This whole thread is really cool! I've never actually thought about conlangs like this? (to show the level of amature I am haha)

I've only ever really employed conlangs for nouns so that I could have cool names for my people and places, but the way I've done it then is much more simple. I take my group of people (say, mountain giants), and then think of what sort of sounds I want to connotate to them (w/ the example, maybe like, an avalanche of boulders or crunching gravel), and then I try and find video clips of those sounds and write down the sort of syllables I hear (ch's, uu's, oo's, etc), and then make up words that sort of incorporate those sounds, so that the mountain trolls roughly have the sound of rocks. Or if I were doing mermaids or water nymphs or something, I would use "liquid-y sounds" like l's and s's and b's.

It's kind of a rudimentary system, but it gets me what I need when I'm creating a few nouns!
I'm definitely going to try making a proper language at some point though, using this thread for pointers.