Funny NPC Names (spoilers for Sunless Citadel)

[Gez]

I had made up a name for my step-father for my character's history. He is a powrful druid in our homebrew campaign and his name is Morbak.

LOL ! In French, "morbac" is slang for "crab louse"...

Accidents such as these happens frequently when using material in foreign language... My halfling rogue keeps making comments about the stupidity of human names because of that

But yeah, even without these local problems, we sure have our lots of mangled names or vilified names. I had, for example, in the campaign I DM, a missed lich (the necro wasn't powerful enough to become a lich yet, but he wanted lichdom NOW, and made a deal with a servant of Orcus... needless to say, he got ripped of, and instead of being a lich he was merely a sentient skeleton, all his magical powers being stripped from him -- actually (spoiler for Wizard's Amulet) he was Eralion, the lich from the Wizard's Amulet free PDF adventure, and all his magic powers got to his shadow, who was given to Orcus).

Well, that missed Lich became bitter after having spend a relative eternity in the demiplane he found and where he sets to do his research, being unable to exit it (as he couldn't use magic anymore) and being unable to do what he wanted lichdom for: research magic. So, his vocabulary has become somewhat... vulgar.

When the PCs arrived at the door of his lab, he greeted them by a vocal
"Et bien rentrez donc, foutremerde, puisque vous êtes venu ici !" (So come in, [untranslated because of Eric's Grandma], since you're arrived here !).

Such a "greeting" was meant to show them the lich didn't wanted to fight, and also was not very happy. But such a vocabular, both vulgar and "olde", surprised so much that from now on they always refer to the lich as "Foutremerde", which isn't a pretty name.

There's a character in the Northern Journey campagn (I play my aforementionned halfling rogue in) called the "Suddrbettr" or something like that. My halfling never successfully pronounced that name and call him "Süd Arbeiter" instead ("south worker", in German).

And we have a tradition in our group of twisting names of people we meet -- some times even when we meet them... And another one of naming people after things they say (like Foutremerde, or a PC that got nicknammed "Ohquelpute" for his very undiplomatic answer to someone, etc.).

 

[Voadam]

When I ran the original Temple of Elemental Evil, the party went into the moat house trying to kill the head cleric about five times and ended up working for him for a while. They were convinced that I had made up his title on the fly because no one given some time to prepare would have their head cleric be called "The New Master!" They were stunned when I showed them that that is how it is in the module.

 

[Carnifex]

In a Champions campaign, I ran a character who was basically an alien assassin-priest. Anyway, he often pronounced names wrongly, and then would get set on pronouncing them that way. For instance, there was a russian superhero NPC called Nucleon (all nuclear-related powers etc) who allied with us, and Kmar (my character) kept on calling him 'Neutron', which annoyed him no end. Initially I did this by mistake but then I picked up on it as a deliberate thing, and he did it lots. One of the PC's was a russian electric-themed guy called Electrovitch, a name which I mangled in a suitably amusing fashion

Amazingly, it proved a viable tactic for really pissing off villains and making them do stupid things. Since Kmar was rock hard and an absolute killing machine, he could afford to do this without fear of getting crushed like a bug (an example of this character's hardness - in a battle with a big band of enemies who were tougher than our party, they only managed to deal with him eventually by having their brick roll up the metal floor and pin the alien down with it).

Kmar was an arrogant, nasty, unpleasant, callous, insulting git of a character, and hence was great fun to play (mangling peoples names, telling everyone about his clear superiority, etc - yet somehow managing to establish himself as a pretty solid authoirty figure in the party), and somehow always survived where others got cut down. I guess having 4d6 KA claws and a 3d6 penetrating KA bite helped

 

[d12]

SPOON!

Does anybody else remember when the Tick did this to Thrakazog just to make him mad?

 

[EvilPheemy]

An old Vampire character in a chronicle I ran was named "Richard Bohnn". It took all of fifteen seconds for someone to pipe up with a vulgar nickname for ol' Dickie. The funny thing is, the player of Mr. Bohn got really riled over his character's newly dubbed nickname, which only encouraged us further.

In my current D&D game. I've introduced a villain named Tungaz. It's taken them nearly a year, but my players are finally realizing "Tungaz" is "Zagnut" spelled backwards. Chocolate bar anyone?

 

[Psychotic Jim]

Re: SPOON!

Does anybody else remember when the Tick did this to Thrakazog just to make him mad?

Didn't it go something like this:

Thrakazog just to make him mad? [/B][/QUOTE]
Tick: "4-Yaks-in-a-Bog?"
Thrakazog: "No, Thrakazog! Thrakazog!"
Tick: "Zap-suck-a-frog?"
Thrakazog: "No, no, no!"
Tick: "Okay, Susan."
Thrakazog: "Now you're doing it on purpose. How juvenile."

And to be on topic, I randomly came up with an oriental sounding name for an evil Eunuch Warlock npc: Wuh Wieh, and when I accidentally mispronounced it as sounding "Whoowie", the characters could never take the npc seriously again.

 

[chillwindhaven69]

ummmmmm.........bildred

we were playing return to the temple of elemental evil (dont read if you dont want spoilers), and we went to the flourmill in town to see if the miller was ok as nobody had seen him in weeks. the following sequence happened:

pc:hey, we just came to see if you were ok.
miller:yes, why wouldnt i be.
pc:well, nobody in town has seen you for a while,we were just curious
miller:no, i am fine
pc:so whats your name??
miller: ermmm.......*dm looks scared*....ermmm.......i am bildred
pc's:*pause*........hahahahaha.....your name's bildred, like mildred with a b.
miller:would you like to come in
pc's:yes thank you
miller: *casts burning hands on my character.

that was the last time our dm came to a session without a full npc name list, he just doesnt trust his on-the-fly-name-making-ability

 

[KnowTheToe]

I played a character named Calaphile and one of my fellow PCs started calling his Pedophile. I tried changing his name but he still kept the nickname and i had to kill him. He died an honorable death, but spit out a death curse on the PC who game him the nickname. It was fun to see how the DM put together the death curse.

 

[Sabaron]

<sigh> The absolute worst mangling of a name I've heard was an unfortunate PC githzerai named Rrakamon. It took my little brother about ten seconds to dub him "Rape-a-man".