Building Vellestria: how a fictional sea-coast city earned its place names

Vellestria sits on a coast I've never visited because it doesn't exist. The first map I drew of it was a sketch on the back of a tea bag wrapper — three coves, a council district above, a library quarter at the head of a long avenue. I traced over it in ink the next morning and it kept most of its shape. That's usually how it goes.

Place names are the part of world-building I find the most stubborn. A bad name slides off the page; a good one feels like it was already there before you wrote it down. So when we started naming the eight lieux of Vellestria — the eight places the player visits across Chapter 1 through 8 — we gave ourselves three small rules.

Rule one: the name must do work

A lieu's name has to tell you something true about the place before you arrive. "Old Town" doesn't do much work, but it's honest — every player knows what to expect from an Old Town. "The Stellar Cliffs" is more ambitious: it promises that you'll see the sky from there. It promises a telescope, or a girl who draws constellations, or both. (It promises both. Halla draws constellations on the brass dial when she's bored.)

"Councillors' Walk" promises a row of buildings where decisions get made — and where decisions get unmade. "The Sealed Compass" promises a coffee shop with a name like a riddle. The name is a contract. The lieu must keep it.

Rule two: the name must point sideways

The best place names in literary fiction always have a second meaning. "The Library Quarter" is just a quarter, but Branwen's cartography hall is in it, and the name picks up the weight of the people inside. "The Old Cemetery" is just a cemetery, but Aldric Verras is buried there, and the name carries that too. The trick is to let the second meaning emerge from play, not from the name itself.

We avoided fantasy-sounding compound nouns. No "Whisperdew Plaza", no "Moonshade Reach". Those names announce themselves and leave nothing for the player to discover. We wanted names that read flat on the map and bloom into something else once you walk through them.

Rule three: the name must rhyme with the canon

Vellestria's calendar has a story we never directly tell — about a sundering in the islands to the east, about a council that used to have six signatures and now has five, about a Verras family that produced three children and only the eldest carried the cartographer's name forward. The place names quietly carry that history. Councillors' Walk used to be Councillors' Council. Old Town used to be the New Town, three centuries ago. Theodor's House is called Theodor's House by everyone except Theodor.

A player who solves all 109 puzzles in Vellestria probably doesn't notice these patterns. A player who solves them twice probably does. That's the gift you can give to your second-playthrough audience: a layer of names that wasn't there until they came back.

What we'd change

Two of the eight lieux got names we still aren't happy with. The "Botanical Gardens" is too generic — it should probably be called something with Reyna's voice in it, since she's the one who plants sage for people who are grieving. The "Library Quarter" is too institutional — it should probably echo the spine catalogue, since that's the part of the building that holds the family histories.

But we shipped them. That's the other thing about place names: they get harder to change the more puzzles you set in them. Old Town is Old Town now. Four nations still to come, four chances to do better.

Cora's note: The map I drew on the tea bag wrapper is in the Carnet, on the page after the chapter-one frontispiece. Wipe the corner of it and you'll see a small ink mark — that's the cove where Theodor's boat used to be tied. He never told me which cove. I just decided it was that one.