Great Names for Characters

My Twilight Mirage name would be Edith Walking in Sunshine on a Barren Field.

I named my mc in West of Loathing “Orson Carp” and it ended up being tonally perfect for that gem of a game.

2 Likes

I work in medical billing and do this exact thing, grab a cool last name here a nice first name there avoid Hipaa violations and the like.

1 Like

These are great names! Names in this vain are always my favorites I was looking at the list of names I have and found Random Renegade on there and was like ‘A gift I’ve given to myself’

1 Like

Also, y’all, Rain World has criminally underrated names. Like, the lore of Rain World is incredibly obtuse and buried incredibly deep in the game, but y’all, it’s SO GOOD

MILD SPOILERS but like, literally no one will play this game and it’s a huge mess

There are these massive computers called iterators and they all have names:

  • Five Pebbles
  • Big Sis Moon
  • Sliver Of Straw
  • Seven Red Suns
  • Chasing Wind
  • Unparalleled Innocence
  • No Significant Harassment

Then there are these mysterious things called “echoes” that are like, long dead creatures that speak to you named:

  • Nineteen Spades, Endless Reflection
  • Six Grains Of Gravel, Mountains Abound
  • Four Needles Under Plentiful Leaves
  • A Bell, Eighteen Amber Beads
  • Two Sprouts, Twelve Brackets
  • Droplets Upon Five Large Droplets

Rain World is such a mess but it’s also extremely good eugghhhhh

9 Likes

Gibson’s Chrome Worlds had AMAZING character names for Cyberpunk/Future characters.

Dixie Flatline
Wintermute
Linda Lee
Case
Molly Millions
Lady3Jane
Armitige
The Finn
Count Zero

1 Like

My wife and I have to drive down to Jacksonville, FL fairly regularly for some medical stuff, and always pass the exit for two small south Georgia towns: i-075_sb_exit_055_05

7 Likes

honestly? i think you just convinced me to find a way to play Rain World

6 Likes

I’m pretty bad at names so generally I use one of the three or four that are my standard go-tos when i’m making a character in a video game. For tabletop it’s a bit harder, but luckily the creation process there doesn’t come up as frequently so I can put more effort into thinking about it.

My Tiefling Paladin was incredibly solidly Lawful Neutral, very much a capital C cop. When I was creating her I looked up lore stuff about Tieflings, how they can have normal human-ish names or sometimes take names that espouse an idea they want to embody. At one point we had chased a dude to the top of a tower, a dude who had done some nasty things, and the rest of the party made a deal with him where he tells us what he knows about the bigger bad and we let him go. After he told us I had my paladin kick him off the side of the tower. Bad guys don’t get to get away that easy. Her name was Relentless.

My current character in this game i’ve been playing for 2-3 years now is a drow bard who escaped from the Underdark and lives on the surface. I looked up generic drow names but that didn’t help much, so I went deeper and found a pseudo-language type thing that broke down what the various name components meant. Sort of trying to get into the mind of what a drow parent would want their child to live up to. I went with Aunrae, which means Deadly Seeker. Then I went an additional step and since she ran to the surface to get away from those assholes and live her own life, she made her own name. All she wants to do is play music and have fun hanging out with cool people in a place that isn’t miserable all the time. So I picked Mayffyndra, which means Beautiful Singer and Lover. None of the rest of the group knows that original name, they barely know that Mayffyndra is a name she picked herself. It’s entirely a thing I created to flesh out the character more to help with my roleplaying of her, and I enjoyed putting in the effort since she’s well outside my comfort zone personality-wise.

Ok for the record when I say “mess” I mean I mean Rain World is the easily most frustrating game I’ve ever played. It’s incredibly difficult and obtuse and confusing

That being said it uses this frustration to convey a really interesting feeling that weaves into the themes of the lore (which is also buried) and is kind of a masterpiece

All said, All the lore is worth a read!!!

This very important document came through a slack I’m on this morning:

They have these going back an entire decade, they are wonderful. My favourites from this year:

  • Dallas Creamer
  • Wheaton Jackoboice
  • Kadin Knightlinger
  • Clayton Proctor
  • Hudson Roarick
  • Bizzy Blanding
  • Caton Brisbin
  • Mason Warble
  • Stella Spotts
  • Journey Fischbeck
3 Likes

I’ve always been pretty proud of “Tythus Cadian,” but this thread is an invitation to step my game up.

This is a sort of morbid pull but this site is worth a look for real names http://ssdmf.info/

Because US SSN are one time use the govt has a death master file. Normally you need to pay to access this but someone bought a copy in 2013 and put it on the internet in a searchable fashion as well allowing you to just pick a birthday and see when all those people died.

Stuff You Should Know did a recent episode on it which sent me down a rabbit hole.

1 Like

For gaming I regularly call my character “Dunning-Kruger”. It explains either my excellent gaming ability or complete lack of it.

1 Like

I remember Fry and Laurie used to say the way they named their sketch characters was informed by small British towns. A lot of them make incredible esoteric last names.

For example, a screenshot of the current location of the train I’m on.

Edit: or damn, zoom in anywhere in Norfolk.

5 Likes

Great Hockham! I can already see five new characters for the next season of Counter/Weight on those maps.

As a complete name nerd, this thread is so great.

One cool thing you could do if you wanted to really do something unique, is to break into different languages conventions/sounds like Xhosa languages (but that can be hard as a native English speaker).

Other than that, I just look up meanings of names in all sorts of different languages and then alter them a little

2 Likes

The eye test at my doctor’s has the lines

E R I K
KLACID

on it and every time I visit I think of how good a character name that’d be

4 Likes

sorry for the double post but for those who didn’t see it

5 Likes

I have a lot of names floating around in my head and tend to do weird internet deep dives to find stuff that has a Meaning for the character.

I especially like Tiefling’s Virtue names in D&D, I have an oc named Kindness who was knighted and because they don’t really have a surname they just added another Virtue, so now they’re Ser Etiquette and Kindness.

I’m also not above dumb puns. I have a half-orc divine sorc of Luthic, an orc deity associated with bears, so I named her Kurma de Luthic.