Sword and Sorcery Ethnonym Generator (GLOGtober 2024)
For GLOGtober challenge 7 I rolled 'color'. I was recently delighted by a brief section in Borges' story Undr that evoked an uncharacteristically pulpy sword-and-sorcery sensibility:
I was oarsman, slave merchant, slave, woodcutter, robber of caravans, cantor, assayer of deep water and of metals. I suffered a year's captivity in the mercury mines, which loosens the teeth. I fought with men from Sweden in the militia of Miligarthr -- Constantinople. [...] I have fought with the Blue Men of Serkland [...]
And of course, Burroughs has his red and green Martians. I'm not well-versed enough in Howard but I'm sure Hyboria has some chromonymic folk. Even Tolkien has allusions to 'Blue Wizards'. So, I decided that for this prompt I'd write a generator for chromatic S&S ethnonyms.
As an additional note, a lot of the old S&S names were racialized -- I tried to avoid implicitly tying this generator's output to skin color by using vivid, abstruse, & unusual colors (avoiding white, black, brown) and varying the categories of people (i.e. not just 'men' but raiders, bards, merchants, etc.). So hopefully one's imagination paints these onto styles of dress, hair dye & makeup, flags & banners, moods, metaphors, geography, myths, etc.
Credit for the HTML generator code goes to Paper Elemental.