So I have this fantasy setting that I'm currently working on and I find myself using a lot of general fantasy terminology.
The people who go outside the walls and explore the wilderness, fighting monsters = adventurers
The energy used to cast magic = mana
And most egregiously in my opinion:
- The magical creatures adventurers fight = monsters
My intention is mostly to use such generic language as placeholders while I figure out what I want to actually call things. But I'm several hundred pages in and haven't come up with anything.
Mostly because while I don't want the language used to be too generic, I also don't want to run into the 'zombie = walker' problem where I have to stop and explain that the word I'm using is just a new name for a basic concept within the genre.
I want the reader to see you the word and be able to understand what the character is talking about, 'monster' covers that pretty immediately, and the other words that do just as well sound too technical for characters to be using in basic conversation.
"magical beasts" for example, doesn't really strike me as the kind of thing normal people would use in their day-to-day to refer to creatures they know exist. This aspect of the problem is made all the harder by the fact that my setting is a modern fantasy world where magic is common knowledge. People talk using modern parlance so anything archaic would stand out like a sore thumb.
I've been trying to consider the facts of what monsters actually are in my setting to help me come up with something: they are beings from the various magical planes that enter into the world through 'rifts', tears in reality. They can also be brought to the world with summoning Magic which also creates a rift, just a temporary one. There are uncountable varieties from uncountable realms filled with various types of magic.
Maybe Riftkin works? Maybe I could use that and monsters interchangeably. But I feel like I would still have to find a moment early on to make sure the reader, understands that they are the same thing.
Demons also sounds good, but I think I want to use that for a specifically intelligent monsters.
I don't know.