What could i call the star 2MASS 19281982-2640123 for short in a scifi story that involves aliens from there?
(I don't yet know if the aliens themselves or their companion robots will communicate vocally or not. Or if the aliens themselves are still around since the radio transmission is 1800+ years old and it's a pretty long trip. But the robots definitely are in this)
Edited by Nukeli on Jun 12th 2023 at 7:15:27 PM
~*bleh*~Well, there is a process for giving proper names to stars (and other celestial bodies, incidentally); basically the IAU occasionally declares that it's taking name suggestions from the general public for a specific list of celestial bodies, and picks for each body a single name that it deems most suitable (the meaning is not offensive, not too political, etc.). So you could just handwave that such a thing has been done for this star, and you pick what the winning name was based on whatever criteria you have in mind; you could even just use a random name generator if you don't really have any criteria in mind or want to truly randomize it.
Edited by MarqFJA on Jun 12th 2023 at 6:48:24 PM
Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.
Because of the Wow! Signal i might use "aliens from 2MASS 19281982-2640123" in multiple completely unrelated things.
But in this particular case the story is set on a near-future, wartorn and post-apocalyptic Earth. The star might not have had a name until the space robots show up and the star suddenly turns out to be super important. Not sure if the warlord's subordinates or the guerrillas should coin the name. One of the guerrillas is actually a former astronomer, though he isn't in the main group (who shelter the robots) but in some other fracment of the army somewhere else.
~*bleh*~In Red Revenge, magic is a thing. I haven't fully codified and set in stone everything yet, or justified why literally everybody (let alone every soldier) doesn't or can't use it.
But i thought that in the militaries, the magic users have specific positions. I've used "war mage" as a generic placeholder when referring to those people, but i need to come up with actual military terms for the American, British, German, French, Russian, Polish, and Dutch military magic users (they might also have different names in different military branches, like Wehrmacht vs. SS, or historical points, like Russian Empire vs. Soviets), and may have multiple ranks within themselves.
Ideas?
Edited by Nukeli on Jun 14th 2023 at 8:03:06 PM
~*bleh*~(Marq: Late, but I like "Marchandaire".)
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I don't personally see an issue with "war mage", but perhaps you could name them after whatever it is they do for the military, exactly, and the ways they interact and work with the rest of the military could also affect naming. For instance, "warlock"
means "truce-breaker", so that name plus other translations could refer to a mage who acts as a spy or works in intelligence. "Sorcerer"
is derived from a word that means "seer", but even if your world's forms of Seeing aren't something the military has use for, that could be expanded to describe comms, such as a mage who can communicate or see over long distances. Witches could have nature-based affinities, alchemists could be magic chemists or engineers working in military R&D, etc. The other nations and cultures in the war will almost certainly have their own local magic and mystic traditions informing how they use and categorize magic, and what they name their magic users in the military.
(I don't think you necessarily need to have some special plot-specific reason why magic isn't super widespread in your world, either. Magic being rare is still a somewhat common thing in fantasy, I think- magical affinity could simply just be a rare recessive trait, or it could need many years of specialized study (perhaps even to the exclusion of other subjects), or it could be due to some outside force randomly selecting its gifted individuals regardless of heredity, or some combination.)
Edited by CrystalGlacia on Jun 14th 2023 at 2:21:44 PM
"Jack, you have debauched my sloth."Do you mean "Western" as in "Europe and the Americas", or "Western" as in The Wild West?
Edited by CrystalGlacia on Jun 15th 2023 at 11:25:04 AM
"Jack, you have debauched my sloth."Western can mean either ways - "Wild West" or "Europe, the Americas, and adjacent". You can list all the possible names based on the definition.
What can be a good name for an American Propaganda Machine that's akin to Info Wars but serves the Alien overlords with a showy and reactionary host?
"Cynicism is not realistic and tough. It's unrealistic and kind of cowardly because it means you don't have to try."In Red Revenge's (a WWII Diesel Punk superhero story) backstory, there's the first vampire and evil sorcerer Kyrilu, who's a take on the original novel's Dracula. He's hungarian, born in the middle ages and lived when surnames were starting to become a thing in Hungary/Romania, and looks pretty much like Dracula is descriped in the novel. I'm not sure about his backstory or where he's from, but he turns other people into vampires and controls them with his mind, and allies with Austro-Hungary which leads to his death around 1915-16 and the vampirized people being freed, but they're all still vampires. Kyrilu had also studied at Scholomance and was ennobled at some point).
His vampire powers included transforming into wolfnote , moth, and mist/dust/smoke, putting people in a trance, and possibly enchanced strenght and toughness. Non-vampire magical abilities include vreating fire and light, teleportation, possibly scrying, and propably other magic stuff i haven't come up with. Vampires are vulnerable to garlic, mountain ash, and silver (and maybe Cold Iron unless that's too OP weakness) and can't cross salt barriers for herbal/alchemical reasons, and also can't cross running water or entee uninvited for some other reasons. Some of those things might also protect from magic or prevent teleportation into a place.
Thoughts about the options for the hungarian nickname-based surnames i came up with? Other ideas? Does it make sense for him to have a slavic first name and hungarian surname if he lived in romania even if he wasn't from there? Though he might've translated the name from whatever original language it'd been in.
