Making a Name

Sundered over on his blog asked to hear about others' methods for coming up with the names featured in their games, even being so kind as to call me one of the good name-finders. Since what I do is pretty simple, I thought I would walk through my methods. Method 1: Weighted d20 TableYou look up names from the two or three inspirational sources you've selected, typically cultures from two different continents you think go together well. Then you make a d20 table that's weighted into a light Zipf Distribution. Maybe there's one really common name that has a 4-in-20 chance of being selected, two 2-in-20s, four 1-in-20s, and an 8-in-20 chance of consulting a much longer "rare" name table. If there's different classes of name, like if the setting has gendered names or there's some class or culture split, it's not to hard to make multiple of these tables. Don't be afraid of "normal" names like Tom and Margaret and Wei and Ramesh. With the profusions of Elijahs (Holy Selmat), Udens and…