There's some really interesting stuff to unpack here!
First off, the concept you laid out for Elwyen's quest is definitely interesting - the idea of our party members creating miasmal monsters from their own emotions opens a lot of possibilities. The new map looks really exciting visually as well.
But what I really want to talk about is this idea of making everything "meaningful," and the consequences it has. I've seen this general concept thrown around a number of times over several posts - you tend to dismiss parts of the original Mardek because they didn't "mean" anything. I don't think you're giving your past self enough credit. Yes, Belfan, Hadris, Fengue, etc. don't mean anything in the sense of the corresponding to words in the English language, but they establish a lexicon of this universe and create a semi-consistent "sound." For an example, I'd like to bring up Morrowind again. Here's a selection of place names: Balmora, Tel Mora, Ald'ruhn, Bal Fell, Dagon Fel, Ald Velothi, Tel Vos. Without even knowing any of these places you already get a sense that they belong together in the same world. Though many of these do mean something in the game's dunmer language, even if you never learned those translations you would get an understanding of the world's naming conventions in a way that feels both unique and true to life.
The same goes, if not even more so, for character names: Mardek's original last name is Innanu El-Enkidu. This is not a meaningless name by any means: it references the Epic of Gilgamesh (Enkidu being Gilgamesh's companion, referencing Mardek's "companion" role that he takes to Deugan in regard to leadership) and the Sumerian goddess Inanna, who loses all her worldly possessions on a journey to the underworld (possibly foreshadowing Mardek's future path with Rohoph?). This name has multiple layers of reference while sounding more or less consistent with the established lexicon of Belfan. In universe, this name also establishes the conventions of a prefix relating to element and being named after one's father, which are confirmed by Deugan's surname: Eh-Deredu. I'm sure you know this, because I can't imagine you did it by accident, but at the same time I'm not sure because you certainly aren't mentioning it here.
Of course, the funny part is that you might have just made it up, with no intention to reference anything or have a hidden meaning, and everything I just said is complete nonsense. But that actually doesn't matter, because the point is that the audience is left to discern the meaning for themselves, whether it's "correct" or not. This brings me to what I feel is an actual problem with the changes you've made: in your efforts to imbue everything with "meaning," you've made it so heavy-handed that it actually diminishes the effect. When you have a game named "Divine Dreams," with a continent named "Numina," and landmasses named "Godsmind" and "Godsbod," it isn't consistent, it's just trite. You mention in reference to character's last names that "they're made of common words too so they're easy to understand and remember" and I find that symptomatic of the larger problems that seem to be appearing in this conceptualization of a reboot. You have to put some trust in your audience to grasp subtlety, or you end up force-feeding people "meaning" when you should be letting them come to these conclusions themselves.
Finally, in addition to this, I find that all this renaming of things begs one big question: why? Why is "Gemsand" an improvement on "Goznor?" Why is "Mardek Honeyblood" an improvement? It seems to me that you don't like the old names for whatever reason, but you haven't stopped to consider if the new ones are actually better. Why throw away everything your original fanbase recognizes? It wouldn't cause the game to only reach a limited audience as you've claimed in previous comments, but it would help get that original fanbase back on board, and that's just good business practice. I love this game, and I want it to be a success, so I'm not trying to tear down your creation. It's just disheartening to watch someone as creative as you turn away so strongly from what you've already built, especially when what you've already built is so good.
4
Tama_Yoshi82~4Y
I agree that making things too plain, or imbuing everything with "obvious meaning" can be a problem. I like characters that don't know what they want, I like loftcratian horror-style stories where the feeling is more important than any explicit meaning. I think "trite" is a good word to describe a clumsy writing that attempts to give more symbolism to something than it deserves, dismissing a certain dimension of something complicated in favor of silly archetypes.
That said, you only really talked about names here. Did MARDEK's names have a recognizable world-building sound to them? Yes. Did I perceive them as meaning something profound? Not really. Did they have a D&D feeling of the style Tobias is probably trying to grow out of? I'd assume this is what's happening here. Why not change the names as a part of an aesthetic divide? They're only *names* after all... I find them charmingly different, now; they're kind of their own thing now, instead of being an odd mesh of syllables.
