So, how do people come up with character names, anyway?

[Laman Stahros]

I use an old Judges Guild book from 1979 (I suddenly feel old, strange.) called the Treasury of Archaic Names. Don't remember when I picked it up, maybe during the 1e days (where's my cane? I need my cane!).

 

[MeepoTheMighty]

I work in collections, and a lot of the deadbeats out there are blessed with some wonderful names. Just glancing at my queue right now:

Lyman Vimon
Ansel Whitelocke
Nyasha Largen
Thitiwat Hutasewee
Aurelius Webb
Houdna Essili

 

[Darth K'Trava]

I usually make them up on my own with a bit of creativity thrown in. Most have interesting first names and mundane last names.

Keldaren: half-elf ranger. Came up with that one when the original name the guy who rolled the character didn't work for me. Never got a last name so I decided he to be a bastard child.

Rozhena Ashford: female cleric. Took a long time to give her a last name so I decided that she didn't use it because of her troubled past and didn't want to remember it. Started using it again when her diety called her by her full name. She got nicknamed "Roze" by another player because the player couldn't pronounce her full name.

Sharlanna Melbourne: The first name *may* be a real name but swiped a city out of Australia that a guy lives who writes his campaign stories on the WOTC boards.

Which brings me to...

Kendrik Tallen'drel: male human ranger. I blatantly stole this name from the Aussie's character, "Kendrik Larsen" and somehow got the last name out of my head one day. A friend said it sounded like something from "Dragonlance".... Whatever....

Kelstra Firehammer: Don't know where I got the first name from. Gets mispronounced/mispelled by the DM as "Kelestra".... Typical dwarven last name.

A friend of mine had problems coming up with names for his paladin/cleric, so I sent him a link to a website (don't know the link) that had Old English and other names and he roamed the Roman names section and came up with "Vallidius". DM couldn't pronounce it so he slightly modified it to "Vallidus". She finally could pronounce the original right when he had to drop out of the game.

He had another paladin that he called Valerian. Don't recall the last names for either character. But alot of times we shortened it to "Val". Nicknamed him "Val the Valley Boy Paladin".

Another guy when we first started 3ed named his monk, "Roscoe". He never heard the end of the "Rosco P. Coltrane" jokes while he played that character....

 

[cignus_pfaccari]

Why do you ask, Two Dogs?

Curiousity and plain nosiness.

Now to betray my ignorance...Two Dogs? Did I manage to come up with something accidentally?

Brad (whose handle comes from the insurers CIGNA and Pacificare...seriously!)

 

[Elder-Basilisk]

When I was young, I strung syllables together until I came up with something cool or took names of major fantasy characters.

Now that I am still young relative to most people (though I'm older than I've ever been), I generally steal names from minor characters in setting appropriate myth or history.

So my main Living Greyhawk character is Frederick of Edgewater (after Frederick the Great, Frederick Barbarossa, and Edgwater Blvd (the street I drove by every week on my way to a game).

My pseudo Roman Arcanis character is Seneca Val'tensen (named after the Roman playwright).

My character in a friend's forgotten realms game is Wiglaf (named after the man who helps Beowulf kill the dragon IIRC).

My character in another friend's game is called Pellenor (named after the Pellenor Fields from LotR and a minor Arthurian knight).

 

[Snoweel]

Because, man...wouldn't Two Dogs FIGHTING have been a wonderful name?

Where I grew up (Parramatta, NSW), if anybody was a particularly good fighter, they were said to "fight like a bag of cats".

Alas, nobody ever said it about me no matter how many girls I beat up.

 

[Brother MacLaren]

Named all of the hobgoblin captains and generals in one campaign after the Sumerian King List or variants of those names. Could do the same for a PC... works well for non-humans because the names sound so foreign.

 

[Arcane Runes Press]

Curiousity and plain nosiness.
Now to betray my ignorance...Two Dogs? Did I manage to come up with something accidentally?

Brad (whose handle comes from the insurers CIGNA and Pacificare...seriously!)

It's an old joke about native americans, and how they name their children.

The punchline has the old chief saying "Why do you ask, Two Dogs Fornicating?" (except the word isn't fornicating, I think you get the idea)

Anyway, to answer the thread, I almost always use lists of names from real world cultures which are roughly approximate to the culture of the character I'm naming.

So, if the character is pseudo-Italian, I use an Italian name.

 

[Henry]

To All posters:

Let's leave any attempts at ethnic name-humor out of the thread, please. I've seen a few references both overt, and on the sly, but it's not appreciated.

Thanks, all.

 

[William Ronald]

I tend to use somo of my historical and mythic references from different cultures. However, I sometimes work with a sound and try to create somethign that sounds appropriate to the character concept.