‘Peregrin’, I think you meant.

Had I my druthers, I would utterly, irrevocably, and permanently bar the use henceforth of the apostrophe in any name of any person, location, or race in a fantasy world. It is the lazy, feeble crutch of the linguistically inept.

The timing on this one is stupendous! I spend a good lot of time a few weeks ago setting up this very “French” village my players were heading towards. Of course, all the NPC’s had distinctively French names. They met the first NPC, who introduced himself as Gautier Vioget – the first words out of one of my players’ mouth was “Ok, right, Frenchie.” I can’t wait to see what happens if they meet up with anyone else.

Personally, I hate most high-fantasy names. Tolkien is actually the exception to this. Since he was a linguistics professor, instead of making random mouth contortions, he stole them from historical name sources (seriously, go read the Norse creation myth and find the names of the dwarves–you’ll recognize a couple ;). This is my favorite way to do names, since they don’t end up sounding like you pulled them out of your nether-regions, and instead sound like they evolved as name-words in a living culture. Some of us can easily tell the difference.

Here’s the page for the name library of a bunch of SCA name geeks: http://www.s-gabriel.org/names/

The Academy of St. Gabriel is awesome. There’s a lot of name information there.

Also, players should take notes. I have my character sheet on my laptop and under version control. The last two sections are campaign notes and a character history. The notes have every name used in the campaign copied down and spelled correctly, phonetically, and possibly mockingly. If they can’t remember, then their character can’t (I’ve played under fascist DMs who’ve used that rule before–it’s worth it, actually). I also have a copy of my character sheet after every game, thanks to the version control. It works great.

Steelers, Knights of Pittsburg? I’d cry, and you don’t want to see a grown man cry, now, would you?

I once had a recurring villian in my campaign called “Thovadarak”. Of course, the players couldn’t remember his name so they renamed him “ThatDick”. They sure remembered that.

The one I’ve tended to see crop up is that players will refer to an NPC by the funny voice the DM puts on to do him. It can get very confusing over a long campaign: “Who’s this guy again?” “Brian Blessed no.3, I think…”

But then, every now and then you have players who do take notes, and surprisingly it seems to be them who mess up the names…

Oh, and the “I haven’t seen them” line is PRICELESS.

I try to take my names from real-world sources, fantasy-ize them a bit, and then put them in the game. I also incorporate just a tiny bit of phonetic humor. It helps. The town my player is in right now is called “Darn”, and I drive that point home by including a few “darn” jokes every once in a while, like “Welcome to the Darn Blacksmith!” and so on. I guarantee you my player knows the name of the town she’s in. The tavern in Darn is called “Bim’s Boom”. My player laughed the first time she read the signpost, and she’s never forgotten the name. The bard that hangs out at Bim’s Boom and plays music every night is called “Jeksin” (a play on Jackson, aka Michael or Janet). The Darn blacksmith’s name is Pittur Smythe (Peter Smith), and his shop is called “Smythe’s Smithy”. Again, utterly unforgettable.

That’s not all I do, either. I also use easily pronounceable (and borderline normal) names, like Norbert and Karee (and the previously mentioned Pittur). Not that my player is up on her name origins, but for my own sanity I try to steer clear of religion-based names, or at least to disguise them enough to hide or mar their origins. No Johns, Peters, Christians, or Davids in my campaign, though you might run into a Jonne, a Pittur, a Kristan, or a Dawed. Throwaway NPCs are less important, so I’ll occasionally break my rules and use cheap and cliche names, but they don’t matter as much.

That’s just my two cents.

“Had I my druthers, I would utterly, irrevocably, and permanently bar the use henceforth of the apostrophe in any name of any person, location, or race in a fantasy world. It is the lazy, feeble crutch of the linguistically inept.”

I call that the ‘Star Trek’ effect. Starting early, with T’Pau, almost every alien race in all of the shows featured apostrophes in their names.

And take the Pirates with you?

The look on Aragorn’s face is the best ^_^ Yeah, overly “fantasy” names can get silly sometimes. Though the best name that our DM let a player keep had to be Guac Amole (imagine an accent mark over the “e”, I don’t know how to put it there). And his familiar’s name was Avacado. Even better, we once ran into a relative of his, Tom Amole XD

You find Apostrophs already annoying?

Try some more recent literature and find lots of äëïöü for your pleasure.
Or rather not.

I nearly threw Eragon away, after the fifth absolutely useless trema/diaresis in his names. Which should have been on page 8 or 9 ;) Darn he even puts spelling-advices in the back where he himself ignores every single bloody trema/diaresis he set.

How i hate such stupidity. Cruel and slow deaths to all the users of Metäl-Umläuts!

Even my wife, whom has probably never touched a role playing game of any kind in her life, will get an occasional chuckle from something like “I took the Subaru of -3 to Steering into the shop.”

