Fantasy Names

[Black Dragon]

Building on the discussion on naming everything, how do you go about creating original fantasy names for characters?

What are your favorite resources or tips for coming up with unique fantasy names?

[Johnny Cosmo]

I try to keep mine down-to-earth, with no flowery or 'elegant' names. That might be because I don't really do elves or any type of 'divine' races. I like to alter very normal names, just slightly, so they still look and read the same. And this is not in the same way that people might alter a name to make it sound magical or graceful, most often I do the opposite since my world is quite realistic.

[jackitsu]

I have a problem coming up with names for my fantasy and usually have placeholders until I finish (though I rarely do...)

When I actually do stick names in there I do try to keep the names similar for region or race, as appropriate. I read somewhere something like (paraphrasing) If you have a character named Tom he probably won't come from the same town as someone named Jerly'ndraical because it just doesn't make sense, for continuity and such.

[Johnny Cosmo]

Unless it's has multi-cultural community, like many places do...

[jackitsu]

Very true. Cities you have way more leeway, or anywhere else you have a more melting pot atmosphere. Anywhere sort of closed off from the world, xenophobic, elite societies (etc etc) with few people leaving or coming then I would say its likely they'd have similarish names.

[Ophiucha]

Depends on the story, mostly. Sometimes I do just enough conlanging that I can make up words in the language, and I come up with names from that. Usually based on names from another culture. Like, the conlang could be a pseudo-Russian derivative, and the names can all be transliterated from Arabic or something. Usually I only do this if the story has two+ cultures as its model (if it's only one, I'll probably just use real names - or at least words - from that culture).

[pskelding]

Take a walk through the phone book, there's soo many cool real names that you can use. Or mix up 2 or 3 letters in a real name and get a cooler new name!

[Hans]

Building on the discussion on naming everything, how do you go about creating original fantasy names for characters?

What are your favorite resources or tips for coming up with unique fantasy names?

Depending on the region where that name is from I usually have some ideas how it should sound like. My usual approach then is to get some suggestions from a password generator (aptly named APG) and work from there.

A often used tool in the German worldbuilder community is a program called Kwegbalze. (You can google it. The name is pretty unique.) It currently is rewritten as Lyreword, but Lyreword hasn't seen a release yet.

[Shadoe]

For my last story - yes, fantasy, taking place on another planet - I had the following character names through the entire writing process: Armstrong, Dietz, Herman, Harmon, Smith, Jones, Ken, and Zelda. I didn't get around to giving them "real" names until after I'd finished editing.

[Digital_Fey]

I have this weakness for names ending in -an, -in and -en...no idea why. Usually my mind tends to generate names by stringing together syllables that I like, but when that fails I just grab a book of Celtic or Norse mythology and go through the index. The Mabinogion is particularly good with long lists of names that have no characters attached to them at all. Sometimes a bit of tweaking is necessary, but I find that a good starting point.