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It can't be easy nowadays coming up with unique, six-letter words for alien races that refer to absolutely nothing else catalogued by the internet, real or fictional.

As of October 4, 2022, when typed into Google, the word "Gnolti" brings up an entire page full of references to just the Maelstrom's Edge model, not a curiously shaped Italian pasta, or an anatomical reference to a specialized avian bone, or the town page of some obscure little village near Trondheim in Norway. You don't even get a google link to some random internet user who happens to use "gnolti" as their handle until well into the second page of results!

In this day and age, that's quite an achievement.

That said, I have to ask: Who came up with this term? Is there a story behind the name, or did it just pop into your head?

It all began with a back to back watching of 48 Hours and Another 48 Hours which, curiously, do not even take even 4.8 hours to watch. The rest is, as they say…

 Talking Banana wrote:

That said, I have to ask: Who came up with this term? Is there a story behind the name, or did it just pop into your head?

The Gnolti was already in place in the background before I came on board completely with the development, so I couldn't say for sure where the name came from. In general, we find names from a range of places, though, depending on the unit and/or faction. Sometimes it will be a corruption of a word or name that fits the theme, sometimes it's just spitballing made-up words to see what sticks... and I think the Gnolti was one of those.

I went back and did a search of our inter-company emails to see when “Gnolti” first showed up and I learned two things:

1) It was first mentioned in 2012, to give you an idea of how long we worked on the game (the KS didn’t even launch until mid-2015 and the Broken didn’t show up until 2017).

2) The person who almost certainly came up with the name is one of our main fiction guys, he goes by the handle darrkespur around these parts. Though unfortunately he’s pretty busy with family and other non-wargaming things at the moment so I doubt we’ll be able to get him to pop in and confirm that it was him and where he got the idea from (though I’ll give it a try).

Hi all, yes I think that was me! It started out as a play on words on the DnD race gnoll I think originally - although the final model came out a lot bigger than that fantasy race...

Glad we managed to achieve a googlewhack!

A great accomplishment! If you ever need help with random names I'll offer my assistance. I may not be skilled in many areas, but vomiting out nonsensical/topical combinations of letters and words is something I enjoy when given the chance to help people who are spitballing ideas.