How do you name things in your campaigns?

[fredtheobviouspseudonym]

If I make an interesting typo I save it.

For example, I was typing in haste and wrote "Thursday" as "Thonsdry." I liked the sound of it and felt it would do for an English name from the old Danelaw area or for a Scandinavian character.

Also, some of the "Find the word in the jumble" games in newspapers can come up with an unusual list of consonants -- add a few vowels and you've got something.

[Peter Knutsen]

Originally Posted by fredtheobviouspseudonym

For example, I was typing in haste and wrote "Thursday" as "Thonsdry." I liked the sound of it and felt it would do for an English name from the old Danelaw area or for a Scandinavian character.

If you were making a Danelaw or other Norse character for my Ärth setting, I'd veto that name unless you can document its authenticity. I'm not asking for much; Onomastikon or any culture RPG source is fine (even the AD&D Historical supplement on the Vikings - if it has a list of names, I'd accept most if not all of its names as "legit").

But "Thonsdry" doesn't sound authentic to me at all. Then again, if you had been making a Persian character, or a Nubian character, let alone a character from Vinland, using that method, I probably wouldn't have had the intuition (or whatever it should be called) to veto such a names. I'd have to look it up, or just shrug and go with the flow and accept it.

But sometimes what sounds right to someone not so well versed in the past is wrong. One player making a Jewish character for my Ärth setting picked a German-type name for his character, something ending in -stein, because that's what he thought Jewish names were like. But, dude, that's present-day Jewish names. It's not gonna fly in the 10th century. Pick something from the old Old Testament, or a local name.

Variations over existing names are often fine, though. Most people couldn't read and even those who could often didn't "think in letters" (even in the medieval period, many clerks probably still couldn't read without moving their lips). A name, to them, was a sound, a combination of sounds, not a series of letters like my p, e, t, e, r (when I first came across the English word "soft ice", as a small child, I understood it as "sof-dais"). Small changes, mutations, can happen. A child named after his grandfather who was named after his grandfather might well not have the exact same name as the original guy 120 years earlier.

Modern names are also sometimes perfectly okay, if they can be documented. TvTropes has the AerithAndBob trope for works in which strange names appear next to contemporary names, but often the past was like that. I've got a Mae NPC in my Ärth setting, a Briton. Her full name is the more exotic Maelona, but everybody calls her "Mae". And I'd like to throw in an Irish "Oscar" somewhere, but I haven't yet decided where.

But I think that to achieve a proper "not in Kansas no more"-ambience, to help the players understand that their characters are actually in a world, the vast majority of names need to be foreign.