On the Inspirational Power of Mercurial Place Names

Because I am a very busy, dedicated and hardworking employee and involved family man, I spend a lot of time dicking around on wikipedia, looking at articles about things like the geological features of the planet Mercury. (The genealogy of the thought process that got me there, since you asked, was that I was idly wondering whether anybody had ever speculated whether Mercury had any moons, on the basis that 'the vanished moon of Mercury' would be a cool idea for a campaign setting. It still would be, but, alas!, there was never a time when the ancient Greeks, Toltecs, Bugulmara astronomers at NASA peered at the heavens and imagined there to be a satellite of that sun-blasted rock.)

Anyway, Mercury has a lot of potential as a diamond-hard SF setting, of course (it has a shit-ton of ice, to use the technical term, concealed in permanently-shadowed craters on its poles - prime locations for human colonists to set up bases and thereby become targets for The Thing, Sam Neill, alien facehuggers, or a mad AI voiced by Kevin Spacey). But looking at the place names conjures entirely different images of planetary romance in the mind - more in keeping with E. R. Eddison's Worm Ouroboros, where Mercury is imagined to be something like a more vivid and dramatic version of Earth, filled with strange monsters, magnificent wilderness scenery, and declamatory speeches. From the wikipedia page in question:

Different types of features are named after different things: Mercurian ridges are called dorsa, and are named after astronomers who made detailed studies of the planet; valleys are called valles, and are named after ancient abandoned cities, towns, and settlements; crater chains are called catenae and are named after radio telescope facilities; plains are called planitiae, and most are named after mythological names associated with Mercury; escarpments are called rupes and are named after the ships of famous explorers; long, narrow depressions are called fossae and are named after works of architecture; bright spots are called faculae and are named after the word snake in various languages.

It is one thing for an alien planet to have mountains, valleys, craters, and plains. It is something else again for it to have dorsa, valles, catenae, planitiae, rupes, fossae and faculae. But the specific names are even better (the rupes, because they are named after ships, being probably my favourites). Gaze in wonder at the landscape that emerges in the mind's eye when imagining what it would be like to see, in the distance, the following:

• Adventure Rupes ('nuff said)
• Blossom Rupes (pseudo-Mercurial pseudo-Japan?)
• La Dauphine Rupes (pseudo-Mercurial pseudo-Sun King)
• Hero Rupes
• Paramour Rupes 
• Pourquoi-Pas Rupes (because, why not?)
• Terror Rupes
• Goldstone Catena (the chain of craters that sparked a gold rush)
• Haystack Catena
• Nzoka Facula (just because it sounds like something Eddison himself might have made up)
• Pantheon Fossae 
• Schiaparelli Dorsum
• Odin Planitia 

The Pourquoi-Pas Rupes is such a brilliant title for a D&D module that I can hardly stand not to begin writing it immediately, but you also have to love Terror Rupes and the sheer poetry of Schiaparelli Dorsum. What wonders would lie between the covers of these never-to-be-written modules, and in what kind of world would they be situated?

The theme of the solar system has appeared at various stages on the blog (in the early days, here, and later on here, here, here, and here, not to mention most recently here) and still think of it as an untapped imaginary resource - just as planetary romance is itself is a sadly neglected subgenre. Hard SF is one thing, but what I really long for is a version of Spelljammer done right, in which the entire solar system - planets, moons and all - is reimagined as a vast sequence of individualised, but interrelated, campaign settings across which a group of PCs could in theory range at will. Here, the emphasis would not be on realism but on capturing the character of the solar system's contents, as conjured by a cursory knowledge of what each planet or moon looks like, its name, and its symbolism in intellectual history or myth. Somebody with the time ought to try it; I'm too busy with aforementioned job and family, not to mention trawling around the internet for tidbits to sate my idle curiosity.