Onomasticon Quernorum

Or; On the Names of the Quernfolk

A Wennish penny pamphlet pithily titled 'an unbelievable account of the atrocious apparitional attack on a sleeping and sickly Miss Dyedred by the headless bear demon 'Old Bossbelow' and her noble defense by Mistress Sharpday, Miss Arena Palatine, Jonwith Middlestone, Harque the Younger, Master Winwalloe and the Magic-User Lakelie'  

I have previously written how understanding of the cultures of your setting can be impressed on, and implied to, players via the personal trinkets and pocket loot of NPCs that belong to those cultures. I used my personal setting of The Querns to explore this idea and did some implied world-building by detailing several cultures in this way. In this post, I will be giving names to the owners of those pockets. I will be sharing some lists of names, over 900 in fact, which have been divided by culture and gender, I will also give some more thoughts on creating names and state the obvious: when it comes to building a culture; names are very important. 

Recently, I have had names on the brain. In my post morpheme+word+epithet, (which has proved quite popular) I shared the eponymous formula for making an interesting name. This method works well for individuals but what if I need a great many names to build out a specific culture? 

In the document below I have given names to six, mostly distinct, cultures. In addition to this list I had a whole spiel written explaining my thought processes and inspiration for each of the culture's naming styles. You're not that interested, so I've cut it all down and summed it up here. (I lied, it grew bigger in the writing)

• Firstly, and most certainly, the use of a distinct set of phonetic sounds within a cultural naming style is beneficial to create cohesive list of names. The Skith like the morphemes 'ooq' and '-anaa for example and like Ganthic Wennish have a favoured initial.
• That said, using real words in names by way of creating some commonly occurring suffixes or prefixes is a useful (and I believe superior) name-writing technique. These are actual words, not random phonemes. Creating compound names in this way imparts a feeling of cultural cohesion among names and makes them memorable, flavourful and a little easier to pronounce at the same time. Many historic and modern names have the origins in this.
• Use words from the language you use to game with in the names you write, this provides tone and character that a made up set of sounds with no definitional baggage can struggle to do. The Wennish and Ald names are my examples for this.
• Indeed, Conlanging can only get you so far in rpgs. Yeah, it is better to go for sound rather than meaning, graceful sounding words for a graceful people etc. Players who can't speak your conlang may not realize the villain is called 'Devil-lord-evil' so they won't feel the same impact as if he were actually called 'Deville Lourdeval'. Tolkien understood; it's Samwise Gamgee, not Banazîr Galpsi 😉. 
• Using simple words on their own works too but won't work for every culture. If a character is called 'Bed' his name will continue to colour his character even as it is repeated to the point of becoming a legitimate name rather than something to sleep on. 
• It's absolutely fine to copy and paste from historical sources, I did for the Ald much like Tolkien did for the people of Rohan but neither of us have characters called Athelstan or Ethelred. Go for obscurer names and make up others that sound right - no Remus in your list of not-Roman names. 
• You want names to sit in the sweet spot of relatable but fantastic. The Wennish names are meant to have a 'English' feel but with a twinge of oddity. 
• Don't ever take from a single culture, mix it up. 
• When taking inspiration from the real world, try to make up as many names as you take. Get a feeling for the sounds and styles you like and start writing your own. I did this for the Ald and Skith. The latter have origins in Siberian Turkic languages, Tibetan, Old Uyghur and the the names of ancient steppe people such as the Scythians.
• Likewise, you might want to rewrite historic names to an easier or more consistent phonic spelling or to better fit the overall cultural sound you are going for. 
• If trying to ape a cultural sound, it is also perfectly acceptable to use vocabulary from other languages. If doing so, follow the same advice as if you were using historical names. 
• Be careful with pronunciation, read the names out as you write them, several times and in different ways that one could logically read them. They might be too difficult to say during play or sound sillier than they may look written down. 
• Be very, very, very, very careful with apostrophes.
• You are allowed to ignore or break all of the above rules, I did with the Skith names. For example he 'Xj' phoneme is common and popular among the Skith, It is pronounced as the IPA symbol ʐ - the 'voiced retroflex fricative' - an uncommon sound. Their names are complicated or unusual and use apostrophes. I did this all on purpose for a particular purpose. 
• Be flavourful. Names encompass so many aspects of a culture that I can't list them all here. Think about what a name might mean if you are conlanging them, using real words or not. I did this for the all the names on each list. I hope you may feel a sense of repression and resistance in the Ald names. 
• Go weirder; The longer Gnathic names have an onomatopoeic quality. 
• Don't worry if you haven't gone weird enough and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
• Don't use ChatGPT, they're not very good and it's better to use your creativity, it's a muscle.

