Note: There are a lot of external links in this post. None of them should be affiliate links
If they are, please let me know.
Note2: This has been bouncing around in my brain informally for a while, but putting it
to pixel was prompted by Rook’s post on names on Beneath Foreign Planets as part of
the RPG Blog Carnival. There’s a lot of great material that comes from these prompts.
I encourage you, dear reader, to check that out.
Note3: Link to the GDoc version this post was originally composed in.
On Names
One of the holes new Game Masters fall into while playing D&D-esque games is names.
I’ll start with random NPC names first, to get the subject out of the way: Make a d20 or
d100 list of names for each gender, and for families. Either stick it on the fourth panel
of your DM screen, or pre-roll five of each, and stick those lists on your fourth panel.
If you need a list of real world names, use an onomastikon.
Onomastikon
“What is an onomasticon?” you ask, in English instead of Greek? The first onomastikon
was a list of place names of Palestine and Transjordan created in the 4th century by
the bishop, Eusebius, written in Greek. It’s basically a real world artifact for modern
research of Roman era Christianity. Cool, right?
In any case, modern ones are more commonly lists of people’s names, not always
with their meanings, and that’s the usage I’ll use in this section.
If you can’t find one, this one was one of the gold-standard sources for
pseudo-historical gaming: Kate Monk’s Onomastikon. If that’s down, or you don’t
want to get into historical names, I’ve got a personal list of modern names without
their meanings here, split by geo-ethnic groups (for Trinity Continuum: Aeon, not
fantasy RPGs, sorry).
If you want to generate more names, the next thing I would do is generate an
onomasticon of at least the 100 most common names for each gender and family
or clan, or maybe only six to twenty, if they have very few. The movie
My Big Fat Greek Wedding pokes at the trope that Greek families only use a
few names, and Chinese culture has the concept of the
“Hundred Family Surnames”, which actually has 507, still a tiny number compared
to most Western cultures, although large compared to Vietnam, where
83% of their population’s surnames are covered by only 15 surnames.
Now, with character names aside, I want to get on to generating names for
places, unique creatures, and types of creatures, amongst other things. This
doesn’t have to be hard, as demonstrated by some greats of the English language:
J. R. R. Tolkien basically just stole borrowed names from Scandinavian
folklore.With the exception of Hamlet and that Scottish affair, Shakespeare
seemed to favor Latin-based names (check out
Shakespeare characters, sorted alphabetically). When he didn’t, he’d
often use place names for the names of characters. As an aside, while
he invented a number of words and names, he probably didn’t invent
Imogen, Olivia, or Viola
[Names Shakespeare Didn’t Invent: Imogen, Olivia, and Viola Revisited]Robert Jordan plucked names from all sorts of traditions and mythologies,
as noted in this article on Dragonmount:
https://dragonmount.com/forums/topic/85182-sources-of-names-and-phrases-that-rj-used/.
I’m not on their scale, but I try to follow their example.
Names Carry Meaning
Each name has a meaning. This is often doubly so for names in
literature, often either taking the tack of nominative destiny–so that
Sophia means “wise”, and Michael means “he who is like god”.
Sometimes, the names are inverted, so that George is someone
who destroys the earth, or Tiffany obscures a revelation.
The etymology of these names is usually what reveals those meanings,
but popular culture and literature frequently instill these meanings in our
consciousness, or at least our subconsciousness.
“Luke” means “light bringer”, but most of us will associate it more
specifically with a kid from a desert planet who ends up wielding
a sword made of light, and George Lucas.“Starbuck” means “From The River Where Stakes Were Got”,
but most of us will associate it with coffee, whales, and a pilot
who destroys robot-piloted fighters.“Dorothy” means “Gift from God”, but most of us associate it
with ruby slippers and killing witches.
Structures Imply Things
The structure of names also comes up.
Feminine names often end in -ia, -ie, or just -a.
Latin names end in -us.
Different languages have different tells to their source ethnicity.
“Mc” is a surname prefix in Scottish, or “O’” in Irish as a
prefix indicating descent from a particular man.Likewise, the suffixes “-son” or “-sen” indicating descent
from a particular man in Swedish and English (amongst
others).“-i” in Hungarian at the end of a town name, indicating
where that family came from.
We carry expectations from what we already know, even if we
don’t always know we know them, and we look for patterns which
expand those expectations when we learn about new cultures.
Coming up with these sorts of structures will help players connect
dots, once they’ve been exposed to enough such names.
What I Do
As a Game Master, or as a writer for things I hope Game Masters
will find useful, I try to leverage that, so that it carries forward to the
players, and helps build the setting.
There are a few things I do to try to mix things:
To mix things up, I sometimes use old christening lists from
a century ago, to get old-timey names which aren’t common
anymore.Steal names from other works, preferably from old things not
currently in vogue, such as mythology or works of fiction. If
Tolkien could do it, so can you.When names seem too pedestrian, I try a few things to make
the name more interesting. Robert Jordan was a master of
this. If I can suggest two meanings or allude to names from
literature at the same time, all the better. Some of the ways I
do this:Add a letter or two.
