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By General Tangent
What's in a name, or:
How to pick a cool sounding name with little effort.
The art of picking a name is often an important one and is usually arrived at
five or so minutes after
writing down statistics for the character. There have been many articles in
magazines to assist you in creating the perfect name but most of them are at
home when this fateful event happens!
It is not only players who suffer this, gamesmasters are often the worst
affected by it as they struggle for minutes to come up with a name and there
are only so many times you can have John Smith appear.
The methods outlined below are ones that I have tried* with varying degrees
of success.
Random Methods
Can the cosmic forces of the universe assist you in finding the perfect name?
The chances are no, but if you are stuck for an NPC then any of these might
help.
DICE
Take a d6, d8, d10 and d20. Roll the d8 first, this will tell you how many
letters in the name, then roll the d6, if the number is odd, then roll the d10
otherwise roll the d20. The d10 is the vowel die, 1-2 is A, 3-4 E and so forth,
while the d20 is the consonants die, 1=b and so forth. This will give you a
bizarre name without a doubt and is best avoided unless you play bad science
fiction games where this becomes the creature's Earth equivalent
pronunciation.
TELEPHONE DIRECTORY
Get a telephone directory and flip through the pages at random, more odd
names but at least they are genuine.
TRADING CARD GAMES
Take your favourite TCG and deal two cards of the top, then combine the
artists names, you too can be called Brom Hildenbrandt!
RANDOM LETTERS DRAWN FROM A BAG
Get a Scrabble TM set or prise the keycaps of half a dozen keyboards and
stick them in a bag. Draw as many letters as you like and sort to taste.
LOTTERY NUMBERS
Another number theme here, get the next days lottery numbers and use those.
The National lottery here in the British Isles uses 49 numbers with only six
drawn. Any number over 26 gets broken in half so 38 becomes a 3 and an 8
giving Ch as the first two letters of the name.
OUIJA BOARD
The ultimate way to let the universe decide your character's name and maybe
a random prediction.
*= OK, I never used the Ouija board for name determination I'll admit but it
seemed to cool an idea to pass up. Please note I do not condone the use of
Ouija boards for anything, it may work for you, but if you end up like Linda
Blair, I cannot be held responsible.
As you can see, you get some weird and wonderful names with the random
methods, there is something to be said for semi-thought out names.
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