Article:
The Naming of the Dead

Names are a very personal thing and can come from anywhere. Naming a character can take time, craftsmanship and a keen grasp of social dynamics. It usually doesn't, but it can. If I'm playing in a campaign game it can take me a couple of hours to come up with a name I'm happy with. On the other hand, one of my players once named his character Barry after a plant he was cultivating, which later died.

As the GM though, you're occasionally going to have to come up with a whole bunch of names quickly. You can get your names from any one of a million sources, from random web generators to books, films or your own imagination. Personally, my method is to get out a map-book and open it at a random page, there you'll find a wealth of names of all varieties and most are actually real names in the real world somewhere.

For bonus credits, use a map of somewhere relevant to the game in hand, that way some of the names will have local relevance.

That works for family names and a lot of the time will give you first names too. Though I fall back on simplicity for first names, the simpler the better. In my games a lot of the NPCs will have simple and more importantly easy-to-remember first names. Eric, Bob, Ted, Kate, Michael, Sam and Elizabeth are all easy possibilities and quite common. I generally pick a letter of the alphabet and go with the first name I can think of starting with that letter.

My personal hatred of overly complicated names in both sci-fi and fantasy books has led me to vomit copiously on many an occasion and so I tend to favour names that I can pronounce and pronounce easily. Although the two are extremes, you're more likely to meet "Stan the DragonWalloper" in one of my games than "X'ach'al'cen Ryyiyyg'ax of Hunters Frosted Dagon-Angst-Bane, Prime Bonecasted Fleshwarrior of Gon'ee" in my games.

Map Books. Make a note, there'll be a test at the end.

There are of course, exceptions. One of my personal rules was born out of desperation and has now gone into being a tradition in almost all of the games that I GM.

If you have heard of the name before, they are going to die.

What was a cheap and easy method for naming a huge bunch of characters I needed that I knew were not going to live beyond the prologue went down so well that I now keep my eyes open for pre-doomed characters and name them after a famous actor or actress or writer or somebody of that ilk.