How do you come up with names for your fictional settings, factions, characters, etc? -a fledgeling DM
In all honesty, through a lot of pain, wailing, gnashing of teeth, beseeching of dark and eldritch powers, and wrestling with my crippling self-doubt. I can come up with an interesting and intertwining system of government, religion, social castes, and the history of it spanning a thousand years in a day, maybe longer if I’m doing a lot of research. Coming up with names will literally take me weeks, completely stalling the project until then. God help me if I ever have children. If you have trouble coming up with names, you’re not alone.
In the naming of things, you’ll want to follow these three Rs: Research, wRite it down, and Remix.
- Research: exactly what it says on the tin. Hit the books, visit websites, keep your ears and eyes open to anything that sounds or looks interesting.
- Write it down: you will forget. Don’t let those thoughts get away from you. Also record where you got those ideas from so you can revisit that particular well.
- Remix: the fun and/or painful part where you torture your initial fodder into something useful.
Thankfully, there are a lot of tools and resources to help make this process easier, though it really depends on whether you’re basing your names on an existing or historical culture or making something more unique.
If you’re basing your naming schemes on existing cultures or fictional settings, then your best bet is https://www.fantasynamegenerators.com/. This site, by far, has name generators for just about anything you can possibly want as well as generators for things other than names. Best of all, Emily, the site creator, explains her logic for why the names sound the way they do.
Another good resource and the one I use probably more often than fantasynamegenerators is http://www.behindthename.com/random/. This site provides actual real-world names along with some mythical, ancient, and literature-based names. Best part of using this site is that you can look up what the names’ etymology, historical development, and what they actually mean, which is perfect if you like to give your characters symbolic names. There’s also a sister site for surnames as well, https://surnames.behindthename.com/.
Sometimes, though, you’ll either not find what you’re looking for on the previous sites or want to dig a little deeper into the logic behind certain naming schemes. In that case, you’ll have to do some legwork. Doing an Internet search for “[whatever] name generator” or “[whatever] name lists” can help. Avoid baby name sites, they are complete garbage. Wikipedia can also help if you want lists of kings or historically important people (such as this list of ancient Egyptians, though admittedly these are for very important people who had their names written down somewhere, so your mileage will vary). This will help you at least get an idea of what these names look and sound like, if not actually create as-close-to-authentic names as you can. Also look up the languages involved so that you know how they look, sound, and are put together. Anglicized versions of names from non-European languages can be fraught with peril, as the combinations of letters you read don’t always translate to what you think they should sound like (especially Irish Gaelic and Chinese. Whomever did the Latinization of those languages needs to be slapped).
If you want to make names that are essentially just basic words from another language (like naming a character “Radish”, only in, say, Japanese), Google Translate is a good start and will give you an idea of what those words would look like written in English as well as similar words. However, I highly recommend trying out other online translators as it’s already firmly established that Google Translate is not completely reliable. I named a character this way, Altarus Almakhzun, which is bastardized Arabic for “Gears Inventory”, which fits because he’s supposed to be a djinni artificer.
If you’re looking for place names that are based on a real world culture or language, a good method is hopping onto Google Maps or getting an old road atlas that shows all of the tiny towns and villages, picking a random spot, and then just wandering around, making note of any interesting-sounding place names. If you’re ever on a road trip, keep a piece of paper and a pen handy to jot down interesting names you see on the roadsigns, but please please please be careful if it’s just you driving.
Okay, that covers names that are at least grounded in some version of reality. But what about truly unique names?
In all honesty, the sky’s the limit and you’re kinda on your own. But here’s my process:
- Start with a strange or interesting-looking word or name (eg, Inpalav evolved out of Impavide, meaning fearless, the motto of the 90th Missile Wing)
- Find the syllables and sounds that appeal to you. Make a list.
- Load those syllables and sounds into the Hadron collider of your brain. Smash them together, rip them apart, twist them into a fractal gordian pretzel as many times as you please
- Take a few of the results that stand out, and then mutate them through a thousand permutations, swapping out letters and syllables each time
- Imagine someone saying this name in casual conversation, awed, reverent tones, and at the top of their lungs swearing eternal vengeance
- Pick the ones that pass this Darwinian struggle
That said, though, here are a few other rules to make sure that you have something that’s workable:
- Say the name out loud. If you can’t pronounce it on command, adjust it so you can.
- Make sure how it’s pronounced and how it looks jive together. In my experience, I’ve found names that look cool and sound cool, and they don’t always coincide.
- Keep apostrophes to a minimum. One per name is fine, especially if the apostrophe is culturally or linguistically relevant, but avoid them if you can.
- Share your ideas with friends and see what they think. If they immediately think of a cutesy nickname for your Dark Lord of Ancient Evil or just immediately call your Elven Prince of a Thousand Apostrophes “Bob” in lieu of twisting their tongue into a klein bottle, it’s back to the drawing board.
Once you have some workable names, think about the fictional etymologies of them. You don’t need to go all Tolkien here and actually write out the exact origins of these names, but at the very least think about a few rules for this particular culture. Does the name mean something? Are there any common or reoccuring syllables? Does a particular syllable denote something about the character, such as gender, place of origin, or social class? This will help make the names feel more real and part of a larger culture.
A couple examples from my own settings:
- The Fhalsnir are a very widespread species and have multiple cultures (they are the humans of the Firmament), but there are a couple of etymological holdovers from their homeworld. Typical names are about two to four syllables long and typically end in -ig, -rig, -vig, or -ith (eg, Sorvig, Sorvith, Maegrig). -ith is usually considered feminine, but cultural drift and change has made that rule largely irrelevant in the present day. Some cultures cleave to these rules, some ignore them entirely and adopt names from other cultures and languages, and most adopt some combination thereof.
- One culture names everyone with numbers, with some of the longer names resembling a fantasy version of an IP address (given name, parents’ names, clan/tribe name, perhaps town of birth, etc). Should such a character found a ruling dynasty, they may end up be Primus of the Third Dynasty of the Nation of Seven, with their parents retroactively given negative number names for the history books, never mind that Primus of Third (informally Prime-Three) was originally Twelver, child of Octus and Quint, born of the Fiftieth Tribe of the One-O-Sixteenth Province.
As a reward for reading all of that, I’ll share a couple of links for some more esoteric and whimsical names:
- 16th-19th century Puritan names: https://aramis-dagaz-imaginarium.tumblr.com/post/134169440876/brookenomicon-sonnetscrewdriver
- If you want to give your characters some descriptive names but want to use some very esoteric words, such as Sagacious Zu from Jade Empire, this site has got you covered: http://phrontistery.info/clw.html
- A collection of blog posts on names, including some random generators, ways to create fantasy names, and some name-based humor for writers stressing out over naming characters: https://aramis-dagaz-imaginarium.tumblr.com/tagged/names
Hope this helps! May your characters and nations get the memorable names they deserve!