3
JohnnyBoi45~4Y
I suppose the names are charmingly different, in a way. Some of them I actually quite like - "Cloud-Clad Castle" is more interesting than "Castle Goznor," for example. But unfortunately for the rest we may just be in a stalemate of opinions - I say "why" and you say "why not?" I certainly have opinions on "why not": some of the new names just sound less appealing, I definitely find that using so many combined English words for every place sounds juvenile, and choosing Latin as the "oh it means this but it's not in English" is probably the lowest hanging fruit, because so much of English is basically just latin roots. But again, I cannot back these up with any objective truth. Do I find them a step back the original names? Yes. Do I have reasons why? Yes. I would love to know your reasons as to why you find the new names better... I'm not beyond being convinced that I'm wrong.
But overall, as I said, the names are just symptoms of the larger issue. Some don't really make a difference like "Gemsand" or "Wyrmourn," though in my opinion they are simply sonically inferior to their predecessors. Some, like "Lake Lacrimosa" or "Heropolis" feel much more awkward and generic. But where this matters is really in the story itself. Are we going to be experiencing contrived, "profound" dialogue the whole time? I watched some of the Taming Dreams longplay, and the expository dialogue, while certainly more serious and meaningful in nature than whatever Mardek's exposition was, is just awkward. The phrase "dreams drive us to divine discoveries" is repeated no fewer than 4 times just in the first conversation, and then again before the boss - I know it's Deugan playing as Enki and that's his "motto," but it feels so stilted. Mardek's P-dialogues somehow captured a very good combination of realism and absurdism, but I feel that in the newer installments movement away from the absurd, they have somehow made it less realistic as well.
3
Tama_Yoshi82~4Y
It gets abstract debating names and realism. I'm an amateur writer myself, so I've some mind on this, but mostly it's mixed feelings. I haven't played Taming Dreams or watched much of it, but I agree with your sentiment on flowery dialogue. I like dialogue where people talk "normally", with occasional exceptions to emphasize certain oddities.
I have divine characters that talk with bourgeois vocabulary, and a Wizard that inexplicably always talks in rhymes, even when having mundane conversations:
"Two things," he said. "A compass ring, and shoes with wings." [...] "The Compass Ring will point you to Somar, the Pegasus Shoes will carry you in a blur."
It's strange, and I just HAD to have the other characters acknowledge how strange it was (both characters here are divine beings):
She chuckled. "Y'know, I've been eavesdropping on your quarrel, and I have to ask, do you *have* to rhyme *everything* you say? Were you cursed to sound imperious? So you'd be ostracized?"
"A word that flies dies. Forced reprises make the words wise."
"Orange!" she shouted, "Orange, orange!"
"Trying to destabilize me, is it on what you hinge? At this rate, you'll barely mobilize me."
She burst out laughing. "How do you do that!?"
And I kinda like that, although it's definitely on the fringes. My point? Uh... I guess I agree, maybe, it depends. Full realism is almost always bad or impossible, and voluntary excess in irrealism can be interesting.
Most things tend to have roots that are transformed variations of a word, or words, in some other language. Latin and English are just the most obvious ones when we think of this, and by being more obvious, they usually have a more "fairy-tale" or "new age" feeling, I find. I also know the sound "k" is usually the most memorable sound, but it also feels more gritty, like "r". "Orc", "Mordor" I actually found it more difficult than expected to find examples, oh well. Maybe the resistance to terms like "Divine Dreams" is that it just evokes such a radically different area of ideas than the typical D&D concepts (war and blood, black magic and barbarity). Divine Dream is spelled with D and D as well... but it evokes to me more things like souls, fate, predestination, emotions, inner energy. It's very different, and the appeal will be different too, but because it's artistically aligned with what Divine Dreams is, I think it's fine.
It's difficult to find objectivity in art, but I think consistency is at least one where we can agree with (unless the inconsistency is for effect, in which case... waaaaaaaahhhh).
4
JohnnyBoi45~4Y
I love those dialogue examples! They're really quite fun. I agree that "full realism" is often ill-fated. You bring up an interesting point about the phonetics of "Divine Dreams." I personally have no problem with that as a title, but it does make me think a bit about other names like Gemsand, Honeyblood, Fathom, etc, which also use those softer consonants. In my latest reply to Tobias I recognized that there's truly no issue with any of these names from a "realism" standpoint, so any remaining issue I have with them is basically "I don't like how this sounds," which is subjective. At this point, the only thing left to say is that I hope Tobias recognizes how some of these names might come off, not just to nostalgia-riddled players of the original Mardek, but new fans who might see Anvilicious [LINK] names such as "Heropolis" or "Godsbod" and judge the game poorly based on that. It seems small, but these surface-level details can make a big difference to an outsider.
