Name Inspiration

[DungeonmasterCal]

Various sources... I'm a "wing it" style of DM, and I've glanced at the ingredients on a can of soda and taken two syllables from the middle of a chemical name before in a flash. No one ever suspected. There's an ingredient in some shampoos called "Laureth".

I personally try to steer away from Tolkien-sounding names; just a matter of personal taste. Someone in my game told me once the names I use for places and people have a vaguely "Hindu" or "Arabic" feel to them... I never really thought about it. "Unkhoor" and "Kusunoor" are city and nation names in my settng, for example. I dunno of they sound Hindu or not. I just liked the way they "felt" when I set them.

The job I do allows me to see thousands of names a week. Some "real world" names are perfect for D&D. For example, I've seen "Stonesinger", "Stonehouse", and "Stonebreaker" in the last few months alone.

Oh...and one of my players works for a major casino chain as a tech specialist, and works with a guy (real name here... get ready) named Coon Bigmeat.

 

[Tinner]

For modern era, or even near future games like Shadowrun, I look no futher than my high school and college yearbooks.
The best part is since I know these people already, the name also offers some ready-made personality quirks, and even nicknames for the characters.
Right out of college, I ran a 10 year (real time) SR campaign entirely populated by my college buddies turned into NPC's.
My players often comented on how amazing it was that my NPC's were so detailed, even the ones I obviously just came up with on the fly.
"It's almost like you really know these people!"
Really? You think so?

 

[TheEvil]

I often use 'Ye Olde Tome of Names', AKA the white pages of the phone book. One of the big ones.
I will usually pick a page a random and scan the page for a likely candidate for a given name or surname, then repeat for whatever I didn't get.
Using this method, I have gotten names like Nicodemus Eberhart for a human paladin and Dawn Fallquist for a half-elven ranger. Mind you, these were far and away the best ones I have gotten.

 

[Desdichado]

If I have a gift, it's for names. My campaigns may not make much sense, they may not have many thrills or chills, but damn I've got some cool names.

Indeed. Your campaign turned me on to the joys of vaguely Romance language names, which I've (as already mentioned) used heavily in my current setting for one area; mainly by pulling from more obscure Romance languages than Spanish, though. I could get the same effect by taking Spanish names and modding them just a bit.

I didn't initially think of that, though. Maybe because I grew up in an area where Spanish names were so common, it didn't cross my mind to use them in fantasy.

 

[NewJeffCT]

I love to take names out of ancient history, and twist them a little.

One of my friends, likes to spell the names of famous people backwards. He'll then tweak it if it has potential. Divad Eel Throk came from David Lee Roth. The name inspired entire generations of Eel Throks.

I was in a game a few years back where the DM did that, and nobody noticed it until he pointed it out. But, out of necessity, we made a temporary alliance with some gnolls. The gnoll leader was named "Darok", and the DM modeled him after wrestler/actor "The Rock"

 

[NewJeffCT]

I used to work in two large corporations - one with over 40,000 employees, the other with over 10,000. I would scan through email directories for last names. I'd go, "well, I want a name that starts with "D" and then hit d and start scrolling through until I found what I liked... or, if I got specific, it would be starts with "Da" or "Dr"... sometimes, when glancing at a list of 15 or so names on your screen, you also see an interesting first name, too. (I just did it on my current company with its 300 employees for "G" and came up with Gauldin and Graham as two decent choices)

I found one of my favorite PC characters that way - Prentiss.

I'm sure you could do the same with a residential phone book / white pages.

 

[Celebrim]

Phonebooks for large U.S. cities (Chicago is particularly good). I'm particularly found of Slavic names.

Online name resources - essentially the same value as Phonebooks but easier searching.

Composition of Tolkien name stems (like 'Aldarhel', for instance)

Random language generators (you set phonetic rules and it spits out random words made using those rules). This is particularly nice because you can set the phonetic rules to say Welsh, Finnish, Romanian, or whatever to evoke particular flavor.

Corruptions of archaic English words, particularly names of occupations.

Random things pulled out of my head.

 

[kenobi65]

I used to be absolutely atroicious at names.

Baby books (or online lists of baby names) can be helpful.

But, I now swear by the Everchanging Book of Names...a slick little shareware program, that includes modules for both real-life and fantasy languages (including Tolkien, Greyhawk, and Forgotten Realms). I have EBoN crank out 100 names of the appropriate flavor, and I can always find a few good ones within that list.

It's at:
http://ebon.pyorre.net/

 

[mhacdebhandia]

I write down "old"-sounding names when I see them - authors' names from the hundreds of volumes lining the walls of one of my old professors' study was a fertile field.

 

[PrinceofLowLight]

Roman emperors and saints usually have neat-sounding names.

Some good sites for culture-specific names:
www.behindthename.com
http://www.gaminggeeks.org/Resources/KateMonk/index.htm
http://www.rinkworks.com/namegen/

Contemporary figures sometimes have cool names that could be modified. "Zell Miller" sounds like a D&D character to me.