So, how do people come up with character names, anyway?

[Darth K'Trava]

"It was a brisk day - the Castle of King Prevacid had its pennons flying in the breeze, but the mood in the castle court was a somber one, as the four companions gathered to hear dire news from the King himself. The four companions were indeed mighty - Barbitol, Holy Priest of Percocet the just; Digoxin, Peerless Druid of the Altace Forest; Dulcolax, that peerless runner of the city shadows; and the mighty warrior Loperamide, who could stop any man dead in his tracks..."

As if it isn't bad enough for us to be serious gaming........ to run into some guy name "Viagra" would just end it all for us for sure!!!

 

[Doug McCrae]

The Smouldering Whore of Ur-Imbra --a godess

That's a good un. Got some alliteration/assonance going on.

 

[Incenjucar]

When it comes to names, I'm just glad that I have a the following language dictionaries: Latin, Greek, French, Malay, Chinese, Japanese, Romanian, and Spanish. Combine that with utterly random sounds, and an utter lack of concern for proper usage (Hence "Incenjucar", which would get me glared at by anyone who knows a hint of Romanian), and I've only had a problem with remembering the things.

 

[cignus_pfaccari]

One thing that I have been tempted to do for a humorous adventure is to use a pharmaceutical dictionary and have characters and places using product or generic drug names. Obviously, the difficult thing would be to keep a straight face while talking about some of the NPCs.

Heh. Often, drug manufacturers will put out an updated version of a molecule, and the name is always related to the first one.

The last two that my company had to do anything with, though, the new versions started with "Val" and "Peg". The joke was that the lead researchers named them after their wives.

Brad

 

[Henry]

Heh... no, I used to. You could try altavista.com translator. I think it spits out the hiragana, however, so if you can't read that then you'll be out of luck....just google for an English to Japanese translator.

One note to this: When you google, be sure to include the word "Romaji". An English to Romaji Japanese translator will use the closest english homophone for the term you translate, instead of the hiragana (katakana?) characters.

 

[Thief of Always]

I know this sounds weird, but I found that if you just think about sounds that you can make with the human vocal chords and not worry about their meaning, you can come up with some interesting stuff. I made up the name "Armisaunt" that way. Or just take bits and pieces of words you hear and combine them in different ways to make something interesting.

If I couldn't come up with anything, I stuck with either making up words with a Spanish flair in them, going online to a name generator, or altering the names from people that I either know in real life or that I encounter during my online endeavors.

One note to this: When you google, be sure to include the word "Romaji". An English to Romaji Japanese translator will use the closest english homophone for the term you translate, instead of the hiragana (katakana?) characters.

One thing I found helpful when naming characters for Oriental games was a Japanese-English online dictionary. Typically, I'd search for a word like "night", "winter", etc. and then add syllables to its romaji spelling. A good Japanese-English dictionary I discovered can be found by entering "jedi edict" in Google.

 

[GoodKingJayIII]

A lot of it is coming up with stuff on the fly. Jorindell is the name of my half-elven paladin. Since half-elves are generally regarded as slave scum, his last name is simply "Halfelven." Re-Chulai (ray-COO-ly) is the name of my giant magister in an Arcana Unearthed PBP, and Q'varret Eqlavarr is the name of a verrick akashic concept I came up with.

Generally I try and stick with naming conventions based on the region that my character is from. I'm not above silly names either, though only if the campaign calls for it. When I DM, just about anything goes. A bunch of drunk faen once called their god of excessive drinking and spirits Boozlethor. This wasn't as much as lacking a proper name as I wanted to get a laugh out of my players.