What do you do? What are your thoughts on creating names for RPG characters? Please comment, I really enjoy this stuff. But now, on with the names;

Another Wennish penny pamphlet titled 'The Mightily True Report of Sergeant Bov Pangweather's victory over the hulking Aldish Birch-Crone known as Jennie Snatchelflynda and her dread-familiar who some call Black Froggebighter'. 

Here are the names, presented without any expository information, with the names themselves and the contents of their pockets, the reader should have a good feeling for these cultures already. Settings are better when implied and I wouldn't want to spoil anything.  

This post was written for Words! Linguistics, Etymology and Onomatology for July's RPG Blog Carnival. 

'WORDS! Etymology, Onomatology and Linguistics' - A Blog Carnival Call-to-Arms!

Canto II, Tom Phillips, 1981

This July I will be stepping-in to host the RPG Blog Carnival. The premise is simple: create a piece of RPG content in-keeping with the month's theme by July 31st, 2024, link to it in the comments below, and at the end of the month I'll curate a spotlight post, linking to your site and writing about your content. Last year, I hosted the Carnival with the theme 'Anthropology and Archaeology' and it was rather successful, I'm hoping my second attempt will equal or surpass it. So, as July's host, I have chosen the theme 'WORDS! - Etymology, Onomatology & Linguistics'. Let's refresh our definitions via Merriam-Webster before getting to some prompts:

Linguistics: 

- The study of human speech including the units, nature, structure, and modification of language.

Onomatology (see Onomastics): 

- The science or study of the origin and forms of proper names of persons or places 

Etymology: 

- The history of a linguistic form (such as a word) shown by tracing its development since its earliest recorded occurrence in the language where it is found, by tracing its transmission from one language to another, by analyzing it into its component parts, by identifying its cognates in other languages, or by tracing it and its cognates to a common ancestral form in an ancestral language

Language families by Bosman Bos of the Border Baronies

As themes go, 'Etymology, Onomatology, Linguistics' is broad and can be summed up simply as 'WORDS!'. These themes lend themselves well to world-building and RPG theory. The central challenge running through these prompts is to consider what makes words in RPGs both 'interesting' and 'purposeful'. While many prompts ask you to detail words from your current or previous campaigns or worlds, you could also use them as a springboard to create a new setting or as inspiration for tables and generators, this what I find the prompt is leading me toward. 

Questions and Prompts:

Here are some potential topics to get you thinking before the carnival begins:

Toponyms

• What makes for a good RPG toponym? A good place name? Have you thought etymologically about place names? What are the toponym's origins and how did the name shift and change over time? Are the best place names in roleplaying, clear and evocative, are they more fantastic with a weird verisimilitude or somewhere in between? Where do you fall on the spectrum of place names? Are your towns more 'White River' or 'Lililingburlingan of the Sacroline Spire'? and why?
• Similarly, how do you name geographic features? What are the natural wonders of your world called? What about other planets, stars or fantastic celestial bodies? Is there a generator you could make for such names?
• What of your setting's nations, communities or collectives? What are their names (endochoronyms)? Why? And what are the (formal and informal) demonyms of their inhabitants? What are their exonyms?

Names, Names, Names

• How could you impart a sense of a particular culture via their personal names and naming conventions? A certain vibe is easy to achieve when creating names for a familiar culture with a familiar language (such as with hobbits) but can become trickier when dealing with deliberately foreign cultures.
• Do you have a list of spare names for NPCs? What is your thinking behind the names? Are the names naturalistic, cultural, gonzo, aptronymic or charactonymic? Is your knight called Sir Spear, Sir Chivalrous, Sir Bob, Sir Fuck-Vampires Flyingburger or Sir Eldo Serindal?
• Who are some of the mononyms of your world? People so famous, so iconic and with such a unique moniker, that they are known by a single name, such as Plato, Napoleon, Hitler, Jesus.
• Likewise, what about eponyms? Are certain places, spells, monsters, animals, plants or peoples named after an individual?
• What is the autoethnonym of orcs or any other 'monstrous' folk in your setting and what does that word mean?
• What makes for good monster names? Which is the better name, Hideous Ropey Snatcher Beast or Spitzlgangler? Or will the players just call it a grabby guy?
• If your game features political groups what are their politonyms and what are their origins?
• What can you do if you know a demon's true name, or anyone's true name for that matter?
• Make a zoonym generator for your setting focusing on the taxonomic name of the beast and from that extrapolating its stats and characteristics.
• Chrononyms are the names of historic periods, what are the names of the historic periods in your setting and why do they have that name?
• Epithets are great.
• How could your players gain epithets? Would there be special rules around gaining an epithet?
• Old school DnD classes gained a title each level, could you rewrite these titles to better reflect your game world or cultures within your game world?

