Pyramid Review
The Character Naming Sourcebook
Written by Sherrilyn Kenyon
Published by Writer's Digest Books
360 pages; $18.99
One of the hardest things for a GM to do is come up with a name for all of his NPCs. He's spent all week getting the adventure ready, drawing maps, outlining scenarios, stating up the bad guys, and then it comes time to name them. Most of us just start pulling stuff off the top of our head. Jorn. Ismael. Guthar. Dar. Hey wait, I think that one's already taken.
While we gamers often come up with some pretty good ones, most of these names are bound to leave us a bit unsatisfied. I mean after all, most of them are just things we pulled out of the air, so what is there really to distinguish them? Thus, we can see that picking a good name is something we should put a bit of time into. The more meaning a name has and the more logical it is linguistically and culturally, the more it will satisfy both the GM and the players.
We can take a look at it from another standpoint. Stop for a second and think about the coolest bad guy you've ever known. Not just from games; let's try picking one from a movie. First one that comes to my mind is Darth Vader. Now granted, Darth Vader was cool, but do you think he would have been an iota as memorable (or Star Wars a fraction as successful) if he had been named Donald McKibble? It's a perfectly legitimate name, but it's pretty clear that it doesn't work. Darth Vader bears with it a wicked connotation, and much of . . .
This article originally appeared in the second volume of Pyramid. See the current Pyramid website for more information.
Article publication date: January 19, 2001
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