MNblockhead
A Title Much Cooler Than Anything on the Old Site
Perhaps this is a weird topic, and I should stop posting late at night, but in the monster hit points thread a thought occurred to me after reading this post:
I highlighted "evocative" because that is what go me thinking. I'm a big fan of random name generation tables. But I find many such random-name tables and sites are hit and miss when it comes to versimitude for me. Often I spend as much time re-rolling (or pushing the give me more names button) and tweaking selections as I would just coming up with something myself.
Part of this is has to do with "evocative". What about the common and non-evocative names? Particularly in fantasy, in many cultures you would find many people with similar names. Maybe not in the same hamlet, but from settlement to settlement. Of course, some cultural naming practices lead to very few people having the same names.
So, for me, "evocative" is more about feeling like part of living culture than something that sounds "cool". Creating random name tables that tie into a well-thought out fictional cuture, however, can be a lot of work.
In my first 5e campaign, which was entirely homebrew, I spent a lot of time thinking about names and coming up with (or finding third-party material) naming conventions. I frenquently went down deep rabbit holes where I could spend a crazy amount of time coming up with a family or clans background and coming up with names based on their culture.
But as the party explored more of the world, I increasingly took the lazy Warhammer approach of just cribbing from real-life cultures and history. Its a lot easier to just use name generators based on real names from actual cultures. That could be very problematic in a published book where ignorance may cause you to hit sensitive trip wires, but in my home game I wasn't that concerned. It is even easier with names from cultures I'm familar with and languages and naming practices I know something about. For some fantasy cultures ripping off of real life cultures I could just come up with names on the fly.
I'm running Warhammer Fantasy now and it is quite obvious that they took this approach.
In D&D, I tend to use various Tolkien and Tolkien-fan material for person and place names in elvan and dwarven cultures (the Dwarrow Scholars materials for "Neo Kuzdul" is great for Dwarven societies). For other Fantasy races I'll try to find names from other fiction works and games where the creators seemed to put some thought into the language and culture. Other times I'll just kit bash practices and names from various real-life current/historical cultures and constructed languages to come up with something not immediately recognizable as being based on a real-life culture or name.
One thing that I have not done, but I think would be interesting would be to assign a value to surnames and given names to indicate how common they are so that certain names come up more than others. It would be a lot more work to do this with fantasy name generators than those based on real-world names which have existing data sets I could use. Not sure I will ever make the effort. It seems that it is more work to come up with common names than unique names.
Yeah, that sort of fun, for me, has shifted to creating random name tables, so that I can be ready when the PCs talk instead of fight. A bunch of evocative names -- which can be reused if these particular NPCs do just get killed -- gives me even more of that, personally.
I highlighted "evocative" because that is what go me thinking. I'm a big fan of random name generation tables. But I find many such random-name tables and sites are hit and miss when it comes to versimitude for me. Often I spend as much time re-rolling (or pushing the give me more names button) and tweaking selections as I would just coming up with something myself.
Part of this is has to do with "evocative". What about the common and non-evocative names? Particularly in fantasy, in many cultures you would find many people with similar names. Maybe not in the same hamlet, but from settlement to settlement. Of course, some cultural naming practices lead to very few people having the same names.
So, for me, "evocative" is more about feeling like part of living culture than something that sounds "cool". Creating random name tables that tie into a well-thought out fictional cuture, however, can be a lot of work.
In my first 5e campaign, which was entirely homebrew, I spent a lot of time thinking about names and coming up with (or finding third-party material) naming conventions. I frenquently went down deep rabbit holes where I could spend a crazy amount of time coming up with a family or clans background and coming up with names based on their culture.
But as the party explored more of the world, I increasingly took the lazy Warhammer approach of just cribbing from real-life cultures and history. Its a lot easier to just use name generators based on real names from actual cultures. That could be very problematic in a published book where ignorance may cause you to hit sensitive trip wires, but in my home game I wasn't that concerned. It is even easier with names from cultures I'm familar with and languages and naming practices I know something about. For some fantasy cultures ripping off of real life cultures I could just come up with names on the fly.
I'm running Warhammer Fantasy now and it is quite obvious that they took this approach.
In D&D, I tend to use various Tolkien and Tolkien-fan material for person and place names in elvan and dwarven cultures (the Dwarrow Scholars materials for "Neo Kuzdul" is great for Dwarven societies). For other Fantasy races I'll try to find names from other fiction works and games where the creators seemed to put some thought into the language and culture. Other times I'll just kit bash practices and names from various real-life current/historical cultures and constructed languages to come up with something not immediately recognizable as being based on a real-life culture or name.
One thing that I have not done, but I think would be interesting would be to assign a value to surnames and given names to indicate how common they are so that certain names come up more than others. It would be a lot more work to do this with fantasy name generators than those based on real-world names which have existing data sets I could use. Not sure I will ever make the effort. It seems that it is more work to come up with common names than unique names.