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!
My first long running D&D character was a thief, Debris Deritus (I misspelled 'detritus' on the character sheet). Aside from the name, he was a pretty straightforward character. The DM had a few silly names, like a high level wizard, who sometimes got a little confused, named Bollux.
I tended to play thieves, so I made variations like Delerius, etc. Our wizard in that party was named Mister, so we could yell out "Help me, Mister Wizard!" The cleric, a devotee of Set, was named T.V..
Every so often we would go on themes. We had an entire pary of sportscasters. I played Brent Morsberger, but I kept mispronouncing it 'Moose-burger'. Another was all Spanish names. IIRC, my character was Real Sangria.
When my one friend's college buddies would play, the crudeness got turned up to 11. I remember one character named Jizz Coonkiller. :eek: Mercifully, I remember little else.
Some memories:
Pendragon - Sir Brillig and his brother, Sir Slithy; Sexhard the Saxon; Sir Stendix (from a brand of stationery).
RuneQuest - Queng Wisequack, a duck; Tobor, a Grotaron; Marrakesh and Krakajak, morokanths; Genrik, an NPC who got used by drop-in players and players without chrs; Gitchie-Goomie, a Dorastan werewolf; Henry, a troll.
Star Wars - Gar Triihugga, a simple farmer on a forest planet.
Quote from: One Horse Town;264957Graham God-Botherer.
:killingme:
One of the PCs in my short-lived Traveller sandbox game was named "Shazam Goon".
Quote from: Jackalope;265028. . . an awakened raccoon with levels in Scout, inspired by both the National Park Service mascot (Ranger Rick) . . .
Ranger Rick is a character in magazines published by the National Wildlife Federation; he's not a mascot of the National Park Service.
My worst character name ever was
Lotto Rumblebottom, a flatulent halfling thief. Mercifully he was slain in our first encounter, as by then the joke had worn off.
I created a magic-use character named
Wuffa Weirdbeard, but never ran him. Wuffa is an Old English name if I remember correctly, and 'weird' in this context meant magical, so while it was a bit strange sounding, it wasn't really a 'silly' name. At least not deliberately . . .
Two things have been mentioned here that I gather used to be common, but don't seem to happen any more:
i) punning names.
ii) direct use of pop culture elements. For example, if a DM really wanted to have Klingons, it seems like in ye olde days they'd be actual Klingons (whose spaceship had crashed, if it was fantasy). Whereas now it seems like it'd be expected that you change them to fit the world: in science-fiction change the name, or in fantasy change them into barbarians or lizard-people or something - unless you'd specifically said you were playing in the Star Trek universe, in which case you couldn't have creatures from another franchise.
Is that perhaps because in those days the players saw D&D as a mixture of elements - if you've already combined Lord of the Rings and Conan and Elric, why not add something else - whereas now most people see hobbits and barbarians and evil magic swords as elements of the same thing?
My Dad, in the one D&D game I got him to play with me, was a Magic-User named... "Resucigam"
I had a theif from way back named "Robin Everyman"
My first Cleric was "Brother Maynard of the Holy Outhouse"
Our Recon squad patrolled the Phuoc Yu river in 'Nam...
I played with a guy who had a D&D character called Sir Duc Sean of the Innocent.
Quote from: Pierce Inverarity;265106:killingme:
:hatsoff:
It loses a bit of its shine when you find out that he adventured with his twin brother
Tim God-Botherer, who was a...Thief. Yes, it was the family name.
My first DnD character was a halfling named Frodo. Which was funny I suppose because I was one of those kids who hadn't yet read the LotR novels.
All of my dwarves come from the Staggerhome clan that me and my old roommate created, complete with detailed family history, heirlooms, and a book of grudges that we added after we discovered WFRP.
Names can be important, but not always. I have one player who's a great gamer, and killer at characterization-but rarely bothers to name his character.