How do players come up with names for Starfinder Characters?
One utility that I have found helpful is the Starfinder Name Generator.
But what are you using for names?
I'm not too fussy about names. The Gap allows Children of Golarion in particular to reinvent their names and cultures according to preference. If someone wanted to name a character James Bond in one of my games, I'd let them. What the heck.
I do appreciate the work my players put into names, though. The Captain of the player crew in the game I'm running is named George Aroden owing to a corrupted half-memory of a dead(?) god. Their Vesk soldier is Brelkith Bonebreaker of the Starhide Clan in rough but agreeable accordance with what the CRB has to say about Vesk names. I quite like the poetry of their Android Mechanic's name, Flicker II; the prior soul in her body was named Glimmer I. Perhaps the one before that was named Shine Zero or something.
As a player I based my Maraquoi Solarian's name on vocabulary from random Amazonian languages: Kamoe-Lani, which shortens to "Kala," nicknamed "Stargazer" because she liked looking up the stars as a kid. She comes from the River's-End tribe, who literally live at the end of a river but which is really a nod to astronomy and particularly to the star Achernar (the end of the "river" constellation Eridanus) for no particular reason other than it struck me as cool.
I use the Fantasy Name Generator pretty heavily for NPC's. It's produced some gems. One of my best campaign villains so far was a renegade Shirren Xenodruid whose name, K'Zan, came straight out of the generator.
I'm still on the lookout for whichever generator it was that produced the NPC names Territory Jazz and Kevin Vacation in Austin Walker's anime campaign Counter/WEIGHT.
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My first go-to source for names is the Story Games Name Project. I picked up a hardcopy at a con a few years ago and it is amazing. Tons of categories, and if you decide you want random instead everything's in nice blocks of 20.
My first go-to source for names is the Story Games Name Project.
Pretty neat. Thanks for posting that.
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Eh, I'm pretty lenient with names. My only concession is that if someone uses a third party name, they might as well go big and play up the part. So I expect a "Brock Samson" to be a operative melee machine. =P
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Being a linguistic anthropologist, I try to do my best to stick to the sounds of any given race. So I’ll look through words given for that language (like the list of example names) and figure out what sounds/sound pairings are used. Then I mix and match those sounds until I get something that sounds nice good. For my Kasatha I named him Isuheir (EE-sue-here)
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I honestly just named my Sarcesian mechanic Indrid Cold because my first thought when I saw the race was "Space Mothman." But for Golarion based names, her butterfly inspired hover drone is called NM-02, named after the Night Monarch herald of Desna, who is still around obviously but... might possibly have different heralds it's been so long.
Eh, I'm pretty lenient with names. My only concession is that if someone uses a third party name, they might as well go big and play up the part. So I expect a "Brock Samson" to be a operative melee machine. =P
I was thinking Soldier (blitz) with toughness and improved unarmed. But, operative fits his background better.
Does The Pact Worlds have an "agent" theme? Starfinder kind of needs one.