I Am Not Shazam/Tabletop Games

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • The Ultra-Dimensional Fighter Vic Viper from the Gradius series was once immortalized as a Yu-Gi-Oh! card. When the card was released in English, it ended up being called - you guessed it - "Gradius". Apparently not even Konami, the company behind both franchises, knows the difference between the planet and the spacecraft defending it. Sure enough, as if trying to make up for this mistake, they'd later release not one, but two cards based off the eponymous spaceship, with the correct international names this time; Victory Viper XX03 and Vic Viper T301.
  • Geist: The Sin Eaters is part of The World of Darkness series, which generally follows the title theme "Species Name: Symbolic Metaphor/Social Group/Adjective/Verbing" -- needless to say, it's a common mistake for those casually acquainted with the setting to refer to the supernatural player characters as "geists" and their society as "sin-eaters". In fact, "sin-eater" is the actual racial name, while "geist" specifically refers to the Eldritch Abomination that merged with any individual sin-eater to bring them back from the dead.
  • Most classic Dungeons and Dragons settings aren't actually referred to in-universe by the names of their product lines. The world of the Forgotten Realms is called Toril, the home planet of Dragonlance is called Krynn, and the one where you'd find the city of Greyhawk is called Oerth. Dark Sun's residents call their world Athas, and natives of Ravenloft know that name only as a castle in Barovia, not their world, the Land of Mists ("Demiplane of Dread" for the few outsiders aware of its existence). Eberron and Mystara are about the only official TSR or WotC worlds that really are called by their product-line names by their own inhabitants.