Places by the Way design diary: A question about creative process that I am never asked
What's in a name? Something, something, I dunno
Writing about Places by the Way #10: Exiles of Newmarket reminded me that when we put that module up on Kickstarter 3 years ago, I used a campaign update to answer a question that I am never asked: How do you come up with the names for NPCs? Whether or not you consider that each module has a lot of NPCs in it, by now there are enough modules in the series that, taken in aggregate, I have had to generate a lot of names that sound fantasy-appropriate. It’s probably just as well that nobody ever asks me, because the answer would likely disappoint. I just make something up as I need it:
If you've ever wondered where I get the NPC names for my modules, the answer is almost always, I pluck them out of thin air. Typically, there's some combustible mixture of Tolkien, other fantasy RPG modules, Dune, the few Forgotten Realms and Dragonlance novels that I've read, Bugs Bunny cartoons, W. C. Fields, the Marx Brothers, Monty Python's Flying Circus and "The Goon Show" involved.
In Exiles of Newmarket, calling a team of gnome jewelers the Gnomic Brothers comes from a morning when I clearly had too much coffee. Calling then Jesper and Saturninus comes from another such morning, after I realized that I hadn't given them first names yet. As this suggests, I don't draw up the names all at once, they come to me over time. Sometimes not until the very moment when I need to write something down.
This comes to mind because I just noticed an unintended rhyme in the preview that I posted in the campaign, where I mention Lillia the Bard and then, not that many paragraphs down, the possessed girl Milia Wheatley. Lillia and Milia. Didn't mean to do that. It's a juxtaposition that got set into electrons just before I launched. So I think I'm going to rename Milia. Millie Wheatley? Or something that doesn't end in "-ia."
Why Milia Wheatley? The Wheatley family are kind of a late addition, as it occurred to me that maybe your party ought to have a stronger prod to go to the village dump and get a foreshadow of the march of the animated objects. I needed a name in a hurry. I've been reading a couple of books on the Napoleonic Wars that mention a journal kept by Edmund Wheatley, a young British officer who served from late in the war in Spain through the Waterloo campaign. I thought it would be amusing to call a family that grows and sells fruit "Wheatley." And Milia was short for Aemilia. Or something like that.
Regarding the Gnomic Brothers: You will also note that I resort to an old trick with them, one that assumes that a scene with NPCs bickering pointlessly with each other is funny just by its nature. I know I've used it before, but it's too much fun writing stuff like that to give it up.
Coming up with character names has never been a strength of mine, so it rather astonishes me that I have whipped up 50 or so named NPCs over the course of Places by the Way with little trouble. I hope that I haven’t jinxed myself in bringing this up.