I Am Not Shazam / Tabletop Games

• The UltraDimensional Fighter Vic Viper from the Gradius series was once immortalized as a Yu-Gi-Oh! card. When the card was released in English, it ended up being called — you guessed it — "Gradius". (Apparently not even Konami, the company behind both franchises, knows the difference between the planet and the spacecraft defending it.) Its name in Japan is "Super Dimentional Fighter Vic Viper," though, so its international name change is most likely intentional since they probably thought fans would be confused about it due to this trope.
  • However, there is also a 'Victory Viper XX03' card, a reference to the same aforementioned ship. It has the same stats, effects mimicking Gradius's support cards (as well as the in-game power ups), and a similar (albeit upgraded) appearance. It's based on a concept used for the cover of an art book.
• Geist: The Sin-Eaters is part of The World of Darkness series, which generally follows the title theme "Species Name: Symbolic Metaphor/Social Group/Adjective/Verbing" — needless to say, it's a common mistake for those casually acquainted with the setting to refer to the supernatural player characters as "geists" and their society as "sin-eaters". In fact, "sin-eater" is the actual racial name, while "geist" specifically refers to the Eldritch Abomination that merged with any individual sin-eater to bring them back from the dead.
  • Well, geists aren't really Eldritch so much, they're (probably) still ghosts i.e. former humans, they've just gotten over their specific fixation with their death and their anchors by swapping it out for a fixation on the more general subject of the broad category their death falls into, the platonic ideal of what their anchor once was, and general curiosity as to whether this being dead thing is worth it (thus the pact with a mortal). If they were people, they'd basically be people that achieved Nirvana, the weirdness comes from the fact that the zombie-player is the Nirvana the old ghost found.
• Most classic Dungeons & Dragons settings aren't actually referred to in-universe by the names of their product lines. The world of the Forgotten Realms is called Toril, the home planet of Dragonlance is called Krynn, and the setting where you'd find the city of Greyhawk is called Oerth. Dark Sun's residents call their world Athas, and natives of Ravenloft know that name only as a castle in Barovia, not their world (the Land of Mists). Eberron and Mystara are about the only official D&D worlds that really are called by their product-line names by their own inhabitants.
  • Many players mistakenly refer to the continent on Eberron where the main plot is centered as Eberron instead of Khorvaire. Possibly, in part, because the pronunciation of "Eberron" is much less debatable (and doesn't sound an obsolete Chevy).
• In contrast with the above, Magic: The Gathering has largely averted the trope, at least in recent years. Between 1994 and 2003, only two expansions were named for the setting in which they took place: Arabian Nights—this was itself retconned into a plane named Rabiah where the characters and monsters of the Arabian Nights tales had an equivalent—and Mercadian Masques. The bulk of the remaining expansions took place on Dominaria, with only the Nemesis expansion and the Tempest block set in the demiplane of Rath (which was itself mystically linked to Dominaria). However, in 2003, the game's setting left Dominaria, and so each block of expansions since (that hasn't taken place in Dominaria) has been named for the world it takes place in, usually with the initial set bearing the plane's name——Mirrodin, Ravnica, and so on.
• Warhammer 40,000: The Space Wolves don't actually call themselves that, the name was a mistranslation that they allowed to propagate because they would rather everyone in the Imperium think of them as loud, boisterous barbarians in Power Armor (as opposed to terrifyingly effective wolf-themed Super Soldiers). Similarly, Jarl and Varagyr became Wolf Lord and Wolf Guard. Their actual name is Vlka Fenryka (Wolves of Fenris, their homeworld), and they also use Sky Warriors of Russ (their Primarch) or The Rout.

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