The Non-Euclidian Staircase

Names are important... Names are used too often to ignore, and potentially can be employed to seed your character with background/personality info from day one.

I have one primary tool, The Melting Pot Book of Baby Names. This is as good as baby name books get, sorted by ethnic origin and meaning. The name origins and meanings I'm going to quote below come from this book.

Now, for my own game world, I tend to design in linguistic rules for each culture, which suggest the forms names should take. This helps to avoid the random run of phonemes that some fantasy games can offer. Gevrok, for example, is a name that fits my idea of Orcish language's sound, with its hard G and K sounds.

I like my current names for the d20 games I play in... Ezhno is a Native American name, meaning "solitary, a loner", which fits his gruff, somewhat anti-social manner. Valentin is a Swedish form of a Latin name, meaning "strong, brave", which fits his tall and blonde appearance and his proposed prestige class will result in "strong" being a very appropriate descriptive. My character name in Passions of the Tide was also carefully considered... Nikolao is a Hawaiian variation on Nicholas, a Greek name meaning "victory to the people"; a nice name for a populist rabble-rouser in an underwater culture, I thought.

I used to be a lot sloppier about names, and I still have something of an attraction to exotic or difficult to pronounce names (Ezhno or Nikolao, for example). Tongue twisters like Menikamorthphan are just silly, but I played such a character in my early gaming days. I try to restrain myself.