Special NPC Names
 

Those special NPCs and their names, where you want to put the players in the correct mindset upon meeting them.

NPCs who require a rather bland, milquetoast or otherwise comedic name without just being gross or Pythonesque (like Smoketoomuch, etc)...

Blander Grovelbeck
Phineas Blent
Thaddeus Ghreem
Morris Fuddrake
Duncan Plook
Sir Bentley Floodbottom



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Arven Darven...

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I used to game with a guy who named someone in every campaign - always a bad guy - "Darkstar". It was like clockwork. He finally stopped after one campaign in which my character simply sniped the guy called Darkstar as soon as we'd identified him.

One of my friends always has a helpful (but sometimes problematic one way or another) character in his games; this character is always called by some variation on the name "Tim" (Timothy, etc.). The first campaign I was ever in with him, my character actually ran Timothy over with an SUV (killed him) upon meeting him (well, he did shoot at me with a Mac-10).

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< laughs >


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I had a player who, whenever we'd play Fantasy, would make a mage named Balthazar. Always.
My brother-in-law always names his "run-in-guns-blazing-get-your-friend-shot-in-the-buttocks" trigger-happy character Simon Judge. On the other hand, it's always good to have one of those hanging around.

I have a "recurring" scientist named "Sarah Westmorland." She's always a biochemist, and about a third of the time she's evil, a third of the time she's innocent, and the last third of the time, she's "just doing her job."

I use Lee Chaolan (his name, and likeness from Tekken) as a regular major badguy. MonkeyFist has told me that the next time Duncan sees the guy, he's going to kill him outright claiming past experience in multiple dimensions as precedent for it.

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This thread reminds me of the MST3K treatment of "Space Mutiny."

<incedently one of the WORST SciFi Films OF ALL TIME>

The bots are coming up with alternatives to the "hunky" name the hero was burdened with by the "writers"....

IIRC...Dirk McBeefSlab, Iron Thighzine, Rip Fistly, Hunk Manmuffin, etc, etc, etc

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I'm glad I'm not the only one. I was surprised at how many they came up with.

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Great my wizard has a new list of aliases (?)....

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We put our faith in BLAST HARDCHEESE!

I got introduced to that episode thanks to a youtube video. "Top 10 MST3K lines." Most were kinda "ehh," then they got to number one. Over a minute of names. I was laughing so hard...

Think my favorite was Big McLargeHuge.

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I occasionally have a barbarian warrior named THUNDERCLES show up in my games. (And yes, his name is spelled with all caps)

For a while I was using "Nils Borgenthal" as a generic NPC name, until one of them became an important enough character than I decided to retire the name.

One of my favorite recurring characters, though, is Stinky Muldoon, a six-foot tall ferret who occasionally shows up in dungeon crawls with his pushcart of used (and only sometimes lightly cursed) magic items.

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A lot of times I give characters names from various books. Textbook appendices are very good for this, as are dedications. As long as it's someone fairly obscure. No "Good morning. My name is Ray Bradbury." "Oh, really?"

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I went to school with a Brad Rayberry. I was too young to get it at the time.

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War is my profession
War is my obsession
I like nothing better than a violent intercession
Rivers of blood deep enough to wade in
While I hear the lamentations of my conquered foe's women
War is good for me!
What's my name?
THUNDERCLES!

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I occasionally have an Inacio at some point in a campaign, he can be an NPC ally, or one of the major NPC villains, but he's usually a pretty normal acting guy who tends to make friends with the PCs and just happens to be able to do some pretty serious juju, regardless of whether or not he's a villain. Might also be named Ignacius, Iggy, Iggie, Ignacio, Ig, etc., depending on the campaign.
Makes for some interesting party dynamics when the PCs decide that their buddy Inacio is up to no good, or perhaps knows more than he lets on.

I also use Rafael, Bruno and Lucille/Lucia/Lucas/Luke/Lucy/Lu on a regular basis, Rafaels are the fast willowy types, Brunos are the fast powerful types, Lucilles are the past baggage types, usually swordsmen, but on occasion mages and such too. As they get older they often become Patrons to the the next generation of PCs.

Rufus and Lenny/Leo/Leonardo are trader types, with Rufus tending to be the merchant prince type and Lenny tending to be the slickster on the corner selling hot merchandise. Though Rufus might just be starting out and still be selling cut-rate armor and Lenny might have gotten older and taken over the local criminal underworld, or even gone straight, bought a patent of nobility and taken over the local city or duchy.

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We made up a name for a tough guy mercenary leader rival to the PCs in a Traveller game. He never actually was used in the game; it was more a bit of satirical cliche: "Giddeon Stryker". (Probably gets played by Michael Ironside.)

