On Place-Names

I've always struggled naming places in campaign worlds. This sometimes happens when I'm a player - I've had DMs have us make up locations for our character backgrounds, which they then incorporate into the geography of their campaign world (or they ignore them and we assume that they're off the map/too obscure to warrant inclusion, and that's fine too). I can rattle off a serviceable backstory easily enough, especially since background has never been all that important in our games. What matters is what happens at the table, after all. But coming up with a place for my character to be from can leave me paralyzed for minutes on end.

But however bad that can be, it's way worse when I'm DMing and I try to create stuff out of whole cloth. I originally used the Nentir Vale map for 4E, keeping the locations but freely reinterpreting them for the purposes of my own campaign. But as time went on and the lore for the setting grew, I got more and more paranoid about contradicting something established.

But you can just ignore the established lore, say the straw-man voices in my head. Maybe you can, I reply. I can't. Not easily, and not without needless hand-wringing.

I don't have this problem with naming characters. Names can be recycled. I can name my evil wizard Arthur, it doesn't matter that, in another  universe, there's a legendary king named Arthur, it's just a name.

But places have names that are supposed to be unique. Sure there's fifty Springfields, but I can't have my players climbing Mount-Everest-No-Not-The-Real-One. But anytime I try to come up with a sufficiently "fantasy"-ish name I feel like I sound ridiculous. I can't send my players to the Lost Caverns of Mimsy-shriftenbibble. Other fantasy works can have nonsense-word names without issue, but I can't hack it.

The reason I bring this up now, incidentally, is because I was sitting on a train platform in New Jersey, thinking about how many place-names in the U.S. (particularly the east coast) are recycled. If they're not named after people, they just stuck "New" before some town from England for which they presumably felt homesick (or, possibly, wanted to thumb their nose at). I thought, it must have been nice to have a whole country's worth of place-names all ready to go when you discover a whole new continent steal someone else's land and put a country on it.

But then I remembered my summer in London, and how I will never stop thinking "Cockfosters" is effing hilarious. If I came up with that on my own for a D&D campaign I'd never hear the end of it, but it exists in real life and I guess everyone in London manages to keep a straight face about it.

Anyway, my solution for the place-name problem is usually to just use descriptive English words, possibly mashed together: "The Stone Hills." "The Grey Mountains." "Bluestone Hollow." "Greenbridge Village." But I worry that that's getting old--how many "[Color] Mountains" does your average fantasy world need anyway? So how do you handle place-names in your campaign? English words? String syllables together and hope for the best? Create entire fictitious languages?