Instant Names: the One-Letter Trick
This trick is really too simple to even mention, but when I bring it up at games I’m always surprised that people don’t know it, so I’ll record it for posterity.
Say you’re stumped coming up with a name for a character in your average fantasy / sci-fi / not-modern-day-Earth setting. Here’s what you do:
1) Take a normal name
2) Change or drop one letter
Done.
Robert becomes Rolert, Rubert, Obert, or Roberi
Frank becomes Brank, Urank or Frunk (half-orcs in the house, yo)
William becomes Illiam, Willia, Welliam, or Wixliam
And so on.
Try it. If you pick random letters you may get unattractive results (like Zrank… hmm, maybe that one isn’t so bad after all) but with a minimum of effort you can weed out losers and score good names. You can use this trick as a GM trying to brand random NPCs on the fly, or as a player struggling to find a good character name. If you’re the GM, don’t tell anyone this is what you’re doing — it’ll just distract everyone.
You’ll be surprised how quickly names look nothing like their original version. If a name does look too much like the original you probably want to ditch it so it doesn’t break the mood (Jonathan => Jomathan might be too close). If you wind up with a homophone ditch it and try again (Bill and Byll look different but sound the same, so no go).
Changing the first letter or a major vowel will usually have the most impact. Linguists can step in at this point, but I suspect you’ll get the biggest results by altering letters in the emphasized syllable of the name — just a theory. You don’t need to worry about that, just experiment and trust what sounds good.
If one letter is not enough, you can go completely crazy and change two letters. You are now in the completely unexplored frontier of rapid name generation. You have been warned.
I am coming up with name of two primatologists for my game : Nova Taylor and Cesar Allgood (helps me to remember who they are).
Another one I’ve found, particularly good for elves a lot of the time but perfectly valid elsewhere, is reversal. Take a person’s name, or a day of the week, or an astrological sign, or pretty much anything (heck, pick a random word out of the dictionary), and turn it backwards. As with the change-a-letter trick, you’ll probably wind up with a ton of duds on the face of it, but grab enough random words, and you’ll get some good ideas.
For more otherworldish names (for elves or demons, perhaps), try stuff like reversing someone’s full name, and putting an apostrophe in the space (as an example, Dave Grohl turns into Lhorg’evad). If you don’t quite like it, try moving the apostrophe.
If you don’t work with your players in real life, use co-workers’ names, or people you went to school with in previous lives. If that person’s first name happened to be Mark, change it to Markus or something along that line. Simple.