I used the textbook author strategy once in desperation. Turned out the player had used the same text in college, and so he was continually bugged by this odd sense of familiarity to the names of these two crewmen, despite the fact he'd never met them before. Just can't quite place where I've heard those names...

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I'm really bad at coming up with names (takes me forever) so I will often, ahem, borrow names from books.

For example I once played a wizard names Ponder Stibbons. (Who was nothing like the one in the book.)

Or else I will fail my self control roll and go with a pun.

Which is how I came to play a half-orc barbarian/sorcerer called Bad JuJu. (Well actually that wasn't his name, when asked he would say "People ask me my name, I tell them people call me Bad JuJu." None of the other player ever figured out that he was telling them that Bad JuJu was a pseudonym, they also never figured out he could read and write. Oh, and he had almost as much charisma as the party's Paladin.)

(Ponder and JuJu were from an old D&D 3.0 - 3.5 game.)

When GMing I try to keep the punning to a minimun but I just had to try this one in a game; 'Signora Rosabella De Palma', owner and Madam of "La Cinque Figlie".


Charleson Mambo

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That's a good one they missed, right there.

"Flint Ironstag" is the name of a dwarf NPC I've got set up in my fantasy game. I expect most of my players will assume it's a Dragonlance reference.


My favorite name on that episode was Bolt Vanderhuge.

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A few years back, my friends and I all created identical-looking half-orcs for a D&D 3.0 game being run at our FLGS. We used identical miniatures, with a different number on the front of the tunic for identification (mine was #6) and each character had a different trait -- one was a glutton, one was a coward, etc.

My character -- a sorcerer/bard -- was a major-league snooze-meister...which led to the frequently-heard comment "Somebody wake up Six."

I tend to draw my NPC names from various books and movies. I don't use an obvious one...no Navy SEALS named Thomas Magnum will make an appearance, for example. But I have no qualms at all in naming an Air Force fighter pilot as "Captain J.G. Williams" (The Last Chase) or a submarine commander "Commander Dwight Towers" ("On the Beach").

Some of my regular players have made a minor hobby of trying to track down the source of the names I use...

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"I keep this handy for CLOSE Encounters."

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The standard NPC name in our games somehow ended up being Jarvik. Can't think of a name for a random NPC? Jarvik! We used it for two years before we realized that we'd unintentionally swiped it from an Eddings book.

I like to come up with names, though, so I generally keep a list for my husband's (DM's) use as he creates his NPCs. So far, the list includes
Illustara
Tallia
Reyan Treeshade
Blanegh
Corisillerethmariell (random elf name, it always gets shortened to Cori, for some reason)
just to name a few.

I like going through old-fashioned names for character names, too. There's nothing like a family tree for exotic names. Deleker, Marzella, etc.

Of course, if you're going with a group, themes are fun. A group of mercenaries can go by their group nicknames. Void, Oblivion, Six, etc. A group of clerics can go by names that illustrate virtues or aspects of their faith. For example, clerics of Loviatar could go by Lash, Razor, and any variety of pseudo-punk names.

My favorite ever was a random thief that always seemed to get herself smeared first in any encounter, identified or not. We ended up naming her Kinney.

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When I was in school, a friend had an Asian character (IIRC, a magic user -- this was ADnD 2e) named -- ahem -- Hu Flung Pu.

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No match for the great martial artist -- Hung Lo.

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Huang Chung and Hao Long tend to make it into my campaigns somewhere (Hao Long is invariably some kind of tailor as well...)

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I have recurring dwarf noble npc called Toiler Blunderhead.

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Well, then there's always the brothels where you find Phuc Nu, Lo Dong, Thi Hoa, not to mention the Suc sisters Truc and Long.

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In my X-com campaign, anticipating a high body count, I asked the players to do another character for them to assume if/when their PC died:

One of the backup chars names was Justin Case.

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One Hung Lo and his friend Fa Qu Tu...

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The James Bond franchise has the best example of misogynistic (probably depends on who you talk to http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q...=Google+Search ) female names out there.

Miss Onatopp or something like that. My favorite is Plenty O'Toole :)



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Not ***** Galore?

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Or Holly Goodhead, Mary Goodnight, Kissy Suzuki and Honey Rider?

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You must be dreaming ;)






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Many of our evil wizards, mad scientists, Hannibal Lecters or cloistered vampire lords have a misshapen minion named Vygoslav. He's a bit like Igor except he knows he's ugly and takes it with an awkward optimism.

