Being such a detail freak (seriously, I have issues) I find myself thinking about names in my homebrew and of course of the names used in any adventure and campaign setting. Allow me to explain...
When a published adventure or campaign setting has a name for a particular NPC they always have some fantastic sounding name that is quite "fantasyish" and does everything to not sound like something we have here in RL.
However, you rarely ever see any two NPCs with the same first name. Some may have the same last name but only if they are immediate family, otherwise it seems that in most published works, nearly everyone has an original name.
Now I know that it would be confusing to have two NPCS with the exact same name but surely some NPCS could have the same first name or the same last name who are not related.
I started to think about names in my homebrew and am thinking about mapping out (at least for humans anyway) their last names and how they're interrelated, where they come from and how they have spread throughout Morvia.
So, am I nuts for wanting to do this? Does it matter? Would anyone really care except for some player who is also a geneologist as well? Do you think that writers think about this kind of stuff?
When a published adventure or campaign setting has a name for a particular NPC they always have some fantastic sounding name that is quite "fantasyish" and does everything to not sound like something we have here in RL.
However, you rarely ever see any two NPCs with the same first name. Some may have the same last name but only if they are immediate family, otherwise it seems that in most published works, nearly everyone has an original name.
Now I know that it would be confusing to have two NPCS with the exact same name but surely some NPCS could have the same first name or the same last name who are not related.
I started to think about names in my homebrew and am thinking about mapping out (at least for humans anyway) their last names and how they're interrelated, where they come from and how they have spread throughout Morvia.
So, am I nuts for wanting to do this? Does it matter? Would anyone really care except for some player who is also a geneologist as well? Do you think that writers think about this kind of stuff?