Context: The human empire-kingdom-place is plagued by chimera-like monsters that spawn in dark places and attack other living beings to absorb their spirits/magical energy. Eventually their numbers grow dramatically and they unite under a very powerful "monster king" who threatens all of the known world. Around this time a powerful hero is supposed to appear after being chosen by a special magical sword. The hero battles through the monster horde, fights the monster king and uses the sword to slay her. However, the monster king eventually reincarnates and it all starts over. (It's basically a pastiche and affectionate subversion of old-school JRPGs, Legend of Zelda, chaoskampf mythology, that sort of thing.) Currently trying to figure out what to name those monsters. I could call them "demons" or even just "monsters" but I feel that's a bit generic, and it tends to bother me when the terminology is too on the nose in this type of story. Suggestions are welcome.
How about an original proper name? Something like the Cylons in BSG, who were really robots but were treated more like a unique race to differentiate them from their generic "robot" origins. I guess the Terminators would apply there too, though I'm not sure if any of those were capitalized, proper names.
It's sort of a world-building opportunity. Your various factions could have different names for them. Underneathies. Low ones. Wrongs. The wrong throng, throng of wrong. Poors (the upper classes might be comically unable to differentiate between the monsters and generally destitute). Malmade (mal prefixing 'made.' Makes me think of marmalade though.) Aberrant. Sinifesters (sin, manifest, fester—courtesy of the local clergy).
So much of the monster naming will depend on the origins and story development. With anything sentient, there's the issue of what we call them but also, what do they call themselves? If they have a king, they have a society and all societies have a name for themselves, even if it’s just ‘The People’ in their own language. A whole race with backstory and lots of room for development is a deep well. That’s always a treat to play with. There’s the monster factory approach which is usually a literal name. I’d generally throw all were-creatures in here though of course there’s a whole chunk of independent lore on those. David Gemmel had his ‘Joinings’, created by melding animals and man through the science of magic. Special mention for our Frankensteins (monster), named after the creator. My favorite naming convention is when it seems to happen organically. Monsters can call themselves what they like and the relevant authorities can designate an official name but usually the populous names them, whether it’s a catch-all name or a regional thing. In the Farseer Trilogy by Robin Hobb, there is a process done to captives that removes their humanity, making them more bestial in behaviour. This process was called being ‘Forged’ because the first settlement it happened was a place called Forge. That always stuck with me because it was addressed in the book and done very smoothly. Similarly I don't think there's any harm in going generic either. Demons and monsters will always exist in the minds of people so it's not a stretch at all that when something fitting the description appears, that's what people call them. Often with Feist books, you couldn't turn a corner without bumping into a Demon and that's how they were known universally, though they had their own complex culture and hierarchy back home in their own realm, or ‘Circle of Hell’ Most of this is me having fun thinking about it rather than actual suggestions but it has helped me boil it down to two things I’d consider 1) Look to the Origins: How they came to be is going to be a factor. 2) First Encounter: Before the day is over, any group of humans that have an interaction with these creatures will have a name for them. You know best what they look like, so if you were there and had to report what you saw to a superior or such, what would you say?
I'd go with original names that don't have English definition like they do in Zelda with names like Keese and Bokoblins.
