Not sure how that works in other countries, in Germany the endings of village and town names are often regional for various reasons.

One typical thing is that in borderregions or conquered regions, place names are derived from the original language, for example, in Eastern Germany, there are a lot of places that were originally slavic settlements and retain some features of those (-in, -ow, -itz, -leben [probably Germanized from -slav). The far north has some endings common with Skandinavian city names (-by, -holm).

Then, the spelling of the same thing very often depends on the local slang, eg -rode, -roda, -rath and -reuth all stem from "Rodung" (deforestation), -rode is typical for north Germany, -roda east Germany, -reuth Bavaria, -rath Rhineland. Other example: -um in northern Germany, -heim elsewhere (Heim=home). In some cases a word might just be typical for a region (-wig for market in old north German).

In most maps, this shouldn't play much of a role because you won't need enough names for it to matter, but in a detailed map of a large enough empire, I believe this is something to keep in mind, especially if you want to give different regions an own flair.


I'd also like to mention that while Fantasy names are often pretty tacky, Dark Forest is perfectly fine (Apart from the "Schwarzwald" - Blackwood - there's also a German town called "Finsterwalde" - Darkwood) and in cases where the location lives up to its name, I wouldn't object a Dire Swamp either - if there's just a couple of hermits living in it and the neighbours fear going near, they might well call it the Dire Swamp.