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Writers' Forum

Coming up with character names

undesired
Friday, January 11, 2013 - 17:31

Quite hard to do this. Any techniques? I know some of you are into the RPG dev thing so there should be some advice.

 

Right now, "sorceress" (<------------- her) is a troublesome and terrible name to have.

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Zabin
joined 12 years 9 months ago
Saturday, January 12, 2013 - 04:20
Zabin's picture

I had this link bookmarked for this same very reason.  Looks like some of the links on that site are broken.  I don't know if it'll help you find another name for "sorceress" but I thought I'd share it.  Hope it helps.

http://www.lowchensaustralia.com/names/fantasylinks.htm

Edit:  Here's another one I had bookmarked  http://medieval.stormthecastle.com/medieval-names.htm

http://duskrpg.blogspot.com/

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surt
joined 15 years 11 months ago
Saturday, January 12, 2013 - 04:35
surt's picture

Take a real name, or word (perhaps relating to your character, perhaps in another language) and evolve it through a number of iterations until you get something appealing:

Sorcerer

Saurcer

Saruser

Zarusaer

Zarusana

Red warrior needs caffeine badly.

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riidom
joined 15 years 2 months ago
Saturday, January 12, 2013 - 16:00

This is my favourite generator: http://www.rinkworks.com/namegen/

You can let it create full random ones, or, if you got a rough idea, use some very simplified regex formula to get variants over a certain pattern.

(D|T|Th)vs(ie|i|y) for example, gives:

Tewory Daonie Devesie Dardy Dypery Tetasi Thyageie
Thamorie Thipolie Dowarie Tyory Tochai Tyadie Doackie

Where the things in brackets are letters I want, and "v" is for random vowel and "s" is for generic syllable.

 

 

 

 

 

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Syrsly
joined 12 years 7 months ago
Monday, August 12, 2013 - 01:23
Syrsly's picture

Coming up with names seems pretty easy to do.  I just take the game idea or story idea and apply some key words from that idea to the meaning of the name... or I just choose a name that sounds good.

More specifically, say you have a story about a boy who dreams up a world where everyone was turned into pig slaves to do their master's bidding, and the boy must defeat that master by using his trusty telidoscope!

Key words: dream, pig, slavery

Potential names for the title of the story:
Porkchopper (Unintentionally brings up helicopter ideas.)
Piglatin (Too plain, not very descriptive of the game.)
What Pigs May Come (Perfect, it references a movie with "dreams" in the title, and it describes the premise of the story quite well.)

Potential names for the boy:
James Porker (Random and quickly thought up, whatever.)
Brendan Slop  (Brendan refers to having "pig odor" while Slop refers to food you feed to either a pig or a slave.  Not catchy enough.)
Al Swine (Al would be short for Almos, meaning "prince".  This name could also be considered the title, "All Swine", to describe the premise.  Calling him the prince of pigs could be a hint at the story's ending.)

You could take a more realistic route, but I find that a quickly thought up, funny name can be a lot more memorable.  In the case of the planned story, it seems fitting to choose a childish naming style to reflect the childish story.

Syrsly
Twitch Streamer, Web/Game Developer, & Artist

syrsly.com - contact me for commissions, thanks!

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shirish
joined 14 years 10 months ago
Monday, August 12, 2013 - 22:35

@Tap really enjoyed the iterations :)

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bart
joined 13 years 10 months ago
Tuesday, August 13, 2013 - 15:24
bart's picture

Here's one method I use.  Find a sentence fragment somewhere and grab the first syllable or two off of each word (feel free to change, rearrange, add, or omit syllables -- this is a method for getting inspiration, not a rigid set of rules).  Depending on the way you assemble the syllables, you can make the name sound like it's from different regions.

  • You could take a more realistic route -> Yukotakamore
  • I had this link bookmarked for this same very reason -> Ihathli Fotiver

 

 

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Shozuki
joined 8 years 11 months ago
Friday, July 1, 2016 - 01:16
Shozuki's picture

Personally, I'd rather see names of real-life nationalities than one more character with a name that looks like it was created by the author's face crashing into the keyboard during a violent sneeze. >,<

In short, the cold hard truth is that if every name in your whole work sounds like you pulled it blind from a Scrabble bag, it's going to feel like you did.Like there really are no nationalities or races or languages, but one: nonsense. If all the fantasy language in your work sounds like nonsense, and nonsense of the same sort, your work looses half it's charm, and half it's 'believability' in one flaw. The language becomes a barrier to enjoying the story, instead of a help to enjoy it.

 

- Shozuki

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Reemax
joined 12 years 4 months ago
Friday, July 1, 2016 - 04:59

For JHeroes I created random name generator. I took bunch of fantasy names and divided them into syllabses. Then I made list of these syllabse and randomly picked syllabses from those list. Some list contain only name starting part, middle and end part. Then there is possibility create one single random syllabse. Finally surname is made from two different word list containing first part and second part. Here are couple of examples:

Male:

Zanter Eastneck

Thurdak Battlefist

Harak Southriver

Female:

Holvala Monkspruce

Antritte Strongwind

Ninsi Southhawk

 

If you are interested here is link to source code:

https://github.com/tuomount/JHeroes/blob/master/src/org/jheroes/map/MapU...

See methdos getMaleName() and getFemaleName()

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antillie
joined 8 years 3 months ago
Wednesday, February 15, 2017 - 15:16
antillie's picture

What's wrong with normal names? There are a ton of baby names sites on the internet with a bazillion names in them. Some (many?) of the names are even pretty funky. Many baby names sites even let you search for names by meaning or origin, which you could then tie into the game story. At the very least it should give you about a million places to start.

Who said that the main character in an RPG can't be named Alex, Stephen, Bill, Jennifer, or Sally?

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lukems-br
joined 9 years 7 months ago
Saturday, December 16, 2017 - 10:46

Libtcod has a nice name generator IMO, my generator was inspired by theirs.
Also there's Gygax's book of names (cover attached), which I've found a really great reference on the subject of "how names become names and evolve and change".

Attachments: 
Preview
Gary Gygax&#039;s Extraordinary Book of Names_01.jpg Gary Gygax's Extraordinary Book of Names_01.jpg 64.7 Kb [6 download(s)]
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