I collect naming lists from whatever source that I find them. I collect real names, of people, towns and inns.

I love naming characters, etc. It doesn’t mean that I’m good at it. My friends still tease me about my gaijin-named L5R character (yes, she had the flaw), Carisma.

Maybe the folks who really like doing d20 stat blocks (I’d rather fall down the stairs, myself) secretly think everyone likes those, too?

Anyhoo, I enjoyed your comments.

Endless fun.

In our last Primetime Adventure series, one of the PCs met a guy named Steve that was dating his PC’s daughter. The PC would not call him Steve but kept refering to him as some other “S” name: Stan, Stewie, Sam, Simon, Sid, Shawn, etc. and it was hilarious.

I can come up with NPC concepts, plotlines, and settings, but the statblocks drive me nuts. The Sagasheet has a random name generator in it, but you end up getting names like “Ethan” most of the time.

There is a good list of random names inside of the Galactic Campaign Guide (d20 Star Wars revised) which comes in handy.

A big problem however is the tendency of players to make fun out of every name. Almost every PC and most NPC’s can’t keep their name for more then five minutes without aquiring some nickname that’s a bad pun on their real name.

I usually create a complete character, but leave the name and force me to create one at the table… This does add the element that my player think I can create whole characters while actually sitting at the table, so it’s not that bad.

I usually keep a list of Star Warsy names sitting by in case the PCs decide to speak to the guy sweeping the cantina after hours for whatever reason.

I got a lot of jibes from my players over a false name I had an NPC use: Ethan. Even after they found out the NPCs real name, the players refused to use it, prefering to throw “Ethan” around instead. It was embarassing.

For my current campaign, I mapped the various race’s names to real world cultures, then generated top 20 lists of names for the culture so I have names I can pull out of a hat. (For the dominant culture in the region, the gnomes, I have a page of names– cribbed from Welsh if I remember correctly.)

It works for me, because I’m not good at thinking about the names– but by picking the names from the same culture, it makes them sound related, which is what I want. It really reinforces the different types of dwarves. (Clay dwarves have simple names, usually only one syllable of a full dwarf’s name, reinforcing the culture’s disdain for their people. Illustrious commanders tend to have several names, clans, and titles that can be called out in battle.)

Between those two, I can usually come up with something. Sometimes I’ll also take two adjectives that describe something, and mix around the letters until I get something that sounds cool. So for example, “demon realm” with letters deleted becomes “Donaelm.”

I have a list of somewhat archaic or unusual, but still familiar names that I use for NPCs: Conrad, Joshua, Geoffrey, Ishmael, etc. I pick one and usually shorten it, so “Ish, the itinerant merchant” is born.