Wednesday, May 22, 2013

I hate naming things.

So I suck at naming places, people, things. Absolutely horrible at it. Linguistics was never my strong point, and while onomastics was always a good way to write a quick five or ten page paper in undergrad, I think it may have broken my ability to come up with syllables that sound "acceptable" to each other.

So I'm never sure what to do - I can go with nearly purely descriptors for names, and keep everything fairly fairly straight forward, or if I want alien, I can open up a translator with a particular language and start translating terms until I find one I like. As long as I avoid common languages, I will probably be okay with anyone at my table saying, "Um, that's totally the wrong variant/intent behind that word," because my only defense is "It may be, but it is the one that I can pronounce the easiest!"

So folks who name characters, places, things something other than good English names, how do you go about doing it?

8 comments:

  1. I get my inspiration from nearby book titles, then I mangle them in a blender to get things that sound fantastic but not entirely nonsensical

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  2. http://www.behindthename.com/random/

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    1. Arg, I typed out a whole reply to this and the internet ate it. Trying again.

      I use Behind the Name a lot. I like the names of main/important characters and places to mean relevant things, so I use the site to search by meaning and then pick one of the list that I like the sound of.

      For groups of minor characters/places that share an origin or geographic area, I pick a real life culture (if I already have a named main from that area, I pick the culture(s) that their name is from), then just go down the list of names and pick ones I like or are short/easy to pronouce. Makes them sound like they're all from the same place, gives a bit of cultural cohesion.

      When I have a character inspired by a real person or another character in other media, I like to give a hint to it in their name, even if no one but me is aware of it. I'll either find a different language's version of the original person's name (Behind the Name being again useful for this), or I rearrange the letters. (Sometimes both, in a notable semi-villain I had in a long-running campaign named Egroj H'sub. Only one PC caught on.)

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    2. Thirding behindthename.com.

      I also use Google Translate to get exotic-sounding, but meaningful, names. I also have a couple of random generators I use, such as the ones at http://www.seventhsanctum.com/index-name.php

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  3. http://ebon.pyorre.net/

    I like to associate groups in a game with human social groups, for good or for ill, and so I use existing naming systems for those groups. So, gnomes tend to have Jewish names, and my desert folks tend to have Arabic names, and my mountain people tend to have Scottish names, and such.

    I have also used collections of historic names, with some modulation - so I had a whole group of folks named after historic pirates, for instance.

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    1. Wow...I think you may have just delivered my salvation with that link.

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    2. I just discovered EBoN, too! It's fabulous.

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  4. I use the "nearby book titles" when I'm doing things on the fly, but otherwise I have small little supplement from years ago ("The Everyone Everywhere List") that lists by culture/language a whole bunch of both forenames and surnames (also divided by gender) in tables to roll on.

    D.

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