Where do YOU steal your names from?

[Dannyalcatraz]

I steal from everywhere- music, art, obscure fiction, popular fiction, baby name books, and a home-made excel spreadsheet.

However, one of my favorite places to steal names from is the pharmaceutical industry.

I had to take a potassium supplement for a brief time. With a slight spelling change, the name of the supplement became the name of my Half-Orc Bounty Hunter: Klor-Kon.

A recent allergy med's name makes for a perfect wizard: Astelin.

And who could forget the furious northern tribe of seafaring barbarian raider/traders: the Vicodins!

You can probably find more in a second hand Physician's Desk Reference.

And I also use diseases & disorders for names as well. My Githzerai Monk/PsiWar/Lucid Cenobite is named Zjax. His yellow skin and the fact that he sailed into town on a wizard-cursed ship that had lost most of its crew earned him the name "Zjax the Yellow"...which quickly morphed into "Yellow Jack"- an old nickname for yellow fever.

 

[jasper]

for city names atlas, npc phone book if they not called bob.

 

[Chaldfont]

I get inspiration for names anywhere. I try to write them down so I can refer to them later.

I named a swashbuckling villain "Grignard" after a set of reactions that I had to learn for Organic Chemistry.

Street signs and housing addition names are good too. I've used "Briarwood and Twickenham" before.

I named an evil wizard "Malathion the Malignant" after a weed killer.

Some are just normal words that kind of sound cool. I once had a kender named Scrimshaw.

Some I just throw together because they are fun to say. I reuse a city named "Slarifar" a lot.

 

[Kid Socrates]

A big mix of things. In my Final Fantasy game, half of my little asides come from past Final Fantasy games, as little nods to the previous games (a house at the corner of Kiros and Ward Avenues, Thamasa University, Dr. Michael Trepe and his groupies the Trepies -- riffs from FF8, 6, and 8 again). I work for a voicemail company, so we get some awesome names that I mix and match to make NPC names (my new favorite is Urban Graves -- I have no clue what he'll be, only that he'll be awesome). And lastly, I had to name three tonberries on the spur of the moment, so I named them after then-Pittsburgh Steeler wide receivers, Hines, Plax, and Twaan. Since then I've decided that all tonberries are named after NFL players, and I've added Santana, Lavernues, and Craphonso.

I also frequent the online random-name generators when I have to come up with a ticketholder list for a train or a graduation class.

 

[lukelightning]

A fair amount of Dog-Latin or Dog-Greek (i.e. "Latinish" and "Greekish") names.

 

[SidusLupus]

I need names the most for the world map I'm working on for my Homebrew.

Google Earth supplies me with all sorts of names for cities and countries.