- Kyrilu Kardos ("sword")
- Kyrilu Novak ("new" like a newcomer to a place)
- Kyrilu Almassy ("from apple orchad")
- Kyrilu Dunai ("from Danube")
- Kyrilu Karpathy/Karpaty/Karpati ("from carpathians")
- Kyrilu Veres/Vörös ("red")
- Kyrilu Halmi ("mound, small hill")
- Kyrilu Vass ("iron")
- Kyrilu Szarka ("magpie", euphemistically "thief")
- Kyrilu Sovany ("thin, lean")
- Kyrilu Rigo ("thrush")
- Kyrilu Nagy ("big, great", not necessarily literally?)
- Kyrilu Kobor ("wanderer, ranger")
- Kyrilu Kemeny ("firm, hard, tough")
- Kyrilu Fekete ("black")
- Kyrilu Fejes ("head" as in stubborn)
- Kyrilu Feher ("white")
- Kyrilu Farkas ("wolf")
- Kyrilu Eszes ("clever, bright")
- Kyrilu Erös ("strong")
- Kyrilu Csorba ("chipped, jagged")
- Kyrilu Csintalan ("mischievous, naughty")
- Kyrilu Balogh ("left-handed")
- Kyrilu Bajusz ("moustache")
- Kyrilu Szombathy ("saturday")
- Kyrilu Pusztai ("plain, steppe")
- Kyrilu Pesti/Pesty ("from Pesti")
- Kyrilu Budai ("from Buda")
- Kyrilu Pataki ("creek/brook")
- Kyrilu Magyar ("hungarian")
- Kyrilu Sas ("eagle")
- Kyrily Solyom ("hawk, falcon")
Edited by Nukeli on Jun 20th 2023 at 5:32:25 PM
~*bleh*~Title ideas for this story?
It's a scifi war story set in a war-torn post-apocalyptic near-future, the source of the "apocalypse" having been the wars. Human technology isn't that advanced from the modern day and the technology/information/expertise they do have is of variying levels on different fields (the world being mostly in ruins doesn't help) but they do grow genetically edited clones in vats. Then there's the aliens from the 2MASS 19281982-2640123 system
. This is still trying to be a semi-hard scifi, though.
The story is about a band of human guerrilla fighters (who were also an army before being scattered after a major defeat) fighting a human warlord's army in a currently unelaborated desert, guerrillas hiding though not living among the area's remaining civilians and both sides committing war crimes (legit, everybody does something at least once). Nothing is going anywhere, until the main group of guerrillas led by their supreme commander discover three young alien robotsnote who'd ended up on Earth accidentally when they were separated from the rest of their "pack", and are now stuck. Both sides to some extents consider the alien robots' potential usefulness to the war effort, but they find ways to communicate, and the guerrillas end up with them and try to protect them from the warlord who Would Cut Them Up. There's bonding. At the same time, among other things, the army and the guerrillas arms race for alien debris they can use for weapons or support (no ancient astronauts! Also the robots don't know what this stuff is/does either because they're kids). Some adult robots of the same species show up, but they're less nice. These events also eventually cause the warlord's army to become aware that their original head scientist who they thought died 15-17 years ago is still alive on the space station, and they go get him. He brings the now-teenaged prototype kid and the warlord uses him (the kid) as a weapon against the guerrillas. More things happen, the warlord starts to feel threatened by the kid's abilities and attitude and decides to murder the 20 super soldier babies on their last 2-3 weeks out of fear they'd overthrow her/humanity (mostly her) and wants to frame the guerrillas so the kid will die fighting them, the scientist pretends to agree but grabs the kid and the babies and runs away (losing the army an advantage and making them yet another enemy). More things happen, the warlord is murdered by her doctor who props her psychologically wrecked right-hand-man up as a leader, i haven't decided what happens after that.
Edited by Nukeli on Jul 6th 2023 at 9:51:54 PM
~*bleh*~
Here is my suggestion: "A Rain of Sand"
Why: It takes place in a desert. It starts off as something small and unusual coming down from above. Then it turns out to be a lot more of it than initially thought, and if allowed to continue, will wipe out the status quo that previously existed before it started falling down once it ends.
Edited by Trainbarrel on Jun 24th 2023 at 9:33:30 AM
"If there's problems, there's simple solutions."A question of my own, if I may:
Presuming that it were attached to a novel-length book, and said book was advertised as "fantasy", what sort of impression might you gather from the title "A Portrait of an Adventurer"?
My Games and Asset PacksHmm... My first impression would be that the portrait in question has some hidden clues/map for treasure/hidden country that the protagonist(s) find accidentally, which leads to their own adventure.
I assure you, I'm perfectly trustable personHmm, okay, thank you all! ^_^
Well, looks like it's back to the drawing-board for my title, then!
My Games and Asset Packs

WH40K Rogue Traders do take on similar roles, as they are allowed to establish personal realms out of the planets that they have conquered or reclaimed on the frontiers of Imperial space (provided they pay the tithe), and naturally they would defend these realms fiercely against any of the many enemies of the Imperium that try to attack it, making them effectively "marches" of the Imperium.
Alternatively, Rogue Traders can be charged to head for the Imperium's actual marches — regions of near-frontier Imperial space that are purposefully fortified against attacks from nearby threats, such as a sector near an Ork empire or a Warp Rift — and help with defending them against potential or active threats.
And now that I look into it, the French word for "mercenary" is mercenaire... which conveniently shares an ending with corsaire (French "corsair; privateer; pirate"). And the French word for "march" in the aforementioned sense is marche, even!
So... How about blending march(e), marchand, mercenaire and corsaire into Marchandaire?
Edited by MarqFJA on Jun 12th 2023 at 5:56:20 PM
Fiat iustitia, et pereat mundus.