How do name gods?

>google translate hindi

Think of the the thing their a god of, then my eyes roll back into my head and the first this that comes out of my mouth is their name.

>google translate a spoken language

You mean Sanskrit or Devanagari, not Hindi. Spoken language is interpreted, not translated. Please avoid my triggering both my linguist/translator nerves and my autism in the future. Thank you.

...

Say a bunch of giberish until something you say sounds cool.

Depends entirely on the naming convention used by the language of the culture that named it.
Also, mortals tend to call gods by names they know them as, not necessarily their real or true name.
Or
>depends on the setting crap answer
I tend to use names that evoke the domains of the god.
Like a god of battle and forges could be called Bloodquench if a mortal man might be called Thatcher, Gardner, or Goodson. (Real words)
Or maybe Klashrot if a mortal man is more likely to be called Calla, Vanhar, or Penk. (Matched syllables)
Or if a man would be called Hel'vetca, Fflewdekkya, or Gouyaaliar, then the God might be called A'doosh'bahg.

I do the translation thing mentioned earlier but I use constructed languages like Sindarin, WHFB's Dark Tongue or the name generator from Dwarf Fortress. I avoid Latin and Grerk because that leads to stupid shit like naming a fire god Ignis or calling a water goddess Aqua. It also helps to shorten the name you get and smooth out any redundant letters.

For example let's say I've got a god of hunting slanted towards the brutality of predation so I decide to call him Bloody Fang to evoke "nature red in tooth and claw" imagery. In DF's goblin language this would be Dotom Omot (bloody fang). There's a repeated "om" so I shorten it to Dotomot. Since that result only has one vowel I might switch it up to something like Datemot (pronounced Da-te-mot). The nice thing about doing it this way is that I can use the original phrase as the title so now it's Datemot the Bloody Fang, God of Hunts and Feasts. Hope that helps.

*Greek.
Grerk would be a nice name for an Orc god though.

I always like the idea of their names being forbidden to speak so you use some kind of epithet or sobriquet instead.

You never call on "Pelor" but on the "Sun Lord" or something.

Foreign languages, concepts, places, with a few letters scrambled. for spice. Steal characters from works I know none of my players have read/seen, mangle their names for extra.

After taking the germs from there, I write all the names down on a piece of paper and lose it. Then, I go to write them all down again and realize that THAT name just sounds fucking stupid, or it doesn't fit, so I don't write it down. I lose that piece of paper too. Repeat this a few times. Then, when it comes time to actually introduce shit in game, I say whatever I remember first and write it down in my "Do Not Lose" GM notes, and then it's canon because I can't change it anymore.

I use the same method for NPCs, locations, artifacts, and just about anything that requires a proper noun. It works out all right, but it makes it a real pain in the ass to actually inform people of things beforehand. None of my players want to play as Clerics anyway.

I tend to just go with names that sound like biblical angels. Lot's of -iel, -ael, -aeus, and the like. The first part is often just a latin word that sounds cool and/or meaningful, but sometimes it's nothing at all. I also use epithets, but that's more because the setting I am currently running has a fucking massive pantheon of gods and it makes them more distinctive and memorable.

Sabrael, Genius of Dust
Raekariel, The Outstretched Hand
Ahsameet, Dying World's Scream

You get the point. The edgier or more faux-profound, the better.

Take a word that describes something about the god you're naming, find the corresponding word in whatever real-world culture you're basing the culture of the god's fantasy worshipers on, then corrupt it a bit. I've been wondering this myself for a while, and I've found that, at least in a lot of the European myths, gods tend to get their names this way. Thor is the god of thunder, and his name derives from the word for thunder. Zeus is the god of the sky/heaven, and his name derives from an older word for sky/heaven. Granted, sometimes the gods shift around and lose whatever association they had with their name. Tyr ultimately derives from the same word Zeus does, and it's likely that Tyr was the top god in an older version of Norse religion, then got supplanted by Odin and Thor. And of course there are other problems, like with Celtic and Slavic mythology, which due to Christian influence makes it pretty much impossible to completely reconstruct them and really find out the meanings of the names and gods.

