How do you choose names? Random generator? Whatever sounds good? Do you start with a name and then go from there?
I like to have normal sounding names as an inversion against the fantasy genre. One of the longest run characters I'd played was a paladin name Jeff Roncalli.
Just wondering how you do it, and looking to get pointers on how to make more fantasy names.
I either go to random generators and mix and match prefix and suffix until I like something, or use Behindthename.com after deciding what real-world analogue the character is closest to, and then modifying the name I like to be more fantasyish (or not, depending on the specific name in question).
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Usually I just put the word 'AM' in front of whatever class I'm playing...
But seriously, I look to the inner sea world guide for inspiration on where to start before going to naming websites and the like.
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As Trinam said, the Inner Sea World Guide has some gems. I like to look at the example names of the race in question, and then either take similar sounds or feelings, or just latch the back of one onto the front of another. Of course, sometimes I just steal them right out of the book, when they're good enough: my new gnome is named Tongtokl Pictnibbly; the first name is stolen, but the last name is an original creation.
My group usually ends up using Estonian words as names. Got an Alchemist? Noiajook ("potion"). Drunken master monk? Purjus ("drunk").
I just use an anagram of my character concept.
Polearm Fighter = Hargog Pfitgelm (probably a gnome)
Trip Monk = Tom Krinp
That, or bad puns.
I have a particular talent for coming up with cool names, even completely original ones. For NPCs and such I occasionally have to fall back on a name generator, and my program of choice is Everchanging Book of Names or EBON. It's really good!
mmmm i might sound lame now but i have 8 names that i use all the time 4 good guys, and 4 bad. of either of those 4, there is a name for each type of character. (A mage, face, tank, and healer) But since I always DM, no ones has really noticed. npc are domed to have what ever name i come up with at the time (side note: there a lot of Jewish pirates in my game)
Names can come from pretty much anywhere. In my RL job I see lots of client names that can sometimes serve as a basis for PC names. My wizard, Jaygo Lightfoot, in our AOW campaign has his name taken directly from the Doctor Who story The Talons of Weng Chiang.
My daughters absolutely love Monsters Inc., so my current character, an elven rogue, has the name Sulven just so I can shorten it to "Sully".
Anagrams are a decent approach. I have a halfling in a game I'm running named "Phedilo Crea", which is mostly an anagram of "Oracle" and "Delphi" (the game is divination-focused).
For my own PCs, I have a series of 5 syllables that I came up with a few years ago ("Qik" being the first of them) that serves as the basis for all my names. So for instance, for an elf, "Qik" served as the inspiration for "Quioan". That combined with three other syllables, "Ilum", "Joi", and "Goh", served as the inspiration for an as-yet unrealized halfling rogue named Iligo Ojik. The thing I like the most about this is that all my PCs feel just that much more like "mine", because they're all being named from the same "source", if you will.
Google is my best friend for this task. If I don't already have a name in mind, I'll search for "names meaning *insert word here*". I'll also use Google translate to type in various words into other languages. Latin, Swedish, German, and French are all good options.
After doing one or both of these ideas, if the names or words themselves aren't that satisfying, I'll modify them to make them more to my liking. Other wise, I'll do what others have said and "steal" lesser known/used names from fantasy-themed media.
Spanish
Rojo tigre (red tiger)
just add your real life last name to where you are form
Sir Kevin of Klien sir kevin of bacon,
or i think of descriptive
like johnny be hanged,
Thomas arrowscar, johnny never'hanged frank broken hands
or just strange neames i hear at work
william slade, stephen p jorelaman, townsend meeker
...or just strange names i hear at work...
Me too! I forgot about that. Working in retail with lots of tourists for customers, you see a lot of uncommon names on credit cards. My personal favorites so far have been Sigvard and Leontine. I tend to forget peoples' last names, though.
I use different resources depending on the flavor of my homebrew campaigns. Currently my setting is a sort of "what if Pharaonic Egypt had survived and became part of the Renaissance?" I go to pantheon.org and other similar sources. Troll Lord Games also has a "Book of Names" (that I think was written or co-written by EGG himself) with names from several world cultures.
This is the absolute truth...one of my group used to work with a guy named Coon Bigmeat. He showed me a pic of the guy's driver's license and work badge to prove it.
The essential thing to do before the final choice : say it out loud a few times.
Written names are cool and all but I've seen a lot of characters being renamed ingame by other players because the name was just a pain to remember or pronounce.
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How do you choose names? Random generator? Whatever sounds good? Do you start with a name and then go from there?
I like to have normal sounding names as an inversion against the fantasy genre. One of the longest run characters I'd played was a paladin name Jeff Roncalli.
Just wondering how you do it, and looking to get pointers on how to make more fantasy names.
Something that helps me, is an online name generator called the Seventh Sanctum. www.seventhsanctum.com and there you can find all the information on generating names for whatever you need. That's how Lady Ophelia came to being, so it should help you!
Good luck!
I steal from the Sindarin Dictionary, various novels and media, utilize any number of awesome random generators, come up with anagrams related to my character, or just make it up off the top of my head.
