You never know where your next idea will come from…

I was half-listening to the commentary from the Tour De France a few moments ago (as I write the first draft of this opening paragraph), and I misheard something.

No great surprise there, that happens all the time when you’re only half-listening. But what I thought I heard gave me a great idea for a Character Naming System that I thought interesting enough to share.

It breaks a name into three components: A surname, a middle name, and a first name.

But that’s not the clever bit.

The Surname

The Surname consists of two hyphenated parts.

Before the hyphen

The first part is a traditional surname, i.e. a family name, and should be chosen by the player from a list of approved family names provided by the GM (who will be using the same list to generate NPC names, so creating it won’t be wasted effort).

After the hyphen

The second part, following the hyphen, names the township of the characters’ birth; if no township, then the locality; if the locality is not known, then the region; if the region is not known then the name of nearest geographic feature.

To choose a set of examples that most readers will be able to follow, Salem is a well-known small town in Massachusetts. Massachusetts is the locality, the political administrative entity that encompasses the town and more besides. New England is the recognized name for the region. And finally, there are numerous geographic features in and around Salem – everything from Palmer Cove to Walden Pond to Lynn Woods to Jeggle Island.

So a surname from the Farmer family might be Farmer-Salem, or (if the character wasn’t born in town), Farmer-Massachusetts, or if he wasn’t sure exactly where it took place within the area (people having more on their minds than borders in the early colonial days), Farmer-NewEngland, or – if the character can pin it down to a particular spot where there wasn’t any township, perhaps Farmer-LynnWoods.

But that’s not the clever bit, either.

The Middle name

This is also known as the common name, because it’s the name that the parents choose to identify the specific individual, and it’s the name by which the character is commonly known. The player should choose from a list of 366 names generated by the GM – a list that I’ll come back to in a moment – but is free to choose an alternative if the GM approves it.

That’s still not the clever bit.

The First Name

The Birthname is determined by the date of birth being cross-referanced with that same list of approved names mentioned a moment ago. In other words, if you are born on January 1, you are assigned the first name on the list; if January 2, the second; and so on. And if one particular family name hyphenated part is already in use with that first name, you move to the next.

What does that mean? Think about the need to distinguish between different members of a specific family for a moment. In insular times, the entire family is likely to be geographically very close to each other, but after a couple of hundred years, families will seperate into seperate strands in different localities. How many family members do you need before two of them have the same first name? The odds are fairly good that you will need 100 or more – and there aren’t many families in medieval times that are that large. Now throw in the geographic scattering factor, and you find that a family needs something closer to 500 or so members born in the same vicinity before you get any possible duplication. Just using the approved middle-names list, that means that a family needs AT LEAST 50,000 members in the same immediate geographic region before duplication occurs.

And the larger a family grows, the more likely it is to disperse, changing the surname, so this scales up with the population level.

Okay, so that’s a little clever. But until you think about the totality that results, you won’t get the clever bit.

The Clever Bit

Think about what this name encodes and encapsulates. Lineage. Birthplace. Day of Birth. Toss in a hyphenated name for the year as part of the first name, and you have an exact date of birth.

Every individual in a heavily populated country can be uniquely identified with just their name. And that’s before you throw in any social connotations that may attach to the family name and choice of middle name.

It doesn’t quite distill an entire character background into a single factoid on the character sheet. But it comes closer than anything else I’ve ever seen.

And that’s the clever bit. But I still haven’t shown the full range of reasons why it’s so clever.

Who Does This Suit?

This name technique is far too inconvenient and far too artificial to be universal anywhere that it was not strictly mandated by society or by law, with strict penalties applied.

But beyond this ruled-with-an-iron-fist requirement, it can work in just about any environment.

• It might be a Theocracy ruled by Lawfully-aligned Priests in a D&D/Pathfinder setting.
• It could be an ultrarationalist society in a near-future setting.
• It could be a Parallel-world Nazi society.
• Or a variant USSR.
• It could be set in the far future, where naming conventions have evolved to facilitate computer records…
• …or even a post-apocalyptic world in which survivors of whatever the Doomsday Scenario was have emulated the way they thought the old world used to name their people, based on some old computer printout!
• Not to mention a possible alien society that thinks this is the logical way to name people.

That’s because while it’s quite different to established human naming conventions, it’s similar enough to many ancient practices to be completely plausible; you can imagine such a naming system evolving within a society, and reflecting something of the society that created/adopted/mandated it.

Even more depth of meaning can be layered in by assigning or utilizing name meanings that are unique to the campaign when discussing the first and middle names, or by associating certain sounds with certain seasons of the year.

You could even build in a key factoid from your Campaign History, if it suits, and spring it on your players as a revelation. To employ another D&D/Pathfinder example, consider the first encounter between say Dragons and Humans taking place in-game and learning that the human names used throughout the known world mean something completely different in Draconic!

Or you could pull the same trick when gray, short, big-headed bald Aliens land on the lawn of the White House in their flying saucer – implying that some of those stories about ancient astronauts were true (or, perhaps, that this is what the Grays want the world to think…)

Clever, don’t you think?