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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Desdichado" data-source="post: 4652118" data-attributes="member: 2205">I've actually given a lot of thought to names.  The advantage of names that sound like they're sorta real life is that they come with built-in associations.  You don't need to spend much time detailing the culture from which Bjorn and Einar come from, because everyone knows that it's vaguely Viking-esque, for example.  You don't need to spend much time detailing what the country from which Khepri and Imhotep come from.  Or Vladimir and Svetlana.  Or Gaius and Agrippa.  Or Chen and Huang.The advantage is obvious, and Robert E. Howard used it to good advantage.  Rather than spending a lot of time describing the cultures of Turan, Asgard, Brythunia, Aquilonia, Stygia, etc. he just made them vaguely reminiscent of real Earth cultures.Sometimes you don't want too much familiarity; after all these are fantasy worlds, fantasy cultures, and the baggage that each nameset comes with may be inappropriate for your setting.  You may want names that sound "fantasy" rather than like warmed over earth-culture names.  The problem with this is that they come with no associations, except as you build them, and unless you're really good at it, it's difficult to even create unified cultural namelists that sound like they belong together.My favorite thing to do, then, is a hybrid.  I like to borrow real-life earth names, but not use something too familiar.  If I want a vaguely Mediterranean culture, I can't really use Spanish or Italian names, or it'll sound like my characters are from southern California or New York.  If I use names from Catalan or Occitan or some other slightly more obscure Mediterranean language, then I get a bit of both benefits.  Catalan names sound vaguely Spanish, but not exactly, so you get some associations there, but you also open the door for differences.For genuine fantasy names, I've got some systems and quick little programs that generate names with syllables that have a "family" feel.  Here's one system, <a href="http://www.geocities.com/raolin.rm/language.htm" target="_blank">for example</a>, where by using 2d10 I can generate a syllable, and by doing that repeatedly, I can get a bunch of names that sound like they all come from the same language.  I've also got <a href="http://www.geocities.com/raolin.rm/language.zip" target="_blank">this file</a> that I found on the internet something like 12 years ago, that was originally written up to generate names for the Traveller roleplaying game.  I created one custom file that gives me "orc" names, and I have some other files kicking around somewhere too.</blockquote>

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