Your world has been put together loosely, the geography laid out in the form of a map. But your characters still don't have anywhere to live. What we need to add now are cities, towns, villages, and the like. This is probably going to be the second-easiest step you can take, since what you are really doing is placing dots on your map and naming them. The naming part can be harder than drawing your map was, but there are a few tricks to finding good-sounding names for your settlements. First, get out the map and legend you drew in the Geography tutorial. You should have all your physical features drawn in, and your country boundaries marked clearly, usually with dotted or faint lines. We'll start with cities, since they're biggest, and usually rarest. Every country with some form of civilized (or not-so-civilized) government needs a capital city. The capital city is where the king, lord, emperor, duke, count, czar, prince, daimyo, sultan, etc. lives, and rules from. It's where a council, congress, or parliament would meet. It is the center for your country (not necessarily in the literal sense). Find a good, relatively central area in one of your countries, with good resources and defenses, and put a tiny dot there for now. Consider possible trade routes, where attacks could come from and how they could be stopped, etc. Defensible areas include wide valleys in mountain ranges, places were large rivers fork, etc. Once you have a dot where you want your capital, check the scale on your map. Are your towns and villages going to appear large or small? Close together, or far apart? Usually, this won't affect too much. There are three basic sizes you are going to have to your town/village symbols. We'll add those to your legend now. If your scale is really large (if it doesn't take long to walk from one place to another), you don't need to put the symbols on your legend. Instead, draw tiny towns and villages (not more than one or two buildings) where they belong. This is only for a very limited amount of space, or a sylized medieval map. For an example of a stylized map, look at Lloyd Alexander's maps for his Prydain Chronicles (The Book of Three, The Black Cauldron, The Castle of Llyr, Taran Wanderer, and The High King). If your scale is moderate, and the map doesn't cover more than a quarter of your world, you can use round symbols for your cities and such. We'll use the three basic settlement types right now (city, town, village). Put four circles on your legend (small). Draw a star in or around the first, and label it "capital". Think of a shape to put in the next, like a diamond, another for the next, like a smaller circle, and leave the last blank. Label the diamond "city", the circle "town", and the blank "village". You can also just use shapes, instead of circles, and can even leave them all blank and color them instead. You decide what works for you. If you have a really small scale (planetary-size), just use small dots to represent settlements, and usually try to stick to just the major cities, unless you need to put in smaller settlements. For this, you just need to put one dot on the legend. Label it "city/town/village". Then clarify with different ways of writing the names. For example, major cities can be written in all-caps and underlined (EAGLE CRY), with an asterisk or star next to capital city names (HEARTSTONE*). Lesser towns can be regular type and underlined (Stormcall), and small villages and hamlets can be regular type with no underlining (Angel's Ford). Decide what you like. Once you have these places marked, you need to name each one of them. One of the easiest ways to do this is to pull out an atlas and look through the index for interesting-sounding names. You can also put your own together. It helps to base such names off of the language and naming systems of the race or races that originally settled it. For more help on naming, go to the Nomenclature section.