I usually try to get some information about what sort of culture the character grew up in and then choose an easy to pronounce name that is appropriate to that background. If it does not seem to be based on any real world culture, you could ask the DM for some NPC names and use those to give you a feel for what sort of name would sound right.
If you have recently read a fantasy novel that you are pretty sure your fellow gamers have not read and it uses names that do not sound too out of place for your game, use the name of a minor character (never a main character) from that novel.
Take a package of processed food. Write down the ingredients backwards. Occasionally move a letter for euphony.
For our first two Adventure Paths, my group used the Fantasycraft naming tables.
We ended up with, well... absolutely legendary character names. Bruce Whitetiger. Patrick Kinghawk. Rhy'tal Mountainfist... the elven wizard.
We stopped after the next adventure path, but not before we got another amazing name: Yagdreg the Killing Blade.
Now we name our characters normal things, and while it has a side effect of everyone having a cool enough name that you want to say their full name every time you say it... I miss the campy Fantasycraft names sometimes.
Looking through my recent play-by-post characters, I have names from...
- an atlas (N'Djamena)
- a dictionary (Vug Vang) --> I used to play a lot of Scrabble and V is one of the more annoying letters to get rid of
- a video game (Gornak)
- the ever-popular "compound word surname" technique (Ralf Pennywhistle, Finn Killshrike)
- nowhere in particular (Big Ern Krakenov)
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I have no real method. it just comes to me off the top of my head or while joking around with my BF
Latest character a female dwarf ranger Kharha pronounced Kara Put the H's in to make it more Dwarven looking.
Brothur Portillias an over weight cleric dressed and looking like a Frair Tuck it's a mutation of Brother and Port in the first part of his last name for fat
Gabriella Fullpepper swashbuckler Fullpepper was something I was doing at the time, filling the pepper mill and I said it's Full pepper and I thought on it and liked it.
Corvinna a witch that had a raven familier Corvinna is a feminine name for raven - Corvex which is what she calls her raven
So it's just what ever suits me
I usually play around with the phonology of the target culture's implied language until I get something I like (Coram Machira, Wulfram Bront, Suhandi of the Shivering Lake, Taero, Nadir Ibn Sadr Ibn Hamd `Abd ash-Sharanriyyah) and occasionally build in a word root with a fitting meaning ("wulf" in the Fighter, "Nadir" for a humble Paladin of Sarenrae (the Nadir being the counterpoint of Zenith, i.e. the mid-day sun's footpoint down on earth) and `Abd ash-Sharanriyyah to suggest "servant of Sarenrae").
My current elf Conjurer, Iaurinn o-Lossaeglir, is actually a Sindarin name meaning "Ancient-Soul from Snow-Mountains".
The evil Ustalavian vivisectionist I just cobbled together for a one-shot game is called Goris Brzycieszęski, with Goris just being a simple alteration of "Boris" with a subtle allusion to "gore" included, and Brzycieszęski designed to look like a train wreck but being pronounceable within the rules of Polish spelling (as far as I can tell).
I find that latter trick very convenient if you don't feel like taking your time on the name. Just pick a fitting name you like and substitute a letter or two to sever the most obvious ties to the real world. GRR Martin does the same thing in his Song of Ice and Fire books (Rickard, Eddard, Margaery, Petyr). Cersei is a bit more obscure, but I believe it is inspired by "Circe".
EDIT: Oh, and Hrunndalf is an example of my basic strategy again. Put together some sounds that evoke the intended culture while sounding appropriately cool. ;o) Jarlsson just means "son of the Jarl (chieftain)"; an appropriate name for a bastard.
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For Pathfinder (Society) I've tried to use names from ancient cultures. I use Wikipedia a lot to research them.
Sir Tibor Almos - Andoran human Paladin
Hungarian
Tibor - Holy Place
Almos - first Grand Prince of the Magyars
Anton Chigurh - Chelaxian human Ranger (hunts humans)
OK, well that's just from a movie. His wolf is named Lobo (spanish for wolf). I tend to name animals what the animal is in a non-english language.
Lord Akal - Taldorian halfling Alchemist (yes, I've paid for these titles)
Sikh - Timeless Immortal
(He is a guilty pleasure. I play him as MTV's Beavis.)
Drest - Human Druid from the Kingmaker kingdom
King of the Picts. His bear is named Mathan ('bear' in Scots Gaelic).
I got on a PC building spree and choose names based on a certain theme.
Nova - female human ranger
Orion - human monk
Argo - gnome bard
Deslok - half-orc barbarian
I try to use easy to pronounce, short names. Still many GMs manage
to find a new way to pronounce the name.
I mostly use
20000-Names
to find some ethnicky combo to fit my character concept.
As a DM, I use various generators:
Squid.org
Serendipity
Seventh Sanctum
Yafnag
While usually I just sound out a name one syllable at a time until it sounds right, in High School, I did invent a system for randomly making names.
Each vowel, 'y' included, was determined by a d6.
1=A, 2=E, etc.
Each consonant, 'y' excluded, was determined by a d20.
1=B, 2=C, etc.
You just choose when and where to place a vowel or consonant.
