Advice/Help Naming your characters!

[ScatheAriiasqDrayceon]

Aight! Grab a dice and a random letter generator. Make sure to pick only consonants (or vowels, if you like).

I got a six, so apparently the world hates me.

Nab yourself 6 consonants.

W, P, X, V, K, and Z

Well, fuck, but whatever.

Arrange them how you think sounds good.

X-p-k-v-z-w

Xepkavzuw

Chop off what you don't want and add things.

X-p-k-v-z-n

Xepkavzen

Add appropriate number of apostrophes and/or hyphens.

Xe'Kavzen

Fiddle until you're happy

Keav'Xen

Keav'Xen.

(Key-ahv-szhen)

Ta-da!

 

[sopo]

meh, i just name something that looks good or aesthetic-

 

[ScatheAriiasqDrayceon]

Followup:

Granted, I do rp mostly in fantasy and don't care all that much for traditional names (I mean... come on, my main's name is Ariiasq (Aree-ash-k), and my secondary's is Arian, short for Ariavden). If you're rping a known culture, then pick a name that sounds just about right there, and if it's a fantasy race with speech impediments (looking at you, Orcs), take that into account.

But uh

Otherwise, my opinion is to go wild

 

[ShirenTheWitch]

What I like to do when choosing a character name is let the setting and time period guide my choices.

An example of this would be an OC I created for a Star Wars rp. Something like that gives you lots of room to play, which is both good and bad. But if you start to write out the names of existing characters, patterns start to emerge. I let those patterns influence my own imagination and just started stringing letters together until I found something I liked. The name was Ketree, if you're curious.

 

[HollisinUS]

1. I try to follow racial lore... like Tieflings could be named after what they do etc.
2. Someone said try different language. I try to create a character and do a back story. Then have a statement of:

Xxxx greatest desire is

Followed by

Xxxx greatest fear is

From there I come up with one word to describe than dump that into Google Translate. I look at what is created then play with the sounds etc to create my own if it 'doesnt'sound right

 

[grimmmy]

In the meantime, I found a Reddit that's just people posting names, i.e. the forum I didn't know I needed.

 

[marorda]

Oh god... I'm an author but a disaster with names, seriously. Compelling story? Easy! Character arcs? Check! Naming anything at all: *error*

I've taken to using various name generators on the internet... and the rare brilliant moment where my brain can think of names. But it's gotten to a rather bad point... a point where I've made up a fantasy species for my book and can't think of names for the people of that species. I'll then search the internet for a name generator, to find names for a species... that does not exist. That was an embarrassing moment. But also a funny one looking back now.

Either way, in my case name generators are my biggest friend. For people and places alike

 

[Illuminary]

I actually use the meanings to find the name of my characters. I use Behind the Name most of the time.

If not, I usually mesh words that I like from the dictionary and names together. Ex, Petrichor and Raven makes Chorven or Petra or Raveric.