One thing I've learned trying to come up with plausible fantasy words is that people in real life really weren't that original. They basically just named things by the words that describe them, then those words became get corrupted over time and become their own name.

In my last generic fantasy setting I didn't use names. Instead it's the Father (sky, LG), the Mother (earth, CG), and the Son (sun, NG) who are called the Trinity, and are worshipped in the human lands. There are also two sisters Lady Luck (CN) and Lady Fate (LN), two rival goddesses who don't have official cults. It's still common to pray to them though, either in court while asking for justice, or when embarking on a risky endeavor. There's also Death (TN), but nobody officially worship Death, and it doesn't ask for worship.

Instead of wroshipping the Trinity, elves worship the Creator, the Shining One, the Life Everlasting, the Progenitor of the High Race, the... You get the idea. That's one of the reason why elves are smug pricks, naturally. They see humans as barbarians who can't see the One Truth behind the Many.

Dwarves don't talk about gods. Spoken words are naturally decieving and will never be entirely true. Spoken words are the tool of the traders and diplomats, but not of the gods. The runes are true though, as they are the essence of divinity. The great Runecarver of the Deepest Cave and the Highest Mountain carved first dwarves from stone and written their souls in runes. When a dwarf reaches adulthood, he ventures into the Old Halls, where he reads the truth about the gods and the world carved in runes. If a dwarf makes a promise, he carves a rune in his house, or even makes a rune tattoo. Naturally, dwarves despise elves who just can't stop telling blasphemies about their god, which are totally false, of course.

There are also those who worship different demons and devils and old ones, and all their names are totally unpronounceable in mortal languages, so they also mostly use titles. Makes lives easier both for people in the setting and for players.

Could just be me, but it strikes me as generic, and ultimately, forgettable. It reminds me a lot of Destiny's problem with using "the" for everything. The City. The Traveler. The Cabal. The Reef. The Fallen.

Oh yeah, I forgot about The Light and The Darkness, which are really bad offenders here, since even in-universe, the terms are so vague nobody seems to really know what they mean.

The players liked it. I don't get why you would consider titles forgettable, but not Greyhawk or Faerun god names besides BANE, for example. It's basically the same thing, but instead of a rogue saying "we just fucked Tymora in the ass and were alive to tell the tale", he says the same thing about Luck or Fortune or Fate.

Also,
>buying Destiny
you could've prevented this, user.

Possibly b/c Tymora is still a name, whereas the super-generic titles are really easily forgettable. They're just words, and not very original ones at that.

I like the simplicity of the human gods.
>Dwarves don't talk about gods. Spoken words are naturally deceiving and will never be entirely true.
I like this bit a lot, actually

Both names and titles are as forgettable as you present them. Make them a part of the world, make NPCs that are involved in the matters of the divine, and your players won't forget anything.

>Make them a part of the world, make NPCs that are involved in the matters of the divine, and your players won't forget anything.
>implying you can make your players remember what you want

>Both names and titles are as forgettable as they end up being.
FTFY

I think has a point here. You can have titles, but I think they should be something more than just Father, Mother, and Son. Like, if you had a war god, what would he be called? Warrior? Meh, pretty generic and unremarkable. But something like the Unconquered Sun? The Left-Handed Hummingbird? The Phantom Queen? Those stick out a lot more to me.

>buying Destiny
Nah. Was hoping they'd port it to PC later, but I gave up on that pretty quickly after it came out. The game could've been amazing, and it has some really interesting lore (the Vex and the Black Garden stand out especially to me), but from everything I've seen and heard it's just beyond subpar, and Destiny 2 looks like it's just going to be a repeat of 1. The whole thing just reeks of Activision stepping in and forcing Bungie to make the piece of shit that is Destiny.

youtube.com/watch?v=hsr-QfgFRh8

I read it as
>My gods are all manles of powerful forces or concepts

use old languages. like really old
I'm talking proto-uralic old

that's how you get to the real good shit.

latin and hebrew work too but kinda overplayed

Sanskrit is another language and Devnagri is the script. It's perfectly possible to translate hindi. It exists in written form.