Original Post
I'm trying to name the spells in my game. To that end, I would like to survey existing name conventions, along with your contributions on the subject. In practice, the spells in my game include the tried-and-true flaming arrows, lightning bolts, exploding balls of fire, walls of ice, and so on, for which canonical names already exist. However, it also includes spells and abilities with more subtle effects, such as osteomantic curses, various blood-based pacts, teleportation-based attacks, and complex metamagic (such as causing the spell effect to appear when the casting begins, instead of when it ends). The most elementary naming convention derives from roleplaying in the 70s and 80s, with the staples that are Fireball, Wall of Fire, Teleport, Polymorph, Invisibility, etc. I call this the straight to the point style: a Cone of Cold spell generates a (surprise!) cone of cold, the Create Food and Water spell is appropriately named as well, Ignite Poison is a pretty painful way of curing venom and Kill shivers me timbers. Frequent users of this naming style are most medieval-fantasy games, from D&D family games to Warcraft to Diablo, including early Magic : the Gathering editions, with a nod to Final Fantasy (Fire3 is quite an obvious name). The advantage of this naming style is that it's easy for the player to readily recognize the effect of the spell only from its name. The disadvantage is that it's boring. Spell and ability names are a large mass of text that the player has access to, so it's a waste not to have them convey any atmosphere. Another naming convention is what I would call the legendary style. It follows the straight to the point side, but conveys more ambience by associating a name with the spell. The D&D names of Tenser and Mordekainen (and others) have been removed from the d20 SRD, where Tenser's Floating Disc becomes Floating Disc. This is the style heavily used by most Magic : the Gathering cards, mentioning the universe at every possible turn: Curse of Marit Lage as a blue hoser, Urza's tower as a land, Jhoira's timebug as a suspend manipulator, and so on. Final Fantasy summoning also falls into this category, as far as I can see. The Elder Scrolls series uses this approach as well: Ondusi's unhinging. Finally, there's the poetic way, which describes the effect of a spell or ability with poetry (or something close to it), which allows the choice of words to matter as well. I have seen this in many of the White Wolf role-playing games, such as Vampire's Mask of a Thousand Faces answer to d20 Disguise Self—Exalted pushes this to new extremes with Precision of the Striking Raptor, Ox Body Technique and so on. I have also seen it in fighting games (King of Fighters, for example) as well as manga (Kamehameha, Chidori, Raikiri). I feel that this adds a lot of atmosphere to the game. Do you know of any conventions that I have overseen? What is your take on these possibilties?
