Photo by Gioele Fazzeri on Unsplash
I've always been fascinated by the power and meaning of names. Probably something to do with reading Ursula LeGuin's Earthsea trilogy at a young age.
It's interesting to see how players name their characters, and how DM's name their NPC's. There are a huge number of ways to come up with names; familiar ordinary names, names from mythology, invented names that just sound cool, descriptive names, and names mashed together from bits of other names.
But one of my favourite ways to create unusual names can be especially fun and subversive. I use Google Translate.
To do this I'll come up with a concept, then put it into Translate and scroll through a bunch of languages until something pops up that I like the sound of. A bit of experimentation and artistic license can come in useful.
Sometimes, I will just use the name as it comes out, for example in the name of a ship the players gained access to (UK readers of a certain age might get the reference....)
For a sorcerer, I had to play about a little bit. The character's backstory is that he was the youngest son of one of the most notable mages in town, eager to prove his worth. I started out with the term "junior spellslinger" but it didn't really give me anything I liked, so I tinkered with the words until Czech came up with something I liked the sound of;
In one case Google Translate didn't do very well with the original word I entered ("hobo"), but when I switched it to "tramp", Yiddish gave me a name which, with a slight amount of editing, I thought was fabulous;
Thus was Mordshlepper the Barbarian born; it was several months before the party worked out what his name meant, although his conduct should have given them a few clues.....