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?
The male names adhere here to mostly harsh consonants and darker vowels, interspersed with lighter vowels to take a bit of the edge off and , like the female ones, adhere mostly to a Germanic nomenclature with names like “Daldir and “Frogund”, but also the eponymous Albrecht and Klaus, which to this day are common names in Germany. The clan names follow the established composite word tradition and include entries like “Firebelly”, “Blackhammer” etc. Unfortunately, there are some entries in this table that are less than superb – “Skullcrusher” to me sounds more like an orc-tribe and “Stonemeier” sounds ridiculous to me.
Worst offender would be “Traugott”, though – literally, that would mean “Daregod” or “trusts in god” (if an “In” was eliminated), but the connotation for “trauen” is also “to wed”, evoking unpleasant pictures of bearded dwarves in bridal gowns. These are the exception, though and generally, we get solid lists.
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 are my verdicts:
Dwarves suffers from the wonkiest names and overall, while not bad, could have used some finetuning. Hence, 3.5 stars, rounded down to 3.
Endzeitgeist out.