2
Tama_Yoshi82~4Y
I don't know about you, but when I read Heropolis, I immediately thought about the Mighty Heroes, which were absolutely on the nose. "Gosh, they were so arrogant, they named a city after themselves." If that were the case, wouldn't it be pretty appropriate? :P
Apparently comments get marked as read if anyone replies to them, so this didn't appear in my inbox before.
You might want to have a look at the comments by AdmiralLara and my responses, since I addressed some things there.
I can't remember, but were you the one who expressed criticisms about Taming Dreams' dialogue when I posted the longplay a while back? The complaint about Enki's wearying motto seems familiar. I actually agree with you there, and I've been trying to make the point that I'm aiming to try to capture the tone of MARDEK rather than the tone of Taming Dreams with this. That is, I'm aiming for a blend of silliness with fantasy allure rather than pretentious spiritual themes. Or at least no more pretentious than something like, say, Final Fantasy. Probably.
I saw a documentary about Tolkein way back in school, and something in it stuck with me. He said that while he loved coming up with his own languages - he was a linguist, first and foremost, and he made his world so his languages had somewhere to exist - he used them sensibly and sparingly. There might be a forest called Lórien in the Elven Lands, but the down-to-earth Hobbits wouldn't use names like that for their local landmarks. They'd use names like "Old Forest" or "Weather Hills" or "The Shire" instead. Names like that make it clear that somebody named them once, for the practical purpose of meaningfully referring to a local location for communication with others.
A lot of fantasy names just use airy-sounding Fantasy Names that evoke a certain feeling, but who would have actually called them that, and why? "Alas, we must venture from Dha'ragasta'va'ria to Allawendrest post-haste, my fellows!" If they're words from a local language, sure, that works great! But most people don't put the effort in that Tolkien did, to make them actually meaningfully in a fantastical language; they just make up sounds that 'seem like' they could be in a fantasy language, but lack any meaningful history for why people would ever use those words for their intended meanings. "Lórien", if you were speaking Elven, would just mean "Dream Land". It's not as if the elves were coming up with a fancy word; in their language, the name is relatively mundane.
Tamriel names are a good example actually. The Morrowind place names use the language of the locals, and I'm assuming (perhaps wrongly) that the creators had at least some vague idea of how that language sounds, if not to the extent Tolkien planned his. But in the provinces where "English" is the native tongue, instead you get names like "The Orange Road", "The Great Forest", "Blackwood", "Whiterun", "Solitude", "Imperial City", etc.
In the world I'm making, English is their language since it's the only one I know. Historical figures would have named each of the places based on the connotations they felt it had, in the language that they used. So we get names like Slumberwood, Dreamcave, Lifewood, etc.
I'd say that Gemsand is better than Goznor for a couple of reasons. One is that I can imagine a historical figure saying "I'd love to live in that place where the sand sparkles like gemstones", which would eventually be compressed into just "Gemsand", but the only real reason for it to be called Goznor would be if it were named after someone called Mr Goznor or whatever, but even then what would that name have originally meant, and in what language? Every name has some etymological origin. Another is simply because I think it evokes a beautiful mental image, of glittering, precious sand in a likely beach-based place, while Goznor could be - and was! - applied to settlements with drastically different aesthetics and feelings. In the Neverwinter Nights module, it was a built-up city, then it became a cosy little village, and the name didn't lose any meaning or effect when used for both because it never had that to lose in the first place. The name Gemsand wouldn't have made sense for either of those.
Regarding the character names, the original ones describe what they are, but the new ones describe who they are. The former are more like "Cuthbert the Knight" or "Princess Tanya", while the latter are more like "Cuthbert the Mad" or "Wise Tanya". Again, see my other comment for why I chose 'Honeyblood' specifically.
I love language, especially its potential to create complex imagery. I used the metaphor of a seed growing a tree of connotations in one of my other comments. I like playing around with layered meanings so much that I struggle to understand the resistance to it. To me, it's absolutely beautiful and enthralling.
If you think that 'Aeropolis' is an amazing name but 'Heropolis' is trite and juvenile or whatever, I'd invite you to have a look at your own mind to see why that might be. I suspect familiarity is an enormous part of it.
