What's your screenname mean?

[Teflon Billy]

Short answer: It's the name of a German opera by Carl Orff - "Die Kluge". I'm not sure how to write up the German pronunciation, but suffice it to say, it's not pronounced "die klooge"...

DEE KLOOgah

 

[Cthulhu's Librarian]

Mine's a combo of both a literary refference and my job. I'm a Lovecraft fan and I work in a library (although not yet a librarian). I needed an ID as I had forgotten the user name I originally signed up under when I was just a lurker, and my AIM name was Cthulhu Librarian. I thought that it would be better if I was Cthulhu's Librarian, so that's what i became. Of course, having a ' in the middle of the name means that it doesn't work on 75% of messageboards out there...

 

[Andrew D. Gable]

Umm...my name is Andrew D. Gable...yeah, I was feeling very uncreative.

 

[Ghostwind]

Back when I was much younger and in college, I used to hang around with a guy who was from India. It seems I always had a knack for walking up to people and then scaring the hell out of them when they realized I was standing there. So he had taken to calling me Ghost as a nickname. Well, I was also into sports at that time and one day we were playing a Sunday afternoon game of football with some guys from his dorm and I just happened to be faster than everyone that day (like, for the first time ever). Well, after one of the guys said something about me moving like the wind, my friend promptly jumped up and declared me to not only be a ghost, but a ghost wind. Guess what, the name stuck and I've been Ghostwind for a very long time.

Of course, when the internet came up and I needed login names, I used several different ones(especially in chat rooms) but always kept coming back to this name (although my second favorite was SoulBreeze). So Ghost I am and Ghost I will stay for the rest of my life most likely.

 

[Alzrius]

Alzrius is the name of one of the leser-known Abyssal Lords. He's mentioned obliquely in the products (IIRC) Faces of Evil: The Fiends, Hellbound: The Blood War, On Hallowed Ground, and Planes of Chaos, all of which are 2E Planescape products. He's also mentioned in the Book of Vile Darkness.

Alzrius is a Tanar'ri Lord that seems to be a living flame. He gives his subordinates a piece of his own body to carry as a torch on campaigns against his enemies. He rules Conflagratum, the 601st layer of the Abyss.

 

[Saeviomagy]

I was interested in unknown armies, a game system where you have magic systems that correlate to a concept - you gain power from the concept and use it to fuel magic.

So for instance plutomancy - where you gain power from gaining money, and use it to cast spells which influence the stock market.

Or Dipsomancy, where you gain power from drinking alcohol, and use it to cast spells which make people drunk, have liver failure, start barroom brawls etc.

Also in the book was a sidebar that said "yeah, we know that 'mancy' means you're divining, and 'magy' might be more appropriate, but we did it in the first edition and it's not changing. Name them differently if you want".

And I was coming up with another type of magic, one which fed off rage - where you would gain power by making other people angry. I did a quick lookup for 'rage' or 'anger' in an online latin dictionary and came up with Saevio.

So combined we get Saeviomagy. Or anger magic.

 

[Darrin Drader]

I'm named after the first character I ever played, which was a half-elven fighter/thief. I was eleven at the time.

I finally hit 20 years of playing D&D this year. W00t!

 

[Knightfall]

Knightfall is an obvious reference to Batman. 1972 is the year I was born.

Plus, there is the following...

Knightfall
Imagine a dark road,
A knight and his mistress,
A tournament won,
The prize – renown, honor.

The forest is bleak,
Near the edge of the boarder,
A rider appears,
A forlorn knight in dark.

He was just the enemy,
A tournament lost,
He announces his intention,
She will accept his largess.

Nay, says the protector,
He will not have his way,
The favor of darkness,
Will not touch her.

Swords drawn,
Battle joined,
Experience versus youth,
But the tide turns to darkness.

The lady cries out,
A distraction,
At the right moment,
Saves the protector.

He rolls away,
While the darkness,
Lunges at his throat,
A sword bites deep.

The forlorn dies,
His aim his downfall,
Blood upon the ground,
The largess crushed beneath.

The protector rolls the dark,
Away to smite the gift,
But only a sundered box,
Holding a black rose.

Crimson stains the petals,
The lady weeps for the dark,
The protector,
Can only find fault within.

Proper burial,
Marked with honor,
Here a knight fell,
Chivalry died with him.

 

[talinthas]

when i first signed on to the TSR online chat, i had just finished reading Eddings' Elenium and Tamuli series, and really liked the character of Talon. Now, Talon is a cool name, but it's awfully generic, and not at all a cool dragonlancy elf name, which is what i was aiming for. So, like all DL newbies, i figured that any self respecting dragonlance elf has to have a name that ends in -thas. Talonthas ended up sounding too much like Tanthalas (tanis's name), and didn't look all that aesthetically pleasing anyway. So i changed the o to an i and got talinthas, which rolled off of my tounge better. It stuck =) Of course, after a while people got tired of typing out the whole thing, and shortened it to Tal, which has followed me ever since. To this day, i will respond to Tal just as easily as to my real name, and many of my online friends whom i've met in person still call me that. And it makes a helpful pseudonym since tal is significantly easier to pronounce than my (relatively easy for an indian name) real name.

 

[IamTheTest]

I have a lot of friends that use me to determine somebody's worth as a friend. Usually this is done by me talking to them for a while. There for I am the test. Friends either call me Zach, Test, or The flying oso. I use Iamthetest for forums but I like the flying oso more. The story for oso is better too.