As I'm working toward the latest part of my never-ending game project, I realised just how much the names of certain characters don't fit. I've got Greco-Roman inspirations like Cyrus, Ptolemy, Hercules, Julius and Tallera in there, and then I've got Arthur, Jonathan and Donovan.

Then I remembered how Tolkien approached the subject. You had characters who were known by different names in different languages. Their name meant broadly the same thing in each language, but each language rendered it differently. Such as Aragorn also being known as Ellessar.

That in turn made me think back to my own knowledge of how the Greeks interpreted the names of the Persians and how the Romans knew certain mythical Greeks differently in their own tongue (such as Heracles and Hercules, or Odysseus and Ulysses)

So why not somewhere make mention that Arthur Steel is known by that among his own people, but among the Tallairians, the Greco-Roman nation, his name would be Artorius Ferronius (or something).


(Granted, I only plan on mentioning this as world building - at the time period where the game would be taking place, there's been about 200 years of contact between the cultures so names from one culture have been adopted by the other, eliminating earlier ones, much as names like Ethelred have faded from English since the coming of the Normans. Okay, bit further back, but by all indications they died out PDQ)