3
JohnnyBoi45~4Y
Thanks for taking the time to reply - I thought perhaps I'd crossed a line with that last comment (which might still be the case). I was not actually the one who had previously commented about Enki's motto. I'm glad to hear about this direction you're going for dialogue-wise. On some reflection from reading your comment and mine, I realize I've said some things that I no longer agree with, so I'd like to clear those up.
I actually completely agree with what you're saying about your method for naming places - practical meaning. I do want to note that I made no mention of places like Slumberwood, Dreamcave, Lifewood, in a negative context, but since those are all more or less from the original series, I'll add a few more from your map: Wyrmourn, Sternham, Rift, Cloud-Clad Castle. All these places sound like something someone "named" for a practical purpose, or in the case of the castle, maybe named as such by a royal trying to make his or her castle seem special. Now, due to your explanation of Gemsand, I understand it's origin and don't mind it nearly as much. These would be good tidbits for the encyclopedia section, I'd love to know why Wyrmourn, Sternham etc. are named as such.
Which I guess brings me to the places which I probably had the biggest complaints about: Lake Lacrimosa, Heropolis, and the continent/landmass names. I think this is where my initial complaint about "meaning" came from. These complaints don't come from a lack of explanation like Gemsand, as you have explained why they are named that. The thing with Lake Lacrimosa is that you've stated this world uses English (or seem to have Germanic/Old English roots like Sternham or Wyrmourn), so a sudden Latin word in the mix feels way off. "Lake Lachrymose" might be more consistent with the existing terminology, or even something as mundane as "Lake Tear."
For Heropolis... I will say I never thought or said Aeropolis was an amazing name, but it did make "sense." It's a city around the air temple - boom, Aeropolis. I can totally see someone calling it that, obvious as it is, so it checks off the "practical naming" naming box. Upon further consideration, Heropolis does this as well! It's the capital city of the courageous "Bold" race, so I imagine they may have named their city that completely on purpose. That said, I now put it on a similar ground to Aeropolis, as a sensible name in-context, but a bit cringeworthy just as a word - which is not necessarily a problem, because that can totally work in-universe! Only other thing about Heropolis is it has a random Greek root which I'll just mention for consistency with my complaint about Lacrimosa, and that it shares a name with the mobile game "Legends of Heropolis," which is about, you guessed it, heroes. I'll keep it short for the continent names - Numina has the same language inconsistency which come off strangely, and some other comments have mentioned that Godsmind and Godsbod are a bit on-the-nose, which is a sentiment I agree with. But again, could easily be justified in-universe, as long as you're doing it on purpose. The map looking like a head and body (although I think it looks like a head and a uterus and ovaries) is really quite brilliant, and someone could theoretically go "aha! A head and body, the size of a god! Let me name them as such!" Not sure how they would get the birds-eye view to find out, but hey, it's fantasy.
As for character names, at this point I've read the words "Mardek Honeyblood" enough times that I might just be getting Stockholm syndrome about it. Your explanation certainly helped, I least get *why* you want to call him that. You may have noticed I'm not mentioning the other names - I'm not sure if it's because I think they're better (Elwyen's is basically the same as her old one anyway) or I just care less because they aren't Mardek. I still think it's kind of a weird name for phonetic reasons alone, but I'll just get over it. Or not. Who knows.
I guess to sum up, I have reconsidered and your names are totally fine because names aren't all "cool" in real life anyway, so there's no reason they should all be "cool" in this world. After all, there's a town called "Burnt Corn, Alabama" and people name their kids plenty of things worse than "Honeyblood." While I know the existing world of Mardek probably far too well, you know this world you're creating better than I do, and I should probably trust you a bit more to make the right choices in regards to it.
First off, the concept you laid out for Elwyen's quest is definitely interesting - the idea of our party members creating miasmal monsters from their own emotions opens a lot of possibilities. The new map looks really exciting visually as well.
But what I really want to talk about is this idea of making everything "meaningful," and the consequences it has. I've seen this general concept thrown around a number of times over several posts - you tend to dismiss parts of the original Mardek because they didn't "mean" anything. I don't think you're giving your past self enough credit. Yes, Belfan, Hadris, Fengue, etc. don't mean anything in the sense of the corresponding to words in the English language, but they establish a lexicon of this universe and create a semi-consistent "sound." For an example, I'd like to bring up Morrowind again. Here's a selection of place names: Balmora, Tel Mora, Ald'ruhn, Bal Fell, Dagon Fel, Ald Velothi, Tel Vos. Without even knowing any of these places you already get a sense that they belong together in the same world. Though many of these do mean something in the game's dunmer language, even if you never learned those translations you would get an understanding of the world's naming conventions in a way that feels both unique and true to life.
