Jade | February 12, 2010
Tired of games where all the characters are named Ariel or Thorin? What a character name that sounds distinctive but not too far out? What about using a real-world name? Perhaps something historical or from another culture. In earlier editions of Beyond Fred, I covered Roman and Russian names. But what if you want something [...]
Category: Building characters |
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Tags: beyond fred, character creation, italian, names
Jade | January 15, 2010
Here it is — the final post of our What’s in a Name? series. Today we’re talking about alphabets.
Well, actually not about alphabets. While you can create a whole new alphabet for your language, it’s a lot of work to do just to create names. Especially since unless you’re writing out all of your game [...]
Category: Musings, Worldbuilding |
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Tags: Campaign creation, language, names, world building
Jade | December 30, 2009
Image by quinn.anya via Flickr
It’s day 3 of our series on creating a naming language and today we’re talking about stress. Not that kind of stress — this is the emphasis we place on one syllable over the others within a word or name. Setting a set stress pattern for names can help keep your [...]
Category: Musings, Worldbuilding |
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Tags: Campaign creation, language, names, world building
Jade | December 14, 2009
Welcome to Day 2 of our series on creating a naming language.
Every language has its own particular sound. Japanese sounds different from Spanish and few people would mistake guttural German for tonal Chinese. Frequently, with just a little education, we can tell which language is being spoken, even if we don’t we don’t know a [...]
Category: Musings, Worldbuilding |
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Tags: Campaign creation, language, names, world building
Jade | December 11, 2009
Creating names can be one of the most challenging parts of creating a game setting. Sure, you can name things whatever happens to come to mind, but that can create names from all over the map (literally, if you’re borrowing names from the real world). You can end up with the Boxboggle river in the [...]
Category: Worldbuilding |
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Tags: Campaign creation, names, world building
Jade | November 6, 2009
Sometimes the hardest part of building a character is coming up with a good name. You can always take a name from Tolkien or other fantasy novels, but you’ve seen those names over and over and you want something a little different, but not way out there. How about an historical name? Or one from [...]
Category: Building characters |
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Tags: beyond fred, character creation, names, russian
Jade | October 5, 2009
Finding a good name is sometimes the hardest part of designing an NPC. You want something more exotic than “Fred the Fighter”, but “Frewxyque the Grand Thunder Duke” becomes too hard to say with a straight face after the first first time. Baby name books can help, but some of the best names come from [...]
Category: Building characters |
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Tags: beyond fred, character creation, names, roman