
Well your campaign should probably be called something like Heaven's Fall.
Basically, I construct my campaigns around the major theme. This is always part of the BBEG's (who is always done before the campaign starts) theme. Determining the campaign's main themes help to keep a campaign from losing focus and help to guide you when you get off track. I also break my campaigns down into generalized "Acts" which each have their own titles. From there the campaign titles just sort of naturally write themselves into existence.
You, sir, are a genius. My ideas were so close to that name, tiptoeing round it but I couldn't find a name that fit properly. I've decided to go with Heavenfall, and name a forbidden locale in Heaven after it. If it's forbidden, you just know it's a major plot point! ;D
Really good advice on the theme and acts, too, I'll definitely think on that, as I was unsure how to provide clear structure to the campaign. A thousand thank yous!And thank you to everyone who responded, great pointers all round; I really wasn't expecting so many replies! Great to hear about everyone's various campaigns, too. :)
I don't really have a method but often I find myself using the structure of song titles.
My current campaign is named Darker Days, which I later realized is a nWOD podcast a friend of mine listens to, and must have mentioned.
But In my notes I refer to it as "Darker Days Are Coming" (which has led to some players speculating wildly after seeing it by chance once)
and every time I read the sentence I hear the Florence & the Machine song "Dog Days Are Over" in my head.
So I guess I steal borrow and copy from everything.
When I think about it I guess the " ... Are Coming" is something I have taken from the GoT-tagline.
Regardless, half the time we refer to the game as "Johns Pathfinder Game" -
to distinguish it from "Pauls Pathfinder Game"
(that I think is called "Adventurers Guild" but whenever I'm thinking about it I'm hearing "Another Way To Die" by Jack White & Alicia Keys - it's an old school dungeon crawl)