Exotic Names and Exotic Locations

[Curufea]

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[AlHazred]

I actually like the Everlasting Book of Names (EBoN), a free online utility for generating names. You can generate enough names as a player without paying for it; registering gives you the ability to create more names at once and make your own name lists.

[Curufea]

Yeah, but I don't like random names - they feel fake when used.
The only thing I actively hate in names, is the overuse of apostrophes - especially noticable in fantasy genres.

Besides, there are plenty of real world lists out there that fit in a pulp setting.

[Duke Bushido]

Bless the Librarian,
Keeper of all Knowledge,
Bringer of Wisdom

and provider of all this neat stuff for my next late-night reading session!

[st barbara]

Yeah, but I don't like random names - they feel fake when used.
The only thing I actively hate in names, is the overuse of apostrophes - especially noticable in fantasy genres.

Besides, there are plenty of real world lists out there that fit in a pulp setting.

I agree. It might be handy to have a list of common names in various foreign (not Englsih that is) languages such as French, German and Japanese etc to generate names for NPCs in a hurry however.

[Cancer]

This hardly qualifies as "exotic", but at one time you could copy files containing the most common US surnames, male given names, and female given names, from the US Census Bureau site, based on definitive real data (the 1990 Census). The page is hard to find, but it's here.

The files are unfortunately MONOCASE and suppress non-letters (e.g., "de la Rosa" would be present as "DELAROSA"). The names are ranked, and the files include frequencies, although quoted only to 0.001 percent. And, of course, they are incomplete. Also, there's no cross-reference, because there are of course correlations between surname and given name (an obvious example: you almost never see "Jesus" as a given name for anyone who doesn't have a Spanish surname).

But a little coding and use of an RNG and you can make a statistically solid collection of all-American random character names. I've done it myself.

[Basil]

I actually like the Everlasting Book of Names (EBoN), a free online utility for generating names. You can generate enough names as a player without paying for it; registering gives you the ability to create more names at once and make your own name lists.

You don't have to pay to be able to make your own name lists. I made one myself (for v2.1.0, not the latest) which I did by taking names selected semi-randomly from the phone book of the nearest large city. Interesingly, the names it generates, while they don't sound "real life" do not (IMO) sound all that weird or "fakey".

I just whipped up 5 first names, and here they are:
Relles
Kanny
Rald
Phert
Juns

And 5 surnames:
Bynnon
Blund
Tack
Callick
Heser

Other than "Phert," I'd say they all look passible, though not in a real-world setting like many Pulp Hero games would have. If there's interest, I could post the .ebn file to a freewebs website or even c&p to a post here (since they're simply a text file).