Lore Building: What's in a Name?

You are reading Lore Building, in this series I lay out some tips and tricks for aspiring and new GMs for how to keep your TTRPG sessions more engaging for your players, with a focus on narrative storytelling.

If you GM more than, let’s call it three campaigns, you have certainly been here. A player who is engaged and enjoying your world starts talking to a random NPC on the street, and asks their name. And in that moment the flow of the game is broken as you just… freeze. You’ve written out a hundred names for every major villain and ally through this potentially years-long adventure, but not for this one singular NPC. So, after far too long you blurt out “Bob Hoskins” because you just rewatched Who Framed Roger Rabbit last week (which holds up better than you expected it to.) After the party is done giggling, and at least one of them has to google the name, they all start talking to Mr. Hoskins. Over time he morphs from a funny moment to a main character of your campaign. Indignity upon indignity ensues, and suddenly Mario himself (the good one, come at me) is delivering a heartfelt speech about ending the archdevil’s reign of terror on the eve of a battle that will claim the lives of half of the party members. And every time you say his name, a little piece of immersion is broken, a little reminder that this character was named after an actor who passed away over a decade ago.

Extremely specific and not in any way real example aside, it can break immersion when you have a name that doesn’t fit in with the rest of your world. If you are playing a more comedic game this can be a benefit. Even the most serious of campaigns can stand to have some metatextual levity. But let’s assume for the purposes of this article you didn’t want a pop culture reference to become a central figure of your campaign. In this case you need to have a list of readily available NPC names. If you only take away one piece of advice from this entire article let it be this. Have a list of NPC names handy. Just having a few masculine, feminine, and gender non-specific names on a piece of paper on hand could save you so much mental effort in the moment to moment gameplay. Half of preparing for the session as a GM is about reducing the mental load you will have to bear during gameplay. And rolling once on the “Barbarian Names” table to select “Crag Thundertooth” is less than a quarter the effort it would take to come up with that name on the spot.

But enough about bad names, I want to focus on what makes up a good name. A good name should have two main qualities, it should Sound Right, and Be Informative. These are seemingly obvious categories, but they have a surprising amount of detail to unpack. But if you manage to nail both rules you will have a Grade A NPC name on your hands.

Sounding right is a very nebulous concept, and often the harder of the two to nail down. For a name to sound right it must be easy to say for you and/or the players at your table. That isn’t to say you can’t name your frog-alien warrior-monk “Virdaj Qu’elmiraz.” But if you do, you may consider offering up “Daz” as a nickname to make everyone’s life easier. Practice saying the name out loud, and if it’s a tongue twister to you either change it or come up with a shortened version that is easier to use in conversation. Saying the name aloud will also help you with point two, be careful of homophones. “Phoq Michofte” the French-coded sorcerer is all well and good on the page, but saying it aloud will immediately inform you of your mistakes. And that’s the easy to spot and relatively benign example. I once made an NPC who’s name was dangerously close to sounding like a truly offensive term. I will not be saying it again as an example here. Suffice it to say after I introduced them to the players we all heard it. The NPC underwent an immediate name change and I felt a need to profusely apologize to the women in my play group. These are the more extreme examples, but even a character whose name sounds too much like an innocuous word can be derailing. Masked Votakos the rogue will inevitably be asked for “A side of gravy.” There is no escape for you once the homophone is discovered.

You can also run into trouble for words that aren’t actual homophones, but just sound kinda wrong. This is harder to know right away because you don’t have the corollary real word. But it is no less detrimental to you game. I’ll demonstrate with another totally fake example. “Smearran” sounds more like a dirty word than the surname of some important political dignitary. You wouldn’t necessarily know this immediately, since it doesn’t sound like any real word, but you better believe the second a player says “That sounds like it should be an innuendo doesn’t it?” your NPC is toast. Whatever they could have been, they are now the “Noble whose name kinda sounds like a sex act.” And within two sessions your players will have in character conversations about getting up to some smearran the night before.

