LogFAQs > #986931396

PikachuMaxwell posted...

Wow, that's pretty cool! Maybe I should get my hands on that....

It's extremely useful if you need a lot of names relatively quickly. Or just like skimming through names (it's divided up by different regions, so, say, if you need a quick French name, or Arabic name, or ancient Phoenician name, you can just turn to that section and find one that works). It also tends to divide up names into Male Given, Female Given, and Surname (and for places like Ancient Rome, it explains the differences between Praenomen, Nomen, Cognomen, and Agnomen). And it has a syllable-based randomizer towards the end, so you can just make random fantasy-sounding names.

Might be harder to find now, unless you can find a .pdf copy on a site like DriveThruRPG (though there do seem to be a couple used copies on Amazon right now - that isn't always the case). My copy is like 20 years old (and incredibly battered), so I'm assuming it's way out-of-print now.

My nephew has trouble coming up with names, so whenever he's at my house and starting up a new RPG and heading into character creation, I'll usually let him skim through the book and see if anything catches his eye.

And it was super useful when I was playing WilderMyth, when over time I wound up needed like hundreds of names for characters.



Salrite posted...

I don't know if this qualifies or is relevant, but in Minecraft I'm making a 9x9 grid of full maps and naming each one a different region.

I'm sort of doing that in my current world, though I've mostly made the maps but haven't named the regions yet.

I think I named the one island village I found Arcadia (and the lake it's on is Arcadia Lake, obviously).

I also remember one of the maps was named The Dragon's Eye Peninsula, because the map was centered on a peninsula that kind of looked like... go on, guess.

If you're hard up for names, you can always have fun playing around with foreign languages. Like how in Nudo's D&D game he ran here my character came from a land called Vesh (Romani for "forest"), and its people were the Veshari. Or you can take root words and smash them together - so you get things like Ostenhagen ("East Haven"), Nordheim ("Northern Home"), or Caer Sideral ("Fortress/Castle of the Stars").

Wiktionary has a neat feature where you can look up a somewhat basic word and see what the variations of that word are in multiple other languages, so you can kind of come up with couplings that combine well. So like if you wanted to name a place "Silver Wood" (because it's a village near a forest with a lot of silvery oak trees), you could look up "silver" and "wood" (or "forest"), grab the Malaysian "Perak" and the Manx "Keyll", and now you've got a town named Perakeyll. Or Pera'keyll, if you want to go full hack fantasy writer. If you want a specific flavor of name you can stick to the same or similar languages (and come up with names like Chsburg), or you can combine radically different languages to get more exotic sounding names (like Vir-Dzil).