The You Name It PDFs introduce handy lists and tables useful for generating interesting NPCs, locations, plot points, and hooks of all shapes and sizes.
You Name It: Halfling Names & Surnames includes 100 male halfling names, 100 female halfling names, and 100 halfling surnames. Names are listed on a percentile table for quick-and-easy generation.
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Each installment of Abandoned Art’s „You name it“-series so far is 3 pages long, with one page devoted to front cover, 1 page to SRD and 1 page of content, which provides a massive name-generator list.
Generally, the series is system-agnostic and provides just what it promises, i.e. names – 100 male ones, 100 female ones and 100 titles/clan/family etc. names, depending on the race covered, so let’s go through the first 4 pdfs, shall we?
Halfling names in contrast to gnomish nomanclature, face a difficult obstacle – they need to sound down-to-earth, yet slightly uncommon or alien to our ears without being too far off to make them uncomfortable. The solution used in here is to use slightly uncommon names like “Hyrum”, “Wellsby” or “Harmon”- which I per se like. What I didn’t like as much was that there are quite a few names that feel more like monikers – “Latch” and “Bootsie” come to mind. The female list is imho better here, as the male list actually uses several rather common names like “Lee”, “Lenny”, “Hugo” etc. – some slightly more alien names would have been nice here. The surnames, as is by now tradition in the series, once again are made of composite words and mostly hit the nail on the head with entries like “Tweedsleeves”, “Willobold” etc. – only two particular entries in this table imho fall flat: “Hereagain” and “Worrywart” – seriously, these two are just lazy.
Conclusion:
Editing and formatting in each installment are top-notch, I didn’t notice any glitches. Layout adheres to a no-frills standard with 6 columns featuring the names in one massive table. Layout-wise, I consider this slightly sub-optimal – separating the one table into three distinct tables, one for male names, one for female names and one for the family/clan/surnames would have enhanced readability and made the page look less jumbled. The pdfs of this series have no bookmarks, but need none at this length.
So…how to rate this? Well, on its own each of the installments delivers names and solidly so, for a fair price. The thing is…Raging Swan Press has a little pdf called “So what’s the Demihuman called, anyway?” that delivers 50 male/female family name entries for elves, dwarves, halflings, gnomes and haf-orcs – for 2 bucks, which, if you do the math, is simply the better deal, so the low-price factor won’t feature in my calculation of the verdict. Combined with the table-issue mentioned before, that’s a detrimental factor that costs these pdfs some ground. That being said, here is my verdict:
Halflings suffer in the male list and due to the 2 somewhat lazy entries in an otherwise nice table. Overall solid, but the female list shows that author Daron Woodson could have done better – hence my final verdict of 3.5 stars, rounded up to 4 for the purpose of this platform.