The same goes, if not even more so, for character names: Mardek's original last name is Innanu El-Enkidu. This is not a meaningless name by any means: it references the Epic of Gilgamesh (Enkidu being Gilgamesh's companion, referencing Mardek's "companion" role that he takes to Deugan in regard to leadership) and the Sumerian goddess Inanna, who loses all her worldly possessions on a journey to the underworld (possibly foreshadowing Mardek's future path with Rohoph?). This name has multiple layers of reference while sounding more or less consistent with the established lexicon of Belfan. In universe, this name also establishes the conventions of a prefix relating to element and being named after one's father, which are confirmed by Deugan's surname: Eh-Deredu. I'm sure you know this, because I can't imagine you did it by accident, but at the same time I'm not sure because you certainly aren't mentioning it here.
Of course, the funny part is that you might have just made it up, with no intention to reference anything or have a hidden meaning, and everything I just said is complete nonsense. But that actually doesn't matter, because the point is that the audience is left to discern the meaning for themselves, whether it's "correct" or not. This brings me to what I feel is an actual problem with the changes you've made: in your efforts to imbue everything with "meaning," you've made it so heavy-handed that it actually diminishes the effect. When you have a game named "Divine Dreams," with a continent named "Numina," and landmasses named "Godsmind" and "Godsbod," it isn't consistent, it's just trite. You mention in reference to character's last names that "they're made of common words too so they're easy to understand and remember" and I find that symptomatic of the larger problems that seem to be appearing in this conceptualization of a reboot. You have to put some trust in your audience to grasp subtlety, or you end up force-feeding people "meaning" when you should be letting them come to these conclusions themselves.
Finally, in addition to this, I find that all this renaming of things begs one big question: why? Why is "Gemsand" an improvement on "Goznor?" Why is "Mardek Honeyblood" an improvement? It seems to me that you don't like the old names for whatever reason, but you haven't stopped to consider if the new ones are actually better. Why throw away everything your original fanbase recognizes? It wouldn't cause the game to only reach a limited audience as you've claimed in previous comments, but it would help get that original fanbase back on board, and that's just good business practice. I love this game, and I want it to be a success, so I'm not trying to tear down your creation. It's just disheartening to watch someone as creative as you turn away so strongly from what you've already built, especially when what you've already built is so good.
That said, you only really talked about names here. Did MARDEK's names have a recognizable world-building sound to them? Yes. Did I perceive them as meaning something profound? Not really. Did they have a D&D feeling of the style Tobias is probably trying to grow out of? I'd assume this is what's happening here. Why not change the names as a part of an aesthetic divide? They're only *names* after all... I find them charmingly different, now; they're kind of their own thing now, instead of being an odd mesh of syllables.
But overall, as I said, the names are just symptoms of the larger issue. Some don't really make a difference like "Gemsand" or "Wyrmourn," though in my opinion they are simply sonically inferior to their predecessors. Some, like "Lake Lacrimosa" or "Heropolis" feel much more awkward and generic. But where this matters is really in the story itself. Are we going to be experiencing contrived, "profound" dialogue the whole time? I watched some of the Taming Dreams longplay, and the expository dialogue, while certainly more serious and meaningful in nature than whatever Mardek's exposition was, is just awkward. The phrase "dreams drive us to divine discoveries" is repeated no fewer than 4 times just in the first conversation, and then again before the boss - I know it's Deugan playing as Enki and that's his "motto," but it feels so stilted. Mardek's P-dialogues somehow captured a very good combination of realism and absurdism, but I feel that in the newer installments movement away from the absurd, they have somehow made it less realistic as well.
I have divine characters that talk with bourgeois vocabulary, and a Wizard that inexplicably always talks in rhymes, even when having mundane conversations:
"Two things," he said. "A compass ring, and shoes with wings." [...] "The Compass Ring will point you to Somar, the Pegasus Shoes will carry you in a blur."
