Good desert names say what kind of empty it is: golden dunes, cracked salt, or somewhere cursed. Sand, salt and silence can still have a name worth remembering. This desert name generator names deserts for D&D campaigns, novels and sci-fi worlds, from sweeping sand seas and cracked salt flats to cursed wastes and whole desert planets, with a short description if you want one.
Eight good desert names
All eight came from the generator, across its styles:
- the Goldmarch: a fantasy desert that sounds like a border country.
- the Desert of Painted Rocks: a place you'd find on a traveller's map.
- the Wandering Erg: a sand sea whose dunes move.
- the Moving Mountains: what desert travellers might call dunes that shift.
- the Snowsalt Flats: a salt pan that looks like snow and burns like a desert.
- the Desert of Lost Armies: a cursed waste with a story in its name.
- the Jackal Barrens: short, dry and slightly menacing.
- Calyx Prime: a sci-fi desert planet.
How deserts get their names
The most famous desert names are mostly descriptions. Sahara comes from the Arabic word for desert, so "the Sahara Desert" says the same thing twice. Arabia's Rub' al Khali means "the Empty Quarter".
The generator uses the real words for different kinds of desert:
- Erg is the word geographers use, from Arabic, for a great sea of sand dunes: Erg Lorvessa, the Bellisar Erg.
- Playa, Spanish for beach, is a dry lake bed, and sabkha, from Arabic, is a salt flat: the Tazmin Playa, Sabkha Ulvane.
- Badlands are eroded country of gullies and bare rock, hard to cross and harder to farm: the Gnawed Badlands, the Crooked Mesas.
Choose Cursed for wastes with a history, or Sci-fi planet for a whole desert world with a catalogue number, like Thalane XI. With a description adds a line, such as the Wave Erg, whose dunes boom like thunder when the sand slides.
Building a desert
- Deserts aren't all sand. Mix dune seas, salt flats, rocky badlands and the odd oasis, each with its own name.
- Give it a route. A caravan road or a pilgrims' trail tells players how people survive the crossing.
- Leave ruins. A desert is a good place for a fallen empire to have left something behind.
Name that empire with the Empire Name Generator. For the land around the desert, try the Mountain, River and Forest name generators, and for the whole map, Continent and World.
For more, see all the world-building name generators.