Character Name?

[sineater]

How do you generate your character's name?

I will look around a room and find words on things and combine them, cut them in half or whatever.

EX: Heid- From the word Heidlberg.
Lowsee- From Sunflower Seeds

 

[Barendd Nobeard]

How do you generate your character's name?

(1) Random, stupid puns/wordplay - my elven cleric's name Defarmerll came from "farmer in the dell"

(2) Descriptive - my beardless dwarf is Barendd (from PHB) Nobeard

(3) Family names - my human fighter - Forte Galletto (my great-grandmother's maiden name)

(4) Famous names - my human bard is Vatzlav (after the playwright, Vaclav Havel)

(5) Literature - my halfling rogue is Tybalt (from Romeo and Juliet)

(6) Interesting trivia - my halfling monk is Filoli, taken from the name of a millionaire's estate outside San Francisco. (It's an acronym for the millionaire's motto.)

(7) More literature - My half-orc paladin is named Alarbus - also from Shakespeare, but this time from Titus Andronicus.

(8) I have also tried random typing to spark my imagination, but I have never used one of those yet.

These are all current characters. Years ago, I used a name belonging to a friend of a friend (someone I had never met) - Zulman for a half-elf bard.


[edit - fix typo]

 

[Sir Osis of Liver]

I've always liked the phone book, you can get some good stuff there. Who wouldn't want a charcter named Clovis Fectue, or Dante Fava?

 

[Hypersmurf]

I quite often go to a site like the Altavista translator, pick a language that fits the "feel" of the name I'm looking for, and type in random words until something I like pops up.

The name "Anton Brosse de Cheveux" I decided worked fine, for example. The fact that Anton's last name is hairbrush doesn't bother me

-Hyp.

 

[Zhure]

I've found this to be extremely helpful.

http://ebon.uni.cc/

Greg

 

[eXodus]

i prefer to kill a infant child and then read my character's name in the bloody steaming entrails.

jimmy the monk of doom was named this way.

 

[Black Omega]

Various and sundry. Mostly just names that strike my fancy. In Champions it was easier since you were working with a theme. So Ghostdragon had some fire powers and could turn desolid. On the other hand, when it turned out Night Owl couldn't fly or see in the dark that player got teased alot.

In my Rokugan game I grab random NPC names from a book of Japanese wrestlers I have. That gives me a few hundred first and last names to choose from.

 

[William Ronald]

I tend to use a few good books we have, having names that are appropriate to the character's cultural background. Occassionally my group will allow odd sounding names if they sound good. (A lot can be explained by taking a name from one culture and having it altered by another.)

 

[Maerdwyn]

I often use Kate Monk's Onomastikon (dictionary of names). It's definitely worth a look.

http://www.flick.com/onomastikon/

 

[Dravin]

I just sort of make something up on the fly, sometimes it's a combination of something, but mostly I just sort of start pulling names out of thin air until something sounds right.