Where Do PC Names Come From?

[Hirem]

I probably have the laziest name out of anybody on the forum, because Hirem is actually on the Benshira lore page. The original use of Hirem is as one of Biyram's sons, so Hirem would usually get thrown onto the end of names, i.e. "of the sons of Hirem". I figured that even though it's already the name of somebody that's really prominent in Benshira culture, it would be acceptable to call a character that... after all, people name their kids after important religious figures all the time. And, over time, the fact that Hirem was the strongest of Biyram's children became really important to the current Hirem, who struggles with finding and managing his own strength.

[Lissa Maze]

So, I love Latin, I admit it. Took it in high school, loved it, kind of had a knack for it. The Aeneid is a great book in Latin, and even in translation it's a pretty cool piece of literature. One of the major characters is named Dido, but another name for Dido is Elissa. I liked that name but it sounded a bit too, er, elegant, so I decided that the backstory for Lissa's name is that it was the name of someone in her mom's family (Elissa, that is) but it got shortened and Lissa's mother just named her a shortened version of the name: Lissa.

"Maze" is just because Lissa was created as someone's sister so the last name already existed and in her backstory her mother knew her dad's last name and decided to give it to her kid.

I actually had a lot of fun with her name.

[Raien Ironarm Pitrius]

I took the word rain, decided it sounded too much like a cartoon character. So, I added an e, decided it was pronounced (ray-in), told no one till now, started writing the important stuff.

[Brandon Blackwing]

I suck at Naming characters, I'll admit that. So, I couldn't find a name for my character, who had, except for the concept of being a total bad-ass Kelvic thief (which he refused to become btw), no details and no story. I always start with the name when I've got a concept. So I couldn't think of a nice first name, so I took one from a game where I had to name the main character myself, which in turn was named after a Tactics Ogre: Let Us Cling Together charcter: Brantyn. I swapped the y for o and the t for d. That was the video game character's new name: Brandon. In all despair I took that one, cuz I actually liked it. And Blackwing... well, I actually wanted Bran to be a cat or wolf Kelvic, but there were already too many of those and I thought it would be cheap... I thought "maybe a bear" but that wasn't thievish enough for me and then I browsed through an animal book and saw the bats. "That's it!" I thought "A bat" Then since echolocation is awesome I decided it would be a microbat, and the Long-eared grey bat is a really great bat (my favorite, maybe?) so I went with that. Bats have wings, its wings were black => voila, it's Blackwing. That name came to me way faster than the first name though... I'd been pondering for days or so before I decided on Brandon and only like... 10 minutes to find Blackwing. But I like it!

[Shoshana Re Menehat]

I needed to take the opportunity to nerd out again about how much awesome information there is in the races section of this site, and also my other love- languages.

SO I had a character who was half and half, this game is awesome in that it has general guidelines for naming within the races. Benshira, it said, favor voiceless fricatives and affricates, and to me their culture sounded similar to cultures that might speak a language similar to Arabic, or maybe Hebrew. So I looked up Arabic/Hebrew names that fit the described patterns. Then I took a popular last name format of Eypharians (which also then helped me further with developing her concept) and viola!

[Azrayel Kolasi]

Vervain is the name of a flower that blooms in the wild in relatively large numbers near where I grew up. The sight of them is nostalgic for me, and I honestly enjoy how the name rolls off the tongue.

The last name is entirely of my own design.

[Balian Martell]

Balian I stole from the main character of one of my favorite movies, Kingdom of Heavan. Martell is the name of my favorite house in A Song of Ice and Fire. A mash up of the two seemed logical.

[Roderick]

This is probably kind of cheating since I already explained the first name on the previous page, but I didn't mention where the surname comes from (I don't think I'd chosen one at that point. To quickly reiterate: I got mine from that TV series Kevin Bacon did, 'The Following'. One character kept being mentioned and - you guessed it - his name was Roderick. I didn't plan on using it for Mizahar; it just came into my head when I was creating Rod a while later. While trying to decide what to name him the Following popped into my head. So I wasn't really too hung up on what it meant or anything, it was just a name I liked. Apparently it is proto-Germanic and literally means "[he who is] rich in glory", which is ironic since he's a hunter and so far hasn't really done anything interesting. Rod will hopefully be training as a squire soon though so its possible he will start living up to the name. The surname Vandenberg, Van den Berg, is a Dutch, Afrikaans and Flemish surname, literally meaning "from the mountain" and is referring to an elevated place in the landscape or to a hill where the original bearer lived (cheers Wikipedia) which is totally original; the reason is that Rod comes from Zeltiva which is naturally sheltered by mountains and hills. So Rod's name translates literally as "[he who is] rich in glory from the mountain"

[Archailist]

Honestly, I have no clue where Archailist came from. I just wanted a cool name ages back and thought "It's got to start with Arch. Arch sounds cool.. like you have Archbishops and other rubbish like that." The rest of it just eventually got slapped together after a lot of thought on what sounds cool. I might have been drinking a little because "Ale" was involved, but that changed to "Ail" and I also made a list of different names at some point that might have made up the last part.

When I made the name, I typed it into google and no search results were found. Now I type "Archailist" into google and it comes up with all the places I've made accounts. Google images is filled with mostly Mizahar things.

Has anyone tried that? Typed in their character name and checked what came up on google?

[Aventis]

Aventis is a company. :|

But yeah. Aventis just sounded... Okay you know what it sounded like nothing but it was late and I was nervous to rejoin Mizahar so I slammed myself on a keyboard and out popped an Eypharian named Aventis