07 Names

Title

This is the Names blogdex page. Names are critically important. They give characters, places, geographic features, adventures and entire campaigns a point of identity; they imbue flavor, personality, and invoke history. There may not be many posts to it, but Names deserve their own page in the Blogdex.

Content has been divided into sections on:

General Articles,
- The “A Good Name Is Hard To Find” series
Character Names,
Place Names,
Adventure & Campaign Names, and
Vehicle Names


	General Articles
A Campaign Mastery 750th-post Celebration includes advice from a host of GMs on just about every subject as the climax of the party (and some from stragglers in the comments). So I’m listing it at the start of each page, as well as a handful of places where specific content warrants inclusion. 40 Great Name Resources, Lists and Generators – Johnn offers a compendium of resources on the subject of Names. Some may be gone to the Great Internet Node In The Sky since, but most should still be around. This was so good a list that I ended up cutting my planned delivery of a similar resource out of my later series on Names!

		The “A Good Name Is Hard To Find” series How to choose and attach meanings to names for PCs, NPCs, places, adventures, campaigns. A series that remains popular.
	The first article in the series, A Good Name Is Hard To Find, discusses why good character names are important and offers a bucketload of advice on what to do and what not to do when choosing one. The second, The Wellspring of Euonyms, introduces the concept of Name Seeds, a symbolic distillation of a character that can form the foundations of a name, and shows how to generate a name seed. Article three, Sugar, Spice, and a touch of Rhubarb: That’s what little names are made of, discusses simple name structures and how to create a name using a name seed, and as a bonus, shows how to generate a monosyllabic language. Article four, With The Right Seasoning: Beyond Simple Names, extends this approach to cover complicated name structures, and explores byways such as non-human languages, and Superhero & Villain naming. With the fifth article, Grokking The Message, we leave character names behind and move on to naming places and campaigns, and I explain how I chose the names for some of the campaigns that I have run. The next two articles,Hints, Metaphors, and Mindgames (Part 1) and (Part 2), discuss adventure names, with hundreds of examples (with explanations) and general principles based on style & genre of campaign. Memorials To History – an ‘a good name’ extra – I expand the “A good name is hard to find” series in this article by pointing out that inn and town names can be conduits to the campaign background. I then descuss integrating that conduit, and the history that flows through it, into an adventure. A very short post by Campaign Mastery standards.

	Character Names Once you have players, those players are going to need characters, and you are going to need antagonists and supporting cast. And once those are created, you are going to need to know how to express the personalities that you have invented for them in-play. NB: The first four parts of the “A Good Name Is Hard To Find” series also deal with character names.
High Elf Generator – Johnn follows up his review of Q-workshop’s Curse of the Crimson Throne dice set with this review of their Pathfinder Elven dice set and offers a random generator for High Elves – Names, Quirks, Motives, Appearances, Secrets, and Power Base. He then offers our readers the chance to win a set (sorry, the contest has closed) in response for additional add-ons for the generator – so don’t skip the comments on this one! Inventing and Reinventing Races in DnD: An Introduction to the Orcs and Elves series part 3 – Taking up where the previous article left off, this article describes Orcs, a new race (Dwarvlings), a new character class (The Fated, a reinvention from the ground up of an idea from The Planar Handbook [D&D 3.0]), another new race (The Verdonne), Humans in Fumanor, and a new variant character class (The Paladins Of Thumâin). Includes a little content on Orcish Names. Writing to the limits of longevity – As GMs, we have to do a lot of writing. Every minute spent writing more than is needed is time wasted forever. Therefore, it makes sense to adjust the way you write to match the longevity that you need that writing to posess. I divide time into three general categories – short-term, medium-term, and long-term/forever – analyze the differences and potential problems (with as many real examples as I could sneak in), and then offer practical advice on how best to write for that degree of longevity. Even experienced writers usually find something of value in this article, because there are some mistakes that we all make, learn from, forget, and then make again. Who Are You? – An original character naming approach – Naming patterns are generally ubiquitous within and unique to a society – until the modern era, anyway. Some misheard commentary on TV and this fact inspired a new naming pattern – one that comes close to encapsulating an entire biography into the name. This idea can only reasonably be used in Fantasy and Sci-Fi campaigns.

	Place Names The name of a place could be an indelible link to that adventure location, or a generic signpost that, through its very mundanity, captures the essence of a generic location. Everything that occurs in an RPG needs someplace to happen, after all. NB: The first and fifth parts of the “A Good Name Is Hard To Find” series (in the General Articles section) are also relevant to place names.
Inventing and Reinventing Races in DnD: An Introduction to the Orcs and Elves series part 5 – The final preparatory piece of the series points out that each of the PCs has a personal quest in the campaign (and lists them) – something that the players themselves would only peripherally have been aware of. There’s also a demonstration of how a common cultural foundation can unify the look-and-feel of a place during the introduction to and adventures within, The Golden Empire. Vampire’s Creep and other stories: Working With Places – How to choose a location, how to delineate it, how to present it, and how to use it to your benefit. Plus lots of advice on the side about travel, and the spacing between settlements, and other location-oriented tips. A Legacy Of War: The Founding Of National Identities – It’s funny how you can think an article is about one thing when you remember it, only to find that it’s about something slightly different when you re-read it. It doesn’t happen often, but I’ve encountered the phenomenon often enough while working on both this one and the original Blogdex that I don’t trust memory to remind me of the content or classification of an article; I re-read it to be certain. In this particular case, I discuss the emergence of those national traits that would define the collective “aussie character” for generations thereafter, and the forging of those traits into a national identity during a time of conflict. I then point out the obvious – “Every sentient race should have at least one event per society that defines them as a culture” (within the campaign background). After discussing the point, and the consequences – statues, place-names, traditions, and the like – I segue into hints and tips for generating such formative incidents.

	Adventure & Campaign Names Campaign Names help an in-game environment and set of events become unified. Sure, you could just call it “Phil’s Campaign” if you wanted to. By why miss a golden opportunity to not only distinguish this campaign from all the others that have been, will be, or are being run with the same game system and/or referee? Campaign Names can give direction from the get-go by hinting at a unifying principle, object, person, place, or theme. NB: The first and fifth parts of the “A Good Name Is Hard To Find” series (listed in the General Articles section) are relevant to Campaign Names. The first, sixth, and seventh parts are relevant to Adventure names.
A Vague Beginning – Originally written back in 2011, this was a fill-in post pulled out of my files at the last possible moment. It outlines the decisions to be made in creating a campaign, permitting their relative gravity to be assessed, and offers a practical overview of the process of creating a concept and designing a campaign to express it. The subject of Campaign Names is discussed briefly.

	Vehicle Names See Also “With The Right Seasoning: Beyond Simple Names” from the “A Good Name Is Hard To Find” series.
The Care and Feeding Of Vehicles In RPGs 1 – First part of a two-part guest article. This part deals with PCs acquiring vehicles. Lots of adventure seeds result. If the PCs have, or are likely to acqiure, a vehicle in your game, you need to read this.