Peni Griffin
First Post
First, check naming conventions in the source culture. For instance, when we made characters for a Roman-like campaign the DM said that the upper-class Tarantians were using a classical Roman naming convention: Given name, family name, identifying nickname. My character was a priestess from a wine-producing region. Sofia - wisdom. Napea - the valley of the vineyards. Theophilia - God+love. Sofia of the valley of the vineyards family, the one that's so pious.
DMs love it if they've established a naming convention and the player actually uses it.
If the DM doesn't have a naming convention, I frequently name my (female) characters after precious stones or flowers, because that's universal. I also have two baby name books, from which it's easy to pull names with appropriate meanings, obscure names, and variants; lots of reference books, such as foreign language dictionaries, field guides, and lists of historical figures from which to pull sounds with appropriate meanings; and a willingness to experiment with sound. Stocking up on reference books on random subjects is well worth a gamer's while, btw, and is dead cheap if you haunt university book sales.
I have to do this when writing stories, too. Since most of my books are set in modern America, it's not hard to find suitable names for the ages and ethnicities required, although I sometimes call up a friend who makes name-based jewelry to order and get input on the popular names for a particular gender, age, and culture. When I sent my heroine back in time 11,000 years, though, I was kind of stuck. Although I established a naming convention that named men after predators and women after plants, innocuous nongame animals, and geographical features, there's no way of guessing what the language of Clovis people in Texas sounded like! I back-engineered some words from modern American languages (though I'd have done a better job of this if I understood philology better) and used onomotopiea for others. Oddly, this resulted in what's probably the least pronouncable name I've ever produced: Shusskt, for plum, based on the sound a perfectly ripe plum makes when you bite into it and the flesh suddenly collapses into your mouth in a liquid orgasm of flavor.
When writing other-world fantasy, I try out different sound combinations till I get something that sounds plausible and suits the character. It's important to get a realistic amount of variety and to have conventions within a particular culture to convey consistency. Caitlie, Sherna, Genella, Tikina-Londi, Elmara, Mairu, Mestanor, Athlese, Alendil, Dilre - more complex than that and they run together.
I've known people who had a horrible time with names, including one who wrote standard name patterns (Anna = Vowel consonant consonant vowel, for instance) and then rolled dice to generate letters, so he got characters named Exxe or Kaled or Qott. Another picked his names in order from the god lists in the paperback Necronomicon. Others go in for the hidden meaning or near-pun.
DMs love it if they've established a naming convention and the player actually uses it.
If the DM doesn't have a naming convention, I frequently name my (female) characters after precious stones or flowers, because that's universal. I also have two baby name books, from which it's easy to pull names with appropriate meanings, obscure names, and variants; lots of reference books, such as foreign language dictionaries, field guides, and lists of historical figures from which to pull sounds with appropriate meanings; and a willingness to experiment with sound. Stocking up on reference books on random subjects is well worth a gamer's while, btw, and is dead cheap if you haunt university book sales.
I have to do this when writing stories, too. Since most of my books are set in modern America, it's not hard to find suitable names for the ages and ethnicities required, although I sometimes call up a friend who makes name-based jewelry to order and get input on the popular names for a particular gender, age, and culture. When I sent my heroine back in time 11,000 years, though, I was kind of stuck. Although I established a naming convention that named men after predators and women after plants, innocuous nongame animals, and geographical features, there's no way of guessing what the language of Clovis people in Texas sounded like! I back-engineered some words from modern American languages (though I'd have done a better job of this if I understood philology better) and used onomotopiea for others. Oddly, this resulted in what's probably the least pronouncable name I've ever produced: Shusskt, for plum, based on the sound a perfectly ripe plum makes when you bite into it and the flesh suddenly collapses into your mouth in a liquid orgasm of flavor.
When writing other-world fantasy, I try out different sound combinations till I get something that sounds plausible and suits the character. It's important to get a realistic amount of variety and to have conventions within a particular culture to convey consistency. Caitlie, Sherna, Genella, Tikina-Londi, Elmara, Mairu, Mestanor, Athlese, Alendil, Dilre - more complex than that and they run together.
I've known people who had a horrible time with names, including one who wrote standard name patterns (Anna = Vowel consonant consonant vowel, for instance) and then rolled dice to generate letters, so he got characters named Exxe or Kaled or Qott. Another picked his names in order from the god lists in the paperback Necronomicon. Others go in for the hidden meaning or near-pun.
