I didn't want to derail another thread with this tangent.  In the thread about anachronisms, there seemed to be a consensus that names derived from pop culture influences were irritating.  I find this irksome as well.  

However, last night I was reminded that I was guilty of this as well when I first started role-playing back in 1985.  Last night I found some folders containing my 1st AD&D characters, and I started scanning them into the computer.  Here are the ones with stupid/silly names:

Peart the Wizard:  This Magic-User character was originally created by a close friend who was a drummer, and I inherited this character when he gave up role-playing.  He named this character after his rock idol Neil Peart, the drummer for band Rush.

Madmonk:  One of my first three AD&D characters ever created; I created three characters at the same time.  I created an elf thief named Swiftelk, and a human cleric named Cugel along with Madmonk.  When I created the character, I was thinking about Rasputin the Madmonk and named accordingly.

Mysterio the Mage:  This was a Magic-User with psionics.  He was terribly mysterious.  Yup, that about covers it.

Sinbad:  This was a human fighter who was a sailor.  Um, yeah, well this was silly.

I saved the most egregious and offending character for last.  I am the most ashamed to admit this one.  All I can say it that it was a convergence of cool things in my eyes back then.  I was into the Indiana Jones movies, and the Unearthed Arcana book was fairly recent.

/drumroll

Indiana Jones:  This was a wood elf ranger/druid character that was double specialized in the whip.


So, did anyone else have character names that were silly, or derived from pop culture sources?  If so, would you please share with us?

To my eternal shame, i was guilty of giving my character a silly name once. Me and a bunch of friends went to visit a mate who we hadn't seen for ages. He had set up an ad&d one-shot to play with a few of his freinds taking part as well.

I rolled up a Cleric and i named him...Graham God-Botherer.

Another thing from my teens, i've just remembered.

For about 4 years we used to play ad&d every Sunday from 2-6 (strictly!) at my friends house. We used to play in the attic extension. In one campaign that stretched for 2 years at least, the same player had 2 characters. One, a dwarf named Groin and the other a halfling named Dildo Baggins.

I shudder to think what this guys parents thought about what was going on. "Dildo races over to Groin!"

Depending on the game, silly names don't bother me as long as they're imaginative.  I'd rather have Bear Buggering Ben than Bob.  I play to have fun, not to be dreadfully serious and accurate.
 
As a kid, I had many highly derivative names (not always the same as silly).  Such as Thorin Oakenshield.  Now I find these worse than silly names as I want a game to be its own thing and not a knock off of something else.

Our Traveller game was full of silly names, but that was SF, so that's okay.  It was when we switched over to a Call of Cthulhu campaign that the names got a little out of hand:

Lord Tanto Yabo XXIII

I wanted to beat that particular player about the head and eyes for that.

!i!

It was during my early days of playing D&D. We'd barely entered double figures, age-wise, and most of us only had one or two literary sources for names to go plunder. Eventually the Boromir's, Gimli's and Legolas's had been exhausted along with every variant spelling we could think of. Enter Sauron Sackville, the most chaotic halfling who ever threw a molotov. Flaming oilskins were his specialty, and like all homicidal pyromaniacs who fight in enclosed spaces his luck eventually ran out. After persistent efforts to bypass the DM's map by blowing holes in dungeon walls he succeeded in bringing down an entire mountain on our heads for an instant TPK. The following week we were joined by younger brother Petrol Bomb Paxo, who, if anything, was even more deranged than his departed sibling. As the deaths by fire, burial, PvP assassination and yet more fire mounted we were graced with the entire extended Sackville family tree, which resembled a hybridization of the worst excesses of the Angel Gang and Mongol Eurasia.

I remember a ranger I once rolled up for a 1st ed AD&D game in high school that mercifully imploded, whom I named Hawkbane for some reason.  My friend turned to me and said, "What do you have against hawks?".

The creepiest experience involving a character name I've ever had was back in college when my friend Marc went on and on and on about his "Traveller" game in high school (the one that liberally mashed elements of Star Wars, Dune, Star Trek, the Dorsai, etc. - we've all been there) in which his PC became god emperor of the universe.  When he offered to run a game in this setting I decided to take the piss out of him a bit and I created a character based mostly on Darth Vader, who was a fanatical inquisitor who utterly believed in the divinity of Marc's original PC and did all sorts of terrible things to those who questioned this.  I named him "Augustus Randal", which got shortened to "Gus Randal" during play.