Sometimes I like to use the English-to-Latin translator to come up with unique names They absorb spirits/energy? Then Sorbeo (to swallow) or Combibo (to drink in) might work They spawn in the dark? Then Tenebris pariunt (dark spawn) might work
More or less the approach I had in mind, I think. I'm imagining people just took to calling them something convenient and it ended up sticking, like: "Oh, no, the nightspawn are coming!" or something like that. It's fine if it's mostly descriptive, I'm just looking for a term that sounds good. "Terminator" would be the technical designation for that type of android: It's what the T stands for in T-1, T-800, T-1000 etc. I think that means it counts as a proper name, but I'm a bit unsure of the rules of English grammar in this particular case. Actually not sure to what degree there are "factions" in a cultural or linguistic sense: I imagine the humans to be fairly culturally homogeneous, although I do know there are a number of different folk or "races." Just not sure they would have different terms for these creatures, since I'm not even sure they speak different languages. Right, more context needed. My bad. So, for the most part these creatures are not sapient. The more basic ones act like animals and even the ones who seem relatively clever (able to use crude weapons and so on) are more like automatons: Kinda like enemy mobs in a video game, an actual human can learn to reliably anticipate their behavior pretty quickly. These ones have no real language to speak of, and they're by far the most common ones. Rarely, there are individual monsters born with the inherited intelligence (and sometimes memories) of people killed by other monsters. These individuals are fully sapient and (provided they survive their early life and deal with the trauma of their new inhuman nature) tend evolve into to the rather powerful full-humanoid (or demihuman, if you will) monster variety. They often end up serving as generals directly under the monster king, though some pursue their own agendas instead. Though a fairly recent phenomenon, it turns out demihuman monsters can procreate with each other and form families rather than spawn asexually. Still, they're rare enough that they haven't developed much of a proper culture. Both types of monster are subject to an instinctual urge called the Hunger, which compels them to attack humans. However, this urge is weaker in the intelligent ones and they can choose to ignore it, though they'll still tend to be fairly confrontational. (Humans have a corresponding instinct called the Fervor, which makes them inclined to destroy monsters provided they can imagine a realistic way to do so. Again, this can be ignored when necessary.) As for the Monster King, she has limited control over the lesser ones: She can command their movements to a degree but she can't just tell them to not kill humans or to attack specific targets or anything like that. They're more like a weapon that destroys whatever she points them at. The intelligent ones tend to obey her out of self-interest but because of how powerful her influence is they're very unlikely to go behind her back or betray her. Notably, she herself started out as this mindless force of destruction but has been growing smarter and more cognizant of her role over each reincarnation. Currently she's easily as intelligent and self-aware as any human, though it doesn't really matter to her what her minions are called. Pretty much the approach I'm going for, yes. Oh, I agree. I just sorta want to see if I can find something more interesting, you know? To show I tried a little harder than just going with the first word that fit. Maybe that's just me being vain, but still. Hey, thinking is good. I'd rather you explain your reasoning that just throwing random names at me anyway. Usually this type of thread ends up serving more as a brainstorming exercise than anything - it's rare for anyone to come up with a suggestion I'll end up going with, but it helps me think about what I'm going for. And both of those suggestions are useful and make sense, so I'll keep them in mind. Thanks. Though, I'm pretty sure both of those are derivative. I'm not sure about keese (possibly from the Greek keres?) but bokoblins could really just be called "goblins" and the main reason they're not is for the sake of a quirkier naming convention. It's a very playful approach and Japanese games (etc) often do this at the cost of being less serious about it to compared to, say, Tolkien inventing entire languages to explain where the word "orc" came from. Now, I'm not entirely against that, but I do try to keep my fantasy settings fairly grounded. Case in point: May main issue with this is that, since this is a fantasy setting, the Latin language wouldn't be a thing. Ignoring purely linguistic stuff like English having Latin-derived words, I just think it would be odd for people in the setting to use terminology based on a real-life language other than what they appear to be speaking. My general approach is that everything said by the characters is being directly translated to English (or Swedish, depending on which language I end up writing the story in) from whatever alien language they're actually speaking. In that sense it makes much less sense for them to be referring to stuff in a secondary language, especially it it's a common term everyone would be using on a frequent basis. Like Tolkien, I could probably get around this by inventing some original conlang specifically for the setting, but unlike Tolkien I'm far too lazy to do that.
You could still make a "Latin" name work here's how: Tolkien used a number of Old English, Norse, and Gothic terms for certain cultures in Middle Earth. In-Universe the character aren´t really using these languages but it's meant to suggest an analogous relationship between those languages and the Common Speech of most characters. The "Latin" or "Greek" in your work could be an ancient magical language that's simply rendered into Latin or Greek for the convenience of the audience. I suggest as a term "Therion" from Greek "beast", or maybe "Umbrae" from Latin shadows. I'm partial to Therion which you could anglicise into "Therions" for the plural.
