Jane Williams
> And make sure those names all start with different
> letters. Makes for easier note-taking.
I have terrible trouble with names even at the best of times, but made-up fantasy names are difficult to remember to the point of being impossible.
So I try to ensure all my npcs have nicknames I can use as part of or instead of their 'real' names. This helps remind everyone who that character is and what they are like. For example Nobby The Naysayer is the stickpicker whos job is to point out the flaws in any plan anyone comes up with and complain about change; the Trouble Matriach is the head of the trickser bloodline whose job is to ensure there is always trouble afoot; Lucky was the chap who was reduced to stickpicking after getting maimed.
For npcs that do have real names I abandon any attempt to 'correctly' reproduce Gloranthan naming conventions and go for memorable names instead with some real words in that llnk in some way to the character in question: Maximus and Minimus were a senior and a junior Lunar agent (this was *before* gladiator for those who wonder); Luxus Fahrenheit is a Solar general; Black Belly Bzazz is a hungry troll spirit; Onions is the junior Ironspike Sage; Peritonitis was the Lunar clerk and a severe pain with his love of proper paperwork.
I took the same approach with clans and colour coded most of them for easy reference: The Blue Dancers; The Red Rocks; The Blackened Clan; The Brown Hands; The Yellow Manes. The rest got epithets like the Salmons or the Spiral clan.
This is, for want of a better word, the Asterisk naming convention. It may not make the game look serious but actually its an unassumingly practical approach; the GM and players dont need to waste brain power trying to recall who a meaningless four syllable sound is supposed to relate to and can concentrate on play instead. 'Proper' names only seem to work for characters that get mentioned every week, the rest need code words. We tend to refer to those npcs that dont have official nicknames as 'that chap who is trying to seduce that woman' or make up rather unflattering unofficial nicknames for them instead.
(In a pbem you can probably afford proper names. In a larp the opposite holds and any writer inflicting a plain proper name on the overtaxed players deserves to be crushed beneath a mountain of second rate fantasy novels).
Powered by hypermail