The Rum and Coke of Great Drunkeness was also a hit. (Too much rum.)

no duh, if they’re well known famouse people… king george washington, he didn’t want an arnarce, so king makes no sence at all!

We have a dwarf in one of my current Games that is named… I kid you not… Har Don. Har Don has an INT of somewhere around 6.

We have another character, a Gith, named Estalata. Har Don, of course cannot remember this. His first variation on her name was “estalante”, which became “esperante” which became “celantro” (don’t ask). He once conned his way into a mental hospital by saying, “I’s is Doctors Har Don, and this is my nurse, Celantro.”

He hads a devil-girl, once. But he nevers hads a black dragon.

Seriously.

Okay, This comic officaly rulez. I found this site off of another blog, whos host is a bit geekish himself, and I love the comic, and the Game the Game sessions I absoultly love. More, don’t stop. Im telling all my friends (all 8 of them) to visit :P

We play an oriental campaign, and being non-oriental ourselves we sometimes (often) run into trouble with the NPC names so I can heartily relate. We’ve made a habbit of getting the DM to spell the names of important NPCs to us when we remember to. It kind of detracts fromt he campaign when the most feared ninja-assassin get’s called “Rantanplan” (which is the name of Lucky Luke’s dog, his real name was something like Ran’too-Kwan). ;)

Btw, glad to see that in 2007 the comic is even funnier! :D

“If I ever run a campaign again, I am *so* setting up a wiki.”

Wow, that’s a really good idea.

So, I’m from Pittsburgh, and am now very curious as to how we came to have knights….. it’s just not that kind of town!

(*grin, duck*)

Well, I can barely remember names IRL so I guess it isn’t at all surprising that I can’t remember them in the game, either. I do try to write them down but sadly I am so inherently disorganized that this means 2 minutes of ruffling through papers before every conversation. That is, when I haven’t misheard a name in the first place and thus written it down incorrectly.
Were I DM’ing and needed a local setting, I’d be seriously tempted to pull an Ordinance Survey map of an English county off the net. Provided I didn’t have any players familiar with said county, that is. With luck, the pubs will be marked, too. (I think I’d change the name of The Devonshire Dumpling before setting an encounter there, though.)

“Wow. Were those really their names?”

Priceless.

Peter Jackson really needs to see this comic. I think he’d love it.

I save myself the trouble by calling all my characters some variation on André.

Everyone expects it now, and it means people can remember my character’s name.

Of course I spell it differently, just for giggles. Ahn’Dreigh the human sorcerer is emphatically not the same person as Ondray the dwarf fighter.

The names are also short versions of a pre-prepared longer one, in case people ever get curious. They never have, and so never heard the Glory of Ferden Leahnder nek Reighshel den Wickramaseihn (etemology available on receipt of several large Rum & Cokes) and Ondray Skallagrimsson, inspired by Egil’s Saga

“Sure, it sounds stupid, but you have to admit: your players will be able to remember, pronounce, and even spell all of the important people and places. ”

No, no they won’t. I once ran a campaign based on a fictional Earth where the primary difference was that magic worked. To add some slight air of mystique, the basic starter map was that of Europe, only one where the Roman Empire was still alive and in charge.

To make things simple, all of the ‘provinces’ were the modern country names, with one exception. Given the players lack of ability to prounounce or remember Eastern European place names, everything West of the western borders of Poland, Austria, and Italy was lumped into one big area called ‘Mason County’ and run by Masons.

They of course wandered around ‘the south, the north, the west, and England’

To my eternal shame, when looking for a name that was a combination of Zulu and Mongol for a bad guy who was going to lead huge anarchaic hordes to plunder the Empire, I did not come up with Kublai and Zulu, but rather the other halves of those names.

Yes, my players managed to forget, immediately after laughing uproariously, the name of the evil leader Shaka Khan.

Even after making the requisite ‘let me rock you’ jokes.

Of course, the best part of watching a GM tangle with the person who writes all the notes to everything came up in a Shadowrun game that lasted more than 8 years (scary, I know). The player had every note from the very beginning and the GM would try to throw us all in situations that should present HUGE difficulties, like ghosts of player-slaying, but the player would just look back through his notes and say, “oh yeah, 6 years and 3 months ago we took on the underling of the 5th general to (continues for 3 minutes giving relational details) and killed him, taking his dagger of ghosts of player-slaying-slaying. I’ll use that”.

The look on the GM’s face was priceless. It’s thus been my greatest fear that one day, in the game I run, some player will bring my plot crashing to the floor all because they paid better attention than me.

“one Peregrin Took”

Was I the only one expecting a rejoinder along the lines of “Sounds like a lead. Where is this Peregrin guy?” :-)

Arg. Typo. Should be “Ironychan” above.

Heh, the most memorable character in my entire D&D campaign was an 18 str 5 int fighter my brother named Furfin.

He got the name from title off a book on the shelf, Fur, Fin and Feather. but it was goofy enough to be fantastic, and simple enough to remember.