NationStates Jolt Archive

Just a simple question.
In RP's where do you guys pull all the names from?

Personally i go through history to find my last names, leaving me with RPs about steven parthia and don dacia.

So theres your question for today general chat.
Discuss!

Just a simple question.
In RP's where do you guys pull all the names from?

Personally i go through history to find my last names, leaving me with RPs about steven parthia and don dacia.

So theres your question for today general chat.
Discuss!

whatever fits my character.

I look at my character's personality and think "what name springs to mind."

I make them up, almost always. I'm creative with such things--sometimes too creative. In first grade, I wrote a story with a character named Dododombimbomclimchim.

Name Generators mostly.

I have a collection of first names, about 8 or 9 and then I look around me and try to think up surnames from what I see, it may be a variation of an author, or a piece of funiture or I think of surnames I know, some of which are the surnames of ex girlfriends or of famous people. I also think of names of my country and or towns and add that to the mix with a of before the town name like those in Europe who may have Von or Van der.

I do this to create Russian names for my citizens:

1. Pick a gender (for business and the trade/economic related Ministries almost always men and for science/education women...it's a quirk of Vetalian society and culture more than anything).

2. Pick a surname at random:
http://www.gaminggeeks.org/Resources/KateMonk/Former-Soviet-Union/Russia/Surnames.htm

3. Pick a first name that sounds good, or at random:
http://www.behindthename.com/nmc/rus.php

From there, I'll add patronyms/matronyms as appropriate (e.g. Sergeyevich) if and when they are needed.

Just a simple question.
In RP's where do you guys pull all the names from?I get a lot from webcomics. And of course there's the "old pick a word and reverse it". And mythology has some nice names. Occasionally I just make something up (like my nation's name, which I made up a long time ago for another game).
I mostly reuse names I've made up before.

...

I don't want to talk about it...

there are several ways of randomly generating them, and a couple of online websites that will do it for you.

my perminent alternate personas are names that came to me in dreams.

ouija boards work pretty good as a random naming generator too.

=^^=
.../\...

Just a simple question.
In RP's where do you guys pull all the names from?

Personally i go through history to find my last names, leaving me with RPs about steven parthia and don dacia.

So theres your question for today general chat.
Discuss!

Not that I do it any more, but my fav one was taking a dynamic sounding word and spelling in backwords.

For NationStates, I 'created' my own language called Díenstadi based on stereotypical German (I don't know German, so only based on words that I know from studying the Second World War and steretypical endings such as '-ich'), Spanish, Latin and English. Unfortunately, since NS Wiki went down I lost all my declentions and what not (not that I ever completed them), but this is besides the point. My character names are completely made up on the spot and normally follow the 'general sound' of the language. For example, right now I'm writing a post for a U-21 football tournament on the Nationstates forum and one of my character's name is a Sergeant First Class called Samel Penk - Penk is completely made up, and Samel is based on the name 'Samuel'. The great thing of having your own language (well, let's humor me) is that you can also make up other words on the spot, including The Macabees' (Second Empire of the Golden Throne) 'Foreign Legion', called the Díenstadi Régulies; the word Régulies is based on the Spanish word Regulares, which were Moroccan tribesmen who fought for Spain during the Rif War (1919-1927) and the Spanish Civil War, and actually still exist (but its composition is Spanish and the name is largely historic only).

Well, a name that became a running joke with my Witchcraft group grew out of a player going completely off the map and out of my scripted scenario. He decided that he wanted to go hunt drug dealers (his character hated them and got all his money from beating the living crap out of them.) Deciding to humor him, I told him that he found an easy target.

"What's his name?"

"Ummmm... His name is Bob."

"Bob what?"

"Bob the fucking crack dealer, what the hell do you want from me?!"

Later on, our Deadlands GM gave us a set of play examples that featured 'Bob the Randy Opium Dealer.'

I usually RP fantasy, so I generally make them up on the spot. Sometimes I fiddle around with it beforehand to make it fit, since the character is usually stuck with it.

Just a simple question.
In RP's where do you guys pull all the names from?

Personally i go through history to find my last names, leaving me with RPs about steven parthia and don dacia.