Remove a letter or two.
Reverse the position of two letters.
Re-spell them phonetically, possibly with very bad
pronunciation.Do lots of cryptic crosswords to get you in the habit of paying
attention to the meaning of words, and playing with
restructuring them. My friend David pointed me to a website
that does something similar:
https://www.wordunscrambler.net/word-combiner.aspx, which
actually dumps a huge list of combinations. It seems to work well.Use languages other than English, especially if you know them.
Even if you don’t know any other languages, Google Translate is useful for this.
Examples
Some of these examples are of where other people got names from, and
others are names that I used, along with rough steps of how I got them.
The names for the dwarves in The Hobbit come from the Poetic Edda,
a Norse epic poem. These names included Bofur, Bombur, Oin,
Dvalin, Fili, and Kili. [Reddit]North + Odin = Nordin
Hemlock + helm = Helmock
Irony + ignite-> fire = Firony
Gang leader: leader + greed -> crown + avarice -> Crovice
Dangerous deadly birds: Wary (how you should act) + Gallow
(place of death) = GallowaryDeliberate + optimistic, and brutal: Langsam (German for
slow) + sanguine (both “blood red” and “optimistic” -> swap
syllables for Lamsang + sanguine -> merge them for
Lamsanguine -> obfuscate the spelling a bit: LombsanghActor Peter Ustinov -> Change the first name to its Russian
analog, and obfuscate the last name slightly -> Pitr OstinovIfni, the goddess of luck, from the Ringworld series of novels.
Stone + collapse -> translate to Hungarian -> “Ko” + “összeomlás” ->
trim the second part, and put them together ->
anglicize it a little: Koeramlás.Mother Strange Woman “-> anya furcsa nő -> Anglicize+scramble,
and add smush the back two together: Anyew Furansinó.Anyew Furasinó’s four zealot assassin children: Norber, Hela,
Iliko, and Sunder. The first three are based on names of people
I knew, and for me instantly convey personalities to me, even with
their modifications:Norber is Norbert with the ‘t’ dropped. It means “bright north”,
but I didn’t take that into account in using the name.Hela is Helga with the ‘g’ dropped, but also a Norse
goddess of an underworld. It means “Holy, sacred,
blessed; Prosperous, successful.” I didn’t take that
into account either, when choosing this name, but
the irony is delicious.Iliko is “Ildiko” with the ‘d’ dropped. Its root is with the
Latin “Ilico”, and means “battle, warrior, or ‘fighting a
war’”. This one just straight up suits the situation.Sunder just literally came from the adjective, and while
I envisioned someone like Snake-Eyes from G.I. Joe, I
imagined him destroying his enemies by first destroying
their weapons.I used word-combiner to try it out, making a name for a
Geotheurge (basically, a dwarven stone druid), so I tried
out the words “nature”, “mountain”, “rock”, “dwarven”,
and picked two of them for the name “Narven Mounock”There’s a village I use, also naming the valley it’s in.
It’s a fishing village, but there are four farms or ranches in
the valley it's nestled in. The name was originally “Four Ranches”,
but in a language that alludes to Latin, which would properly be
something like “Quattour Villam”, but I didn’t like the sound of that,
so I used Italian, getting “Quattro Fattorie” (okay, Fattorie is farms,
not ranches), so I went back and tried a few other words, and
settled on “Fields”, which translates to “Agros”. I massaged it
a bit to “Quatres Agros” (wave to the French influence as it
goes by!). Then I did this thing Frank Herbert and Robert Jordan
have both done to place names: simplifying their names over time,
so that we end up with “Tresagros”.Frank Herbert does this with Arrakis, the proper name for
the planet Dune, which in later books gets simplified to
simply “Rakis”.Robert Jordan does with a number of names, but for an
example, I’ll use “Carhein”, a city-state in the Westlands
which was originally called “Al'cair'rahienallen” in the
Old Tongue.
This worked out to twenty-two examples. Hopefully that’s enough to give you
some guidance in coming up with your own names, or at least finding
good places to steal them from.
But Wait! There’s More!
Writing this got me thinking about using d100 tables to generate names–I
love my tables, because I think they keep me out of creative ruts. I intended
merely to start with Greek and Latin roots, and add some other ones, but
ended up filling not one, dear reader, but four columns of a d100 table just
with prefixes from those two languages. Even if you’re not looking to
create a Greek or Latin name, their common meanings are listed with
them, to give you conceptual prompts even if you’re not going with those
linguistic ones.
Here are the links: as a Google Sheet:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1KkGFQKG7O-Cp6cSAXawOh7gouHfT5CawPsqntVeiHiE/edit?usp=sharing
On Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/d100/comments/1ebmqiz/random_name_prompter/
Conclusion
I hope, dear reader, the concepts, tools, tables, and examples provided
help you find or build names that evoke meaning in your player’s minds
while bringing originality for your own settings, and the confidence to feel
fine sharing them.
I just want to comment that this is a really good and strong post.
ReplyDeleteThanks for a great post. Lots to think about and many great ideas. Thanks for sharing.
ReplyDelete