The name became became an in joke with the group - for example, in our 1940s supers game the mysterious quasi-governmental think tank from whom we received orders was called the "Randal Corporation".  But in the years that followed I was informed that one of the players had developed an obsession with my original inquisitor character, even to the point that the only name that he used when playing computer games was "Gus Randal".  It was kinda creepy being character stalked that way, but then again the cat in question was an odd bird.


TGA

The most evil character I've ever played was an elf T/MU/F named Otter. He was the vilest of bastards, too.

Currently I'm playing a god-hating dwarf called Mencken and a blue goblin psion call Ragmagel (anagram of Gargamel).  I usually try to match table conventions, and anagrams are a handy way of working in popcult references that would entertain me and irritate the rest of the group.

To be honest a lot of the "serious" fantasy naming conventions irritate me as much as goofy names: Thorsmithy Forgehammer the dwarf, Fralalorien Silverbow the elf, etc.

I'm good at stupid names, but since I never get to PLAY...they never get USED.  Witness:

• A T&T character named Bracero the Illegal ("Bracero" being a Mexican slang term for an undocumented immigrant worker)
  
• Angus MacFaggot, an ass-kickin', name-takin' Scottish warrior who wears Victoria's Secret French-cut lace-trimmed panties under the kilt
  
• Boora of Many Toes, a TSR Conan character who...I...never used for anything; burra, by the way, is the femenine for burro, a term often applied to a stubborn and stupid individual
  
• Ponsonby Britt, (whom I did play: a 2nd Ed AD&D cleric of Cleanliness --it being next to godliness after all) named after the ficticious producer of the old Rocky & Bullwinkle show
  

TREMBLE AT MY RAMPANT IDIOCY!

Encounter Critical NPCs I Have Named:

Jon-Clyde Dam Vanne, Transforming Robot Monk
Elrond Hubbard, Frankenstein/Elf Missionary
Cubeena Gleam, Hobling/Lizard Skateboard Fighter (from Gleaming the Cube)
Wharf Kodaz, Klengon Fishman Warlock (Kodaz from Zadok Allen)
Dr. Shelby Munreau, Wolf-Headed Frankenstein-Wooky Scientist (Moreau + Munster)
Tictac "No Lice" Rerun, Wooky Warrior (anagram)

Ashbury Haight, the hippie Bard
Chomski the Gnome, a recurring NPC sage/adept

Quote from: ttagxamm;264999Elrond Hubbard, Frankenstein/Elf Missionary

I had a minor villain with the same name.

The vast majority of my characters have names that are not, in my opinion, silly.

Some recent examples would include:   Carmen Fortunato - Human Knight, "Spanish"
Elar Stravan - Human Fighter, "German"
Aishwara Ramidipoor - Human Sorcerer, "Indian"
Erinjaye Amberglass - Human Sorcerer, "High Fantasy"
Benoit Evongue - Human Beguiler, "Fench"
Cináed Gailbraithe - Human Fighter, "Pre-Roman Scot"
Jae Don - Human Monk/Sorcerer, "Chinese"Ever since I started playing D&D, I have strived to give my character's "real names," names that evoked a certain culture, and that followed established naming conventions.

When the character is sufficiently alien, I tend to turn to alien names.  For example, I had a Locathah Wizard named Pando Baba Thun.  This was mostly stolen from Star Wars, the character Ponda Baba (aka Walrus Man).

But I am not entirely guilt free.  In the last few years I've used both of these names for characters:
Rik Rascal aka Ranger Rik was an awakened raccoon with levels in Scout, inspired by both the National Park Service mascot (Ranger Rick) and the comic book character Rocket Raccoon.  I really loved Rik, and wish he hadn't been eaten by giant spiders.  

N'Bonka the Outcast.  In fairness, I named this character after N'Longa, from the Solomon Kane stories.  It started out as "N'Bonga" but I changed the g to a k after reading some articles on African languages.  But I REALLY should have said it outloud a few more time before playing the character, because in actual play it was a kinda silly.

Quote from: Jackalope;265028In fairness, I named this character after N'Longa, from the Solomon Kane stories.  It started out as "N'Bonga" but I changed the g to a k after reading some articles on African languages.  But I REALLY should have said it outloud a few more time before playing the character, because in actual play it was a kinda silly.

Go tell that to Lon Duc Dong and Harry Balzac. I'm pretty sure they'd back you up on the name.

!i!