So theres your question for today general chat.
Discuss!

I look for typical names from the languages my nation IC takes its language from, Hungarian and Norwegian/Icelandic

It's pretty easy, since most of my charactes' names are either palce names or matrilinealsn .

I name my RP characters what I can pull out of my ass. Or if I'm totally dry, I just pick a name from one of my favourite games.

Depends. Brutland and Norden has an Italian character to it, so the names look Italian. I have other nations, one of which is Scandinavian in character. I usually search through genealogy websites of that particular ethnic group.

For a more cosmopolitan nation, such as in the United States, visiting the census bureau for a list of surnames and names is nice.

BONUS:
Frequently Occurring Surnames From Census 2000 (http://www.census.gov/genealogy/www/freqnames2k.html)
Name Files (First Names from Census 1990) (http://www.census.gov/genealogy/names/names_files.html)
Linkies will direct you to the US census bureau.

Just a simple question.
In RP's where do you guys pull all the names from?

Personally i go through history to find my last names, leaving me with RPs about steven parthia and don dacia.

So theres your question for today general chat.
Discuss!

I tend to rumage through my memories and search for characters I liked and the names come from them or are variations. Here on NS, my RP character's named Agatsuma (from Yun Kouga's Loveless- Agatsuma Kureno Soubi) Shoriyu (Langley Shoriyu Asuka, from Evangelion) Neneko (one of the main characters of DearS).

Just a simple question.
In RP's where do you guys pull all the names from?

Personally i go through history to find my last names, leaving me with RPs about steven parthia and don dacia.

So theres your question for today general chat.
Discuss!

A couple of different ways.

For NS RP's it's usually been a combination of German, Tibetian, and SE Asian and Chinese names, with some fairly standard spelling modifications.

Sometimes I'll do a simple letter shift from an existing name.

Bobby -> Zuzza
Mike -> Nela

For pen and paper gaming and 1st person RPing, names tend to be picked up from things around me when making the character. My longest running and favorite EPT character was Master Waldorf, after the Waldorf-Astoria hotel. My longest running Urban Dead character was named Can Chu Hi, after the booze I was drinking when I created him.

The names for characters here on NS usually come from three sources depending on the race.

For the usual Tolkien elves, I do know of a few sites that provide name/word lists. I'll take names from there and tweak them quite a bit to change the original meaning.

For drow, there are good name generators around for that.

For humans, well, the good old local phone book is my primary source for that and on those special occasions I'll use people from my past. Humans are the easiest to come up with I think.

Varies.

For fantasy RPGs, I either take names from the setting, or make up a name in my head. "Ralia" and "Kando" for instance, the names of two D&D characters, are completely invented.

For modern RPGs, I use real names that fit the character and origins. When I RPed with Mirkana, I mixed American and Russian names, to fit the country's ethnic origins (originally settled by Russians, then Americans come to mine the rich iron deposits). If I had bothered to elaborate on Mirkana's language, it would have been a dialect of English that borrowed strongly from Russian, and favored military analogies.

Occasionally, I borrow a name from fiction - in a d20 Future game, my mercenary character is named "Koriel" after the Lunarian soldier from James P. Hogan's Giants trilogy, while a human cleric in D&D was named after a character I know in EVE Online. And one character in another game was named "Shadow" for his dark looks and prediliction for stealth.

I also attach names to character concepts I like. I have a few concepts I reuse whenever I can:
Midoc Gondsman: D&D, Forgotten Realms setting. Human fighter from Lantan, uses a musket.
Ben Cohen: d20 Modern, Urban Arcana setting. Human medic/acolyte from Israel.
Inbal Shimoni/Cohen: d20 Modern, either standard or Urban Arcana. Human soldier from Israel. Specialist in demolitions. At higher levels, married to Ben Cohen.
Shadow: D&D, varied setting. Human rogue, focuses on stealth and acrobatics (no people skills), high Strength, wields wrist razors.
Molly O'Hara: d20 Modern, any setting. Human mechanic from London. Looks are based off of Alyx Vance from the Half-Life series. Wields a crowbar.

An odd mix of Byzantine, Roman, Anglo-Saxon and modern English names.