Larian Studios Forums General Chat RPG Chat Naming Characters

I have some sort of method/madness thing going when naming my characters so was wondering what others do.

In my case, I generally use names of dogs that I have or have had. Poor Raze must have really been wondering when I sent him saves and the characters had names like Kalkaki, Ochi, Nashoba, Nanaloma, etc. Story: my main breed is the Louisiana Catahoula Leopard Dog which was originally a native American breed. Oral history says that the native dogs that they had were crossed with dogs that DeSoto left behind (Spanish Mastiffs and Spanish Greyhounds) to form the Catahoula. Later, when the Frenchmen that were expelled/left Canada arrived, they adopted the breed and crossed them with Beaucerons to form the modern breed. Well, I was tired of hearing French names for the dogs so I named mine using a translation dictionary from the closest language I could find (Chickasaw) to the now extinct Natchez language of the original Catahoula owners. My translations are probably quite wrong but (in order) the above I believe translates to: Rocky, Little, Wolf, and Mystery. Anyway, that's my story - what's yours?

Much more interesting naming strategy than mine! In fact I think it is one of the more detailed and in-depth that I've seen. And I think it doesn't matter so much how accurate the translations are but that you tried to find something that was in the general spirit of things: names are quite flexible things anyway.

Mine is as I say a lot less interesting, though one I retell periodically