The last pointer for getting your names to sound right bleeds into our second category (being informative) a little. You must make sure the name is the right one for that specific person. If I introduced a character as “Torque Meatfist” it would conjure a remarkably specific image in your head. likely one with a lot of thrash metal iconography and exaggerated muscles. So, unless you are intentionally subverting expectations by having Mx Meatfist be a tax accountant, you should lean into the image the name is giving you. If you ever have a player say “Every time you say that character’s name I have to pause for a moment and recall that they’re this tiny pixie, and not some giant monster.” That is a sign that the name may not accurately portray the character.

Getting a name to sound right is important in making a good name. But an informative name will separate the good names from the great names. Being informative is largely shorthand for ‘How does this name fit into, and expand, your lore and worldbuilding?’ While a good name sounds right for the character, a great name tells you who they are in the world. Take this line describing a monk from Terry Pratchett’s Guards! Guards! for example: “Brother Fingers was always the one sent out for takeaway food. It was cheaper. He'd never bothered to master the art of paying for things.” In three sentences you have learned so much detail about who Brother Fingers is, and quite a bit about the monastery he lives in as well. Brother Fingers is a gag character, only created for this joke, yet we learn that he has a history of petty theft so prolific that he kept or earned the moniker Fingers while actively being a member of a monastic order. We learn that in this city there are monasteries, that monks bear the title Brother, that this particular monastery has an easy going relationship with stealing food, and that it is situated in a large enough population center to have restaurants that do takeout orders (takeaway if you want to be all British about it.) It was actually in rereading this book that I decided to write this article. I found profundity in Pratchett’s ability to say so much about his world with a simple name.

You can apply a series of questions to your NPCs to really figure out how to achieve a similar effect in game. Think about the region they are from, what do people’s names sound like there? Maybe everyone in the town you are in has names that sound Germanic, and this NPC has a more Japanese name, as they are an immigrant from a distant country. (Side note, I swear if anyone uses this paragraph as an excuse to do a racist accent I will find you and punch you myself.) Think about lineages and families, maybe a bunch of dwarven NPCs have the same last name, because they are named for their clan rather than their direct parentage. Maybe a character is “the third”, or “the fourth”, proudly wearing a family legacy. Think about the history and culture of the region, maybe this character is named after an important saint in their religion. Maybe their name references a culturally significant piece of geography. Maybe they have an elvish surname, despite being an orc, because their father was part elven on his mother’s side. And lastly, think about what they choose to call themselves. Maybe they have a preferred name that isn’t their given name because they have a bad relationship with their family. Maybe they use a nickname because humanoids cannot physically speak the language of their species. Throwing these little details into an NPCs name, rooting them firmly in a culture and in your world, can elevate the immersion of your game significantly.

A lot of this is going to be specific to your worlds and how you choose to populate them, and this is where the list of names becomes extremely helpful. Having a list of names for a specific evil cult that the party is destined to come across means that you will not be caught flat footed when your players try to open a dialogue with the cult members instead of just fighting through them. I recommend anywhere from three to ten names for each major faction and/or region you expect your players to go to. You can also do this for premade NPCs. Let’s say you think at some point your players are going to want to interact with a blacksmith, an innkeeper, a town guard captain, and a travelling merchant. You can write up those characters' names with a little blurb about their personality and profession. Then when your players first say “I want to go to a blacksmith for a new shield” you can bring in the appropriate NPC regardless of what specific town they are in at the time. I like to call these “location agnostic” NPCs, and they are an excellent candidate for having a great name ready-made for them. One that will deepen your player’s immersion in the world and make you seem like a super prepared GM who has a full world ready for your players to explore.

I would like to end this article with the heaviest of disclaimers. While following these guidelines CAN be a useful method of naming your NPCs it certainly does not HAVE to be applied to all of your characters. Sometimes “Bob Hoskins” takes you out of the game, but other times he becomes a beloved NPC that you and your players will talk about for years. My personal favorite NPC I named in a panic was a Bone Devil with the voice of a cartoon hillbilly who I had to come up with a name for in the middle of a tense encounter. By the end of the campaign “Old Tom” was my favorite recurring character, eventually leaving when he stole the prophetic visions one of the players experienced to publish an almanac of the entirety of humanity’s history and future. His dumb name and silly voice having indelibly changed the entire campaign for the better. So when naming your characters I would recommend building deep wells of lore where you can, and having fun rolling with it when you can’t.