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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Mythmere1" data-source="post: 2398751" data-attributes="member: 26563">The Extraordinary Book of Names, by Malcolm Bowers, is Volume IV of Gary Gygax's Fantasy Worlds Series by Troll Lord Games.  There are few things in the creation of a vibrant fantasy world than the names - place names, in particular, since the bad or stupid ones have an annoying tendency to become and remain the center of action for many adventures - an odd phenomenon that merits research.The book is centered upon a very sound premise - that names evoke cultural resonances, and that it adds considerably to the "true ring" of a campaign if the GM has some sort of naming rule and conventions.  Tolkien, a master of language, delivered the world's most elegant demonstration of this art, and Mr. Bowers sets forth to give the average GM off the street the rudimentary tools of Tolkien's methodology.The main bulk of the book contains vast lists of names organized by cultural origin (or, to be precise, cultural occurrence).  These are delivered in paragraph, rather than table format, to save space.  Given the amount of data, this was probably the right choice, but it is jarring for a moment.  The benefit of using cultural grouping is immediately apparent - it is, I think, true that you can add to your campaign's internal consistency by consistently using names from a small group of cultures.  It is worth getting past the immediate "why isn't this in table format" moment.It is worthwhile, even for a GM with a good ear for language, to peruse the essays that accompany the raw data.  These essays are the next step in using the name lists, and they offer some useful general guidelines that aren't necessarily apparent from the lists themselves, e.g.: "/-p/ after a short vowel suggests quickness or shortness: blip, bop, chop..." (p. 20). -OR- "The Anglo-Saxons had no family names.  Their personal names were usually formed from a pair of stock vocabulary elements; meanings were mostly ignored." (p. 28).The section on place names is very good, since it gives the meanings of many of the prefixes, suffixes, and root words for geographic elements for several languages.All in all, this is a very useful book.  I found the organization of sections a bit difficult (I'm not sure how I could have done it better, but still), and I didn't like the illustrations - they are period woodcuts, and I'm not fond of that.  If you, as a GM, don't have a good hardcopy naming resource, this book will definitely be worth your time and money.</blockquote>

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