Game Wish 55: What's in a Name?

In this week's Game Wish, Ginger asks about character naming:

How do you choose character names? What makes a good or bad name for a character? What are three examples of really good (or really bad) character names, and why are they so good or bad?

My favourite line in any RPG rulebook comes from The Dying Earth RPG, and reads as follows:

If you give your character a mundane or anachronisic name, like Nigel or Sue, your GM should allow you proceed though the entire creation process, only to have your character horribly slain in the opening scene of the first adventure. Do not say we failed to warn you.

You can spoil the atmosphere of a fantasy game by inappropriate names. (Same goes for books, having characters called "Kevin" and "Nigel" clunked badly for me in Katherine Kurtz's Dernyi Rising)

I believe fantasy characters need to evoke the feel of the setting; whether it's taking names from historical source for a game based on fantasy versions of historical cultures, or using made-up linguistics for a complely original world. I've tried to come up with some consistant languages for my own setting, Kalyr, which is worth doing if you're GMing the setting, since you need dozens of NPCs. Read what Dorothea has to say on the subject. It's why J.R.R.Tolkein is a better fantasy writer than Katherine Kurtz, and what goes for novels also goes for games.

However, most of my recent characters have been in modern-day settings, where naming a little bit easier. For example, Ivor Tregonning, my character in David Edelstein's The Stand is a Cornish railwayman, named by taking the first name of real-life railwayman mentioned in a book, and the distinctive Cornish surname of one of the posters in a railway mailing list. I didn't realised he's also one of the characters in The Who's mini-opera "A Quick One While He's Away" until later.

Then there was the Sword-Worlder in a Traveller game (which never really got off the ground) called Þorkell Svensson, partially named after an Icelandic poster on the boards of Pyramid Online. There are problems, though, in using a name including characters that don't appear on standard English keyboards on an on-line game. (Ümläüt had the same problem!)

I've gone for slightly humorous names in some games. Leaving aside my AD&D Viking called "Mudgard", I've played an Ofanite of Jean in In Nomine called "Ed Craigentinny", on the basis that Ofanites took humorous surnames like "Jett" or "Wheeler". This was in a setting where an earlier character had used pseudonyms of "Neville Hill", "Philip Marsh" and "Adam Longsight". Anyone reading this who comes here for the train posts might understand those.