In this tutorial, I'm going to show you how to add your own personal twist to generating random names for towns, characters, and so on in your RPGs, role-playing campaigns, or whatever. Plenty of sites offer name generating services, but only a few of those offer an advanced interface. I've also learned that not many people know how to or realize the power of an advanced interface for name generating, so I'm going to go into that a bit for you all.

An Introduction to the Website I will be using

First off, the site I'll be using to generate names is found here:

http://www.rinkworks.com/namegen/

As the site says better than I can explain...


Play with the generator a bit and generate a few default names just to see what comes out.

Seeking a Foundation to Inspire

The first step in finding a name you want to use that isn't completely random is usually to get some inspiration. For my first example, I am going to start with the name of a place that inspires me: Asgard. Norse Mythology seems to have very fascinating way of dragging me into the names, personally. But rather than naming a location Asgard, I want to give it my own twist.

One thing about Norse Mythology is that isn't the only name of a location ending in -gard. I'm not an expert on the subject, but there's also Midgard and Helgard(h). Both sound exotic, and almost dangerous locations to travel to. If only there were a way to generate a name that sounded unique and inspiring like the examples given.

The Advanced Interface

There is! And that's where the advanced interface is. With the advanced interface, you are essentially given the opportunity to regulate more than usual what is sent as output from the generator, but still mixing combinations of letters around to flexibly find what you are interested in.

Take a look at the quick reference guide for a moment. It might seem a bit daunting at first, but this is just to give you a feel of the level of control you have, even if you don't understand it yet I will explain it shortly:



Armed with that, first try putting s inside of the advanced interface name generation template and hit generate. This will output a few randomly-generated syllables:



Most of the names for items in my game were generated using a simply alternating vowels and consonants randomly (Usali, Hanati(i), Olapin, etc.). To get that same effect in the advanced interface, you could just put vcvcv into the form and submit it. You should get something similar to these:



These names are all pretty neat, and in some cases they might be just what you're looking for, but the key is really to combine our inspirational name--Asgard in this example--with something random, yet fresh and new.

Putting It All Together

A key portion of generating something to your liking is the Literal Operator. In the generator we're using, that's just parenthesis. Basically, anything you put inside of parenthesis will come out as a literal--in other words, it will literally be output along with your random letters and/or syllables. Give it a try! Using the advanced interface, let's put in s(gard):



That's what I'm talking about! Now we are seeing some names that are starting to appear interesting and possibly usable. Let's complicate it a bit more.


Logical OR--AKA: Conditionalized Randomness

You can use the vertical bar | to make either one situation or another situation occur. Say we wanted either one syllable or two to precede our -gard, in order to do that we need to use the bar to divide two different cases:

s|ss

However, this alone confuses the evaluator. In short, it's not sure how to interpret what we wish to conditionalize. In order to be more direct, we need to put the two conditions encapsulated in brackets:

<s|ss>

My results were, as expected, either one or two random syllables:


In using this new syntax, we are specifically defining a symbol that is either one or two syllables long. How does this tie together? Well, it adds a large amount of versatility and control. Often, you aren't sure what sounds good until you see it. This trial-and-error process of name generation is how you'll be able to fine-tune a random process into something you can use.

The Final Generation

For some of the most interesting names, I've combined everything I've shown you so far into the following expression:

<s|ss>(gard|gaard)

This gives me a wide variety of names:



But wait, there's more! You can also nest symbols if you desire. Or, in other words, you can have symbols inside symbols within the expression:

<s|s>(gard|gaard|g<v>rd)( village| town| city)

Believe it or not, this is completely valid and it's actually not too hard to follow. I've added an extra conditional in addition to -gard and -gaard which outputs -gard, except with a random vowel instead of the a. This is just a basic symbol within the literal on the outside. I had to use g<v>rd instead of gvrd because since that is a literal symbol (see the parenthesis?) it would literally give me gvrd, which isn't what we want.

In addition, I've added some literals at the end (village, city, town) to decide which looks right for naming my location. You could add additional statements for mines, dungeons, or whatever you wanted.

Next Steps

Find a name that inspires you. Don't limit yourself to video games, either. Grab names from books, word etymologies, movies, or even use the simple generator that looks sort of like what you want, and then add your own twist to it.

One thing I like to do before I use a really neat name I've discovered it is to actually search for it in google. It might be good to make sure it's not the name of something else on accident.

That's all I have for you! Hopefully you've found this somewhat useful--original names can go a long way in your works if they draw forth from your sources to bring in meaning. Good luck, and contact me if you have any issues.