It's strange, and I just HAD to have the other characters acknowledge how strange it was (both characters here are divine beings):
She chuckled. "Y'know, I've been eavesdropping on your quarrel, and I have to ask, do you *have* to rhyme *everything* you say? Were you cursed to sound imperious? So you'd be ostracized?"
"A word that flies dies. Forced reprises make the words wise."
"Orange!" she shouted, "Orange, orange!"
"Trying to destabilize me, is it on what you hinge? At this rate, you'll barely mobilize me."
She burst out laughing. "How do you do that!?"
And I kinda like that, although it's definitely on the fringes. My point? Uh... I guess I agree, maybe, it depends. Full realism is almost always bad or impossible, and voluntary excess in irrealism can be interesting.
Most things tend to have roots that are transformed variations of a word, or words, in some other language. Latin and English are just the most obvious ones when we think of this, and by being more obvious, they usually have a more "fairy-tale" or "new age" feeling, I find. I also know the sound "k" is usually the most memorable sound, but it also feels more gritty, like "r". "Orc", "Mordor" I actually found it more difficult than expected to find examples, oh well. Maybe the resistance to terms like "Divine Dreams" is that it just evokes such a radically different area of ideas than the typical D&D concepts (war and blood, black magic and barbarity). Divine Dream is spelled with D and D as well... but it evokes to me more things like souls, fate, predestination, emotions, inner energy. It's very different, and the appeal will be different too, but because it's artistically aligned with what Divine Dreams is, I think it's fine.
It's difficult to find objectivity in art, but I think consistency is at least one where we can agree with (unless the inconsistency is for effect, in which case... waaaaaaaahhhh).
You might want to have a look at the comments by AdmiralLara and my responses, since I addressed some things there.
I can't remember, but were you the one who expressed criticisms about Taming Dreams' dialogue when I posted the longplay a while back? The complaint about Enki's wearying motto seems familiar. I actually agree with you there, and I've been trying to make the point that I'm aiming to try to capture the tone of MARDEK rather than the tone of Taming Dreams with this. That is, I'm aiming for a blend of silliness with fantasy allure rather than pretentious spiritual themes. Or at least no more pretentious than something like, say, Final Fantasy. Probably.
I saw a documentary about Tolkein way back in school, and something in it stuck with me. He said that while he loved coming up with his own languages - he was a linguist, first and foremost, and he made his world so his languages had somewhere to exist - he used them sensibly and sparingly. There might be a forest called Lórien in the Elven Lands, but the down-to-earth Hobbits wouldn't use names like that for their local landmarks. They'd use names like "Old Forest" or "Weather Hills" or "The Shire" instead. Names like that make it clear that somebody named them once, for the practical purpose of meaningfully referring to a local location for communication with others.
A lot of fantasy names just use airy-sounding Fantasy Names that evoke a certain feeling, but who would have actually called them that, and why? "Alas, we must venture from Dha'ragasta'va'ria to Allawendrest post-haste, my fellows!" If they're words from a local language, sure, that works great! But most people don't put the effort in that Tolkien did, to make them actually meaningfully in a fantastical language; they just make up sounds that 'seem like' they could be in a fantasy language, but lack any meaningful history for why people would ever use those words for their intended meanings. "Lórien", if you were speaking Elven, would just mean "Dream Land". It's not as if the elves were coming up with a fancy word; in their language, the name is relatively mundane.
Tamriel names are a good example actually. The Morrowind place names use the language of the locals, and I'm assuming (perhaps wrongly) that the creators had at least some vague idea of how that language sounds, if not to the extent Tolkien planned his. But in the provinces where "English" is the native tongue, instead you get names like "The Orange Road", "The Great Forest", "Blackwood", "Whiterun", "Solitude", "Imperial City", etc.
In the world I'm making, English is their language since it's the only one I know. Historical figures would have named each of the places based on the connotations they felt it had, in the language that they used. So we get names like Slumberwood, Dreamcave, Lifewood, etc.
I'd say that Gemsand is better than Goznor for a couple of reasons. One is that I can imagine a historical figure saying "I'd love to live in that place where the sand sparkles like gemstones", which would eventually be compressed into just "Gemsand", but the only real reason for it to be called Goznor would be if it were named after someone called Mr Goznor or whatever, but even then what would that name have originally meant, and in what language? Every name has some etymological origin. Another is simply because I think it evokes a beautiful mental image, of glittering, precious sand in a likely beach-based place, while Goznor could be - and was! - applied to settlements with drastically different aesthetics and feelings. In the Neverwinter Nights module, it was a built-up city, then it became a cosy little village, and the name didn't lose any meaning or effect when used for both because it never had that to lose in the first place. The name Gemsand wouldn't have made sense for either of those.