Conlangs

• Dare you descend into the conlang rabbit hole? Do you dare become the DM who says to their patient players; "no, no, no it's pronounced 'bhänüt' not banût"
• Would you like to try designing your own alphabet or syllabry?
• Toki Pona is an art project micro-language, it has 137 words, so it's not unimaginable that one could create their own micro-language in a month. Perhaps, to name just a few possibilities, your own thieves cant, druidic language, hermitic whisper-speech, arcane tongue or hyperborean slave creole. Additionally, how would you use your new language in game?
• Can you provide an outline of the evolution of the different language groups in your setting? Such as how many modern languages spread from Proto-Indo-European?

Language

• Does your setting have unique slang or phrases?
• Have historic events in your setting shaped or influenced the language and sayings of its inhabitants?
• Tell us about your setting's Lingua Franca and how it developed.
• What are considered slurs, pejoratives, swear or taboo words in your setting? What is the consequence for saying them?
• The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis suggests that language influences perception and thought. This can have some interesting implications for fictional settings that might want to push the idea. How does the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis interact with fantasy languages such as Elven or Black Speech and in turn how does speaking those languages affect a person?
• The Himba people's perception of colour is supposedly influenced by their language. In a fantasy or science fiction world, we can push this notion much further: for example, what if a society's language has many words for magic?
• What of non-human linguistics? How do non-human species in your setting communicate? What are the linguistic quirks and unique language structures of those species?
• Let's not neglect science-fiction. What future words, personal names and slang have developed in your future world?

Miscellaneous, Meta and Theory

• What are your thoughts on the language of RPGs on a meta, player facing level? What makes good vocabulary for the mechanics, rules and processes of a game? How do your players use language? How did they name the things they encounter?
• How should rules for learning new languages work?
• What happens if a character is not fluent in a language or only knows a few words?
• What happens if you read aloud an unknown eldritch language rule such as Aklo or an extract from the Necronomicon?
• Speaking of Aklo, could words themselves present a material threat? Sentient languages, memetic viruses, weaponized language and how would you rule those concepts in-game?
• Do have have particular favorite names that your players have named their characters?
• When world building, how do decide what deserves unique onymony? Does it benefit or confuse players whether their characters hear the peel of larks or of Velvety Spi spis? Or whether the tavern serves salted peanuts or salted jingandra seeds?

Your contributions are eagerly awaited and, thank you in advance for engaging in the RPG Blog Carnival.

The RPG Blog Carnival has been running since 2008 and helped to foster community and interconnectedness in RPG blogs. Check it out and consider participating in other months or even hosting yourself, it's not much of a commitment at all. 

Name Generator: Morpheme+Word+Epithet

Who are these fellas and what are their names? Groupe de sorciers by Lucas Roussel

Millions of names!

Each name is made of three parts. A made-up morpheme, an English word and an epithet or honorific. The names are drawn from lists I wrote; there are 335 morphemes, 345 words and 311 epithets/honorifics. I use words rather than another set of immediately meaningless morphemes for a few reasons: 

• Words colour the name, if the name has ‘cruel’ in it, the name instantly gives a hint to the character (but sometimes it just gives an interesting sound) in a very pulpy way that should be embraced.  

• Words make the name a little quicker to read, the brain picks out the second word; so ‘Zhongcried’ is that much quicker to read and then physically pronounce than a random collection of phonemes like ‘Ibquneche’.

• Along with epithets, words add a touch more memorability to a name for your players. If you generate something alliterative or with some assonance, all the better!

Of course, not all characters should have a name that fits these conventions, though these  principles can be quite effective. If a name is generated and the 'epithet' is in brackets it is an honorific and should be read before the name, not after. For example 'Ozdog (Master)' should be read as Master Ozdog.

Thanks to Paper Elemental for their clever html generator generator which I used for this post and for the Archons March On blog whose many numerous generators inspired me to give it a go myself. 

Click Generate for your name:

Click for the raw lists