Fantasy name generator

A fantasy name has two jobs. It has to sound like it belongs to a people and a place, and it has to be easy for a reader or a player to recognize the second time it appears. These five steps cover both.

Readers judge a name by its sound before they know anything about the character. Psychologists have studied this for a century. In 1929 Wolfgang Köhler showed people a rounded shape and a spiky one and asked which was “maluma” and which was “takete”; most matched the soft word to the round shape. In 2001 V. S. Ramachandran and Edward Hubbard repeated it with “bouba” and “kiki”, and reported that 95% of people chose the same way. The effect has since been found across many languages, and with ordinary names too.

The generator's syllable banks lean on these tendencies. Play against them on purpose when it suits the story: a gentle orc with a soft name is memorable precisely because it breaks the pattern.

Each people has its own syllables, its own endings for women and men, and its own invented vocabulary for the meanings shown on each card. The examples are real results from the generator. For D&D's playable races, such as dragonborn, drow and goliath, use the D&D name generator.

A second name tells readers where a character stands: which family, which place, what they did. Real history offers every model you need, from patronymics that change each generation to bynames such as Harald Fairhair and Æthelred the Unready. Choose one or two systems per culture and keep to them, so the names themselves show who belongs where. Ursula K. Le Guin's Earthsea adds a twist worth borrowing: everyone has an everyday use-name, and a true name they guard closely.

Apostrophes are the most common complaint readers have about fantasy names. The Language Construction Kit puts it bluntly: people who are new to inventing languages “start with the alphabet and add a few apostrophes and diacritical marks”, and the result looks foreign without sounding consistent.

• Give each mark one job. An apostrophe can mark a pause, a dropped sound or a clan prefix (Ka'Vor, “of the Vor”), but only one of those, everywhere in your world.
• Use accents for sound, not decoration. If é means a long e in one name, it should mean that in every name.
• Spell each people differently. One culture can use k and y, another c and i. The same sound spelled two ways tells readers two peoples are speaking.
• Think of the audiobook. A narrator has to say every name aloud. If you cannot say it confidently, give it a respelling in a glossary or simplify it.

Readers do not read names letter by letter; they recognize a shape. Orson Scott Card's advice to writers is to give main characters names that start with different letters and sounds, so that Kael and Kira never share a page. Vary the length and the ending too: a cast of two-syllable names ending in -ion reads as one blur.

Long names have a second problem: people shorten them. Game masters on the Paizo forums describe players turning a long NPC name into “Carl” within a session. Decide the short form yourself, and it will at least be one you like. Sound matters for gender too: Brandon Sanderson has said he renamed the hero of The Way of Kings from Marrin to Kaladin partly because the first name read as feminine to his readers.

The cast checker above runs these checks for you: same sounds, one-letter differences, rhymes, shared first letters and endings, hard clusters, apostrophes, famous character names and everyday English words.

Game masters need names fast, usually for a character the players were never meant to meet. Generate 24 or 48 names for each people before a session, download them as a list, and cross them off as you use them. Keep the short ones for shopkeepers and guards, and give long, formal names only to characters who will matter, so players learn that a long name is worth remembering. For D&D races and settings, the D&D name generator covers 16 races, and the town and kingdom generators name the places they live.