Sometimes it wouldn't work directly, but would inspire something else, or one could scramble the letters. Only had to restart a few times.
That was before I took linguistics. I suppose now I'd break it into phonetics, charting each basic sound (if I recall from long ago, there are about 40 in English, so not too many to roll from) or maybe into syllables/clusters to include sl, ng, and other common combos.
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In general, I try to get a feel for the region of the world that my character comes from.
I then like to find the closest real world equivelent culture, and then research names from that starting point.
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I tend to get a bit of the story first before grabbing the name for my PC's... take the monk I am currently playing Hai Yuu. He was an orphaned street rat that broke into a monastery looking for easy food, found some awesome books with neat pictures and then gets sort of caught with someone yelling "hey you!" The stories are neat to the kid so he keeps going back getting seen and yelled at "hey you!" until he is finally caught by an old master at the monastery and is brought into the way of the monks to be a scribe and whatnot. He keeps the name Hai Yuu as that is when his life really started for him (trying to forget why his parents are no longer living)... etc etc etc...
you see, using a name in the backstory can sometimes really make up who your character is...
I played a pilot in Fading Suns (space drama) named Lix Tetrax which translates to demon of the wind or something like that... super crack pilot...
anyways, you see where I'm getting at. Stories help me get the names for my characters and really flush them out too
I go through themes. For example, I was in a Lost kick several years ago when I made my Fighter / Sorcerer, Aaron Shepard.
I liked the sound the letter 'x' makes, so I recently named my Magus 'Felix Xerxes.'
When I was making my Sorcerer, I wanted him to be a punky kid of 15, so I named him Jayven (a small alteration on the name Jaden, from a certain Anime that I watched when I was younger).
This, of course, is assuming I'm playing a human.
Some people don't think a name really means anything when it comes to a character. My barbarian could be named Poopy McSquire-prunes. If he's a badass, though, everyone's going to know and respect that name, right? I don't really follow that logic. I think Mr. McSquire-prunes is still going to get teased when he's level 18 and hacking through prismatic walls.
A name is important. Does it set you up for success? No, that comes down to your actions. But I can almost guarantee that when you walk into the town of X for the first time, people are going to feel a bit more awe when hearing the name "Noctus" than they will hearing "Spoony".
Generally, when I choose a name, I think about character concept and go off that. I have an alchemist who sold a little too much snake-oil and got chased out of town a few too many times. His name is Aiden Tuichelos. Everyone calls him Twitch.
If I'm going for something powerful and intimidating, I tend (unintentionally) to stick to 3-syllable names. For example, I have an old Warlock who's one bad Mother@#$%&! who I named Deacon Frost (Yes, like the villain from Blade). The villain in a PbP I'm running is a pirate king called Captain Nox.
Generally I draw inspiration from other languages, most often Latin. It's rare that I use a name generator unless I'm getting a feel for an area (Ex. Need a Russian-sounding name? Let's look up russian names and then come up with something that sounds similar).
Overall, though, I like to keep it pretty simple. Make sure everyone around the table can pronounce your name, or make sure it's easy to turn into a nickname. (Ex. I have a weapon master monk who was named Kazimir. Everyone just calls him Kaz, now.)
But most of all, make sure you like the name. Don't let anyone tell you that the name Geoff isn't "elven" enough, or that "Paul" isn't a gnome name. You are the arbiter of your own decisions, not the people around you.
...Catch Phrase,
-Chris
I've taken to using one word nicknames, like "Twigs", "Jitters", "Prince" etcetera.
Beyond that, I generally find some kind of ethnic name (provided I can pull off the accent) or scour sites like 2000 names or behind the name for the surname that feels right. I played a paladin named "Clyde Cockburn" once. We found the name, laughed quite a bit... Then decided it sounded a lot more badass out loud and I decided to roll with it. That's probably the silliest name I've ever used, but so long as we can read and pronounce it my group is usually happy.
I'm going to have to add Deuce and Never'hanged to my repitoire, I think.
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I use anything and everything, with a good dose of "it sounds good."
A recent character of mine is a bard from a swampland, vaguely Cajun. First, the thought "swamp rat" came to mind. Swamp changed to marsh, and I changed "rat" to the Spanish "Raton." Marsh wasn't good enough, but March sounded like a reasonable name, and it added a musical element (bard, after all).
So, the PC is named March Raton.
All kinds of things lol. Name dictionaries, name lists I've compiled myself, generators, things from the real world that sound like names but aren't actually names (the wine list on another thread comes to mind), and so on.
But I'll say this- every character that was really memorable to me, their name simply sprang into my head without requiring effort on my part. It's kind of a weird thing to say but I've found this is a pretty accurate gauge of how likely it is I'll stick with the character in the long term. (Some of them got sat on for years before I actually used them, but nonetheless.)
I knew a guy that would grab something and look at the ingediants.
I am Mono-sodium Dextrate a wizard of the order of the Saltines
He always did this. Cereal box, glue, pop, Cheetos, you name it, he used the names of the ingediants.
Gah! Reversing the spelling is important. Muidos-Onom Etartxed is a nice exotic name, Mono-Sodium Dextrate is just an ordinary chemical.