Some DMs have a gift for coming up with the perfect name on the spot. Others flip through Xanathar’s Guide or another name list. Then there’s me: given a minute to think, I can come up with a plausible fantasy name, but in the heat of the moment I might just blurt out a clunker like “Huckabear“.

5e Inspiration has a random NPC generator with a massive name list built into it. I’ve been collecting fantasy names for as long as I’ve been playing D&D, and I’ve brainstormed a lot more for the app. Right now my name list has something more than 6000 NPC names – more than twice the number of names in Xanathar’s Guide.

I’ve vetted all the names in the Inspiration app, which means I’ve said each one aloud to make sure it doesn’t rhyme with something dirty, and I’ve googled it to make sure it’s not a well known trademark or something. (The gold standard for googling a fantasy name: you come up with less than 50,000 hits, and on the first google page is a link to someone’s World of Warcraft character. Then you know you’ve got a keeper.)

How many half-orc names are there?

It’s easy for me to tell you that my name list has 6000+ entries: however, it’s quite difficult to count how many names are in any given category. For instance, how many possible half-orc names are there?

Because Inspiration is an app, I can do more than just create a d100 name chart for each race/gender category. Sure, I categorize names by race and gender, as the Xanathar’s Guide list does – though more than half of my names are nongendered – and also by class. But there are also lots of crossovers and references: on the ranger name list are entries like “roll on the elf name list”.

Inspiration also includes lots of non-NPC names. The app can be used to generate dungeons, treasure, encounters on the land and sea, neighborhoods, and overland maps, so there are big name lists for magic items, ships, taverns, villages, rare books, various categories of monsters, etc. These lists link with the NPC name lists too.

The base half-orc name list might have only 2 entries: one “roll on the orc name list”, and one “roll on the human name list”. Drilling down one level to the orc list, we might have 200 entries, of which ten are like “roll on the evil magic item name list”, to get sonorous names like “Ur Kagal” or “Katak”. The evil magic item name list, in turn, might have a few rolls on the pirate ship name list, for entries like “Winter Wolf”, “Howler,” or “roll on the naval ship name list”. So it’s hard to count exactly how many orc names there are. Do I just count the core human and orc names? The 200 evil magic item names, each a twentieth as likely to come up as a core orc name? The 200 pirate ship names, each a hundredth as likely to come up?

That’s not to mention the possibility of rolling an orc with a barbarian-style name, with all the different name formations that involves: X Y-slayer, X daughter of Y, X Ybane, X Yborn, etc.

That’s all to say that if you use the app to generate 10 random NPCs per weekly game session for 10 years, you might see a random NPC reappear once, but probably not twice.

In a further post I’ll talk about how I generate D&D-style fantasy names. Until then, here’s my orc name list:

Orc Names Roll d20 to select a line. If the line contains 10 names, roll d10 to select the name.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 19th, 2019 at 9:47 am and is filed under RPG Hub. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.