Regarding the character names, the original ones describe what they are, but the new ones describe who they are. The former are more like "Cuthbert the Knight" or "Princess Tanya", while the latter are more like "Cuthbert the Mad" or "Wise Tanya". Again, see my other comment for why I chose 'Honeyblood' specifically.
I love language, especially its potential to create complex imagery. I used the metaphor of a seed growing a tree of connotations in one of my other comments. I like playing around with layered meanings so much that I struggle to understand the resistance to it. To me, it's absolutely beautiful and enthralling.
If you think that 'Aeropolis' is an amazing name but 'Heropolis' is trite and juvenile or whatever, I'd invite you to have a look at your own mind to see why that might be. I suspect familiarity is an enormous part of it.
I actually completely agree with what you're saying about your method for naming places - practical meaning. I do want to note that I made no mention of places like Slumberwood, Dreamcave, Lifewood, in a negative context, but since those are all more or less from the original series, I'll add a few more from your map: Wyrmourn, Sternham, Rift, Cloud-Clad Castle. All these places sound like something someone "named" for a practical purpose, or in the case of the castle, maybe named as such by a royal trying to make his or her castle seem special. Now, due to your explanation of Gemsand, I understand it's origin and don't mind it nearly as much. These would be good tidbits for the encyclopedia section, I'd love to know why Wyrmourn, Sternham etc. are named as such.
Which I guess brings me to the places which I probably had the biggest complaints about: Lake Lacrimosa, Heropolis, and the continent/landmass names. I think this is where my initial complaint about "meaning" came from. These complaints don't come from a lack of explanation like Gemsand, as you have explained why they are named that. The thing with Lake Lacrimosa is that you've stated this world uses English (or seem to have Germanic/Old English roots like Sternham or Wyrmourn), so a sudden Latin word in the mix feels way off. "Lake Lachrymose" might be more consistent with the existing terminology, or even something as mundane as "Lake Tear."
For Heropolis... I will say I never thought or said Aeropolis was an amazing name, but it did make "sense." It's a city around the air temple - boom, Aeropolis. I can totally see someone calling it that, obvious as it is, so it checks off the "practical naming" naming box. Upon further consideration, Heropolis does this as well! It's the capital city of the courageous "Bold" race, so I imagine they may have named their city that completely on purpose. That said, I now put it on a similar ground to Aeropolis, as a sensible name in-context, but a bit cringeworthy just as a word - which is not necessarily a problem, because that can totally work in-universe! Only other thing about Heropolis is it has a random Greek root which I'll just mention for consistency with my complaint about Lacrimosa, and that it shares a name with the mobile game "Legends of Heropolis," which is about, you guessed it, heroes. I'll keep it short for the continent names - Numina has the same language inconsistency which come off strangely, and some other comments have mentioned that Godsmind and Godsbod are a bit on-the-nose, which is a sentiment I agree with. But again, could easily be justified in-universe, as long as you're doing it on purpose. The map looking like a head and body (although I think it looks like a head and a uterus and ovaries) is really quite brilliant, and someone could theoretically go "aha! A head and body, the size of a god! Let me name them as such!" Not sure how they would get the birds-eye view to find out, but hey, it's fantasy.
As for character names, at this point I've read the words "Mardek Honeyblood" enough times that I might just be getting Stockholm syndrome about it. Your explanation certainly helped, I least get *why* you want to call him that. You may have noticed I'm not mentioning the other names - I'm not sure if it's because I think they're better (Elwyen's is basically the same as her old one anyway) or I just care less because they aren't Mardek. I still think it's kind of a weird name for phonetic reasons alone, but I'll just get over it. Or not. Who knows.
I guess to sum up, I have reconsidered and your names are totally fine because names aren't all "cool" in real life anyway, so there's no reason they should all be "cool" in this world. After all, there's a town called "Burnt Corn, Alabama" and people name their kids plenty of things worse than "Honeyblood." While I know the existing world of Mardek probably far too well, you know this world you're creating better than I do, and I should probably trust you a bit more to make the right choices in regards to it.