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I've got a few 'special' names I keep in reserve, for the 'throwaway' characters, although I'll use them for important characters sometime, just to trip the players up:

The renowned scientist, Sara Bellum

The Baron leChristler

A Native American electrician, Many Hands. (Many Hands makes light work.)

The party-animal Dwarf, Bjorn, Bjornson

Billgatti of Bjorg (From an IOU campaign where IKEA ended up buying out Microsoft, I decided to keep the name floating around.)

Sun Yu, Marcus Hella, and The Great Hooda, three mages from antiquity, mostly forgotten except for the spell of identification that bears their names. (You may need to think about this one for a moment.)


And then there's always the rich resource of the Hercules/Xena shows, plenty of fun names there.

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I seem to have a case that's similar, but very much not reoccurring... Sam.

For such a common name, you'd think it would show up more often. But it doesn't. Mainly because after the first appearance, it was universally considered that the name was cursed...

It was a nice dark-fantasy setting, full of dangerous monsters, unpleasant governments, and general all-around nastiness. Sam was a farmer. His family had a sword (And a couple other weapons) and a set of mail that belonged to his father, back when he spent some time as a mercenary. So he "borrowed" them (Without permission) and sought out these great adventuring heroes he'd been hearing (Much inflated) stories about. Much-inflated thanks to a particularly loud-mouthed braggard in the group who liked to embelish his tales.

So this farmer, with no combat experience at all, approaches them, tells them how much he looks up to them and what they do (They're one of the few powerful groups of people who don't just bully around the peasantry! That's almost unheard of!), and wants to join them. They take him on, without even figuring out that he's never done anything like this before.

Sam has a harsh and altogether short life.

He gets beat about on the first few fights. Nothing serious, but not too pleasant, either.

He runs from the minor god Defiler with the rest of the group, after taking a nice face-full of mind-blasting telepathic horror that left him quaking in place, only to have the massive, horrific being look at him (A stunned, terrified man with a sword), then turn to fight a different person (The psionic in the lizardman body with magical artifacts). And when he does become active again, and runs past Defiler to get away, it swings at him and misses! The terror leaves him with a new delusion: "Demons can't hurt me!" After all, there was no way he could have survived if it could, right?

This is later "confirmed" when the group's mage accidentally summons a demon while casting magic (One of the dozen or more times he's done so), who beats about several members but doesn't manage to hit Sam, as well as when they fight a "corrupted" black dragon, who spends so much time chewing (Literally) on one member of the group that it doesn't have the time to lay into Sam, despite him standing in shock just a couple yards away from the giant creature. After fighting the dragon, he was starting to think his protection must extend past just demons. He wasn't just some farmer with a sword, in the company of heroes, he was a hero himself, and a blessed one at that!

Sam died soon after this, naturally. It happened when the group awoke a half-dozen steel golems in a room that sealed itself around them. He heroicly faced off against the steel golems, only to be cut down as fast as one would expect a unskilled man facing several tons of animated steel. And as if that wasn't bad enough, his bleeding body was incinerated when the mage used enough fast-fire to melt not just the golems, but the stone floor they were on (And nearly cooking another party member in the process).

The group all took this as a warning. Don't play a Sam.

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Something similar, is a small barony located in a corner of my campaign maps, a small barony called Greymatter.

It exists for the sole purpose (mostly, never had an adventure get near it yet) of allowing me to have a PC officially dubbed Baron of Greymatter.

(Semi off topic since it is a PC title, but it fits in with the theme of 'special' names.)

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I tried to make an elf cook named Falafiel once, but my GM wouldn't allow it. I never get to do anything fun... :(

A friend has made a troll pornstar (for a Shadowrun campaign) named Pierce Pole

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A friend of mine named a character Long Wang and giggled like mad until I pointed out that it, in fact, meant Dragon King. Then it wasn't funny anymore, but cool, and he was sad. Mission accomplished ^_^

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Why would that reduce its amusement?, if anything it should make it funnier.

He was playing the Dragon King, known to all as Long Wang....

I usually know what most of the names I'm using mean and the funniest ones are when we can get multiple meanings out of them, with the funniest and most fun ones being the raunchy double entendres.

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exactly...

I named it King, as in "When I've got my shorts off...I'm draggin' King"


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From a group that I joined only briefly...

any time a generic friendly NPC is needed (someone to guard a prisoner while the PCs go out investigating, etc.) the man for the job is Reg Hurt.

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Not "Ma Dickey"?

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My players tell me the two most memorable NPCs were:

Timmy

and

Guy

Its funny when last minute, "quick create an NPC" characters become the ones that the players like the most.

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or is it "Mad Ickey"?