Poll of the Day > Fellow Name Nerds?

(+) Yeah! (+)

Anyone else a "name nerd"?

I find fascination with given or "first" names, at least. That's because I make a lot of characters for games, virtual worlds, and stories.

I wouldn't necessarily consider myself a "name nerd", though I do own this:

https://www.amazon.com/Gary-Gygaxs-Gygaxian-Fantasy-Worlds/dp/1931275564



I've made hundreds of NPCs across dozens of tabletop RPGs over the years, so I've had to come up with tons of different names for characters. Modern names, historical names, fantasy names, sci-fi names, comic book superhero names. Names from various ethnicities. Team names, organization names.

I know what a few names mean in their original derivation, though I'm not a huge expert on every name ever.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

I wouldn't necessarily consider myself a "name nerd", though I do own this:

https://www.amazon.com/Gary-Gygaxs-Gygaxian-Fantasy-Worlds/dp/1931275564

I've made hundreds of NPCs across dozens of tabletop RPGs over the years, so I've had to come up with tons of different names for characters. Modern names, historical names, fantasy names, sci-fi names, comic book superhero names. Names from various ethnicities. Team names, organization names.

I know what a few names mean in their original derivation, though I'm not a huge expert on every name ever.

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

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. Usually I try to find something that stands out whether it be biome types or significant landmarks and choose a different language to name it after (Mountains that rise above the clouds = Nimbuyama). Although, I'm starting to run out of anything unique anymore so I'm starting to have to go through greater leaps (A lot of raider outposts = Raiders = Las Vegas = Venturas) or just make random sounds until I say something that starts to sound nice.

I wanted to name my Lich after a famous abbey/monastery, but going with Carffax seemed a little too on the nose

I was given an irregular name. a blessing and a curse I say!!!

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).

Lokarin posted...

I wanted to name my Lich after a famous abbey/monastery, but going with Carffax seemed a little too on the nose

My immediate first thought was Lindisfarne.

Carfax actually works well as a stuffy British-sounding name (especially Victorian Era flavored), and is probably generic enough that you can get away with it unless your players/readers are really big Dracula fans. Though I might hesitate to use it as a name in a Vampire: The Masquerade game unless I was playing a character who was a bit of a douche (and it was a name they picked for themselves). I could definitely see myself playing a character named something like Mircalla Carfax in a Ravenloft game though.

The real problem is that most abbeys or monasteries are just going to be named after saints, or whatever town/region they happen to be in. So you aren't always going to get a cool name that works well if you just steal it (especially if you want a name that fits a lich).

The other problem is one of flavor. If you want something somewhat sinister-sounding for evil undead, you might want to lean to the traditional (but also cliched) Eastern European naming conventions, or even something more Arabic/Semitic/Mesopotamian or Egyptian-flavored for more ancient-sounding names. Western European names tend to carry different connotations (but might work well for a lich pretending to be modern and cultured nobility - ie, Shulshaga the Undying might pass himself off as Marcus deBourne when he's trying to hide his true nature in 19th century London).

ParanoidObsessive posted...

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

I had a very old world named Arcadia (probably a decade old at this point). Creepaia was one I ran with for years, too. But now I've settled on gargamel for my long-term world because that was the seed I went with.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

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").

Groenveld, Aoiwakeru, Hangbien, sstrnd, Novylad, Costa Del Prado... I try to avoid common roots like "hagen" and "heim" that are seen often in media and literature, and often have to use Google to translate certain words. Which unfortunately might not lead to accurate results with a lot of "less popular" languages. Or even popular Asian or Eastern European languages. I get so many mixed results and straight up wrong translations with Japanese.

Salrite posted...

I had a very old world named Arcadia (probably a decade old at this point). Creepaia was one I ran with for years, too. But now I've settled on gargamel for my long-term world because that was the seed I went with.

My current Minecraft world is Aurora, because it's my first world on my PS5 (all of my other worlds are on my 360).

I tend to name all of my Minecraft worlds as if they were worlds discovered in space and being colonized by people from Earth, so I've used names like Terra Nova, Solaria, Alaris, Mirador, ... I think the fanciest name I ever came up with is Vaelon Brae (a combination of Skara Brae and a tweaking of the name Vagonbrei from Stargate).



Salrite posted...

Which unfortunately might not lead to accurate results with a lot of "less popular" languages.

The way I see it, whether or not a word is perfectly accurate doesn't really matter, if you're not going for a literal translation for a real world word as much as just trying to come up with a cool name that can be somewhat justified as being part of a foreign language in a fantasy setting. I'm not Tolkien, I'm not looking for linguistic perfection, as much as I'm looking for verisimilitude. If something sounds like it fits whatever culture supposedly came up with it, that's good enough for me.

When I used Vesh, I didn't use it to mean "forest" (its real world meaning), I used it to mean "home" in the language of the people who used it to describe their homeland. And "Veshari" almost certainly wouldn't have been a proper derivation in Romani, but I used it because it makes it sound more exotic.

Plus, if you're slamming words together from different languages it obscures the real etymology anyway.

ParanoidObsessive posted...

The other problem is one of flavor. If you want something somewhat sinister-sounding for evil undead,

The thing I'm working on there is no real good/evil, so you have Liches that work at the gym and Kobold sanitation workers and such

Salrite posted...

I had a very old world named Arcadia (probably a decade old at this point)

Oh no... that was in beta I'm sure. So fourteen years!

Just use the Space Mutiny name generator.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/0/0b5d8f6e.jpg

Lokarin posted...

The thing I'm working on there is no real good/evil, so you have Liches that work at the gym and Kobold sanitation workers and such

In that case, you probably want the most mundane of all names. Like Pete Jones the Lich or Bob Smith the Kobold.

Though it would be fun to have Kobold last names that relate to Kobold culture (as opposed to human last names mostly based on where your ancestors were from, what they did, or who their dad was). So like, Jake Redscale or Ralph Drakeservant (if you're going with D&D Kobolds), or something even more mundane and Fae-ish if you're going with the actual real-world definition of the race (where they're sort of like the House Elves in Harry Potter).

captpackrat posted...

Just use the Space Mutiny name generator.

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/a/forum/0/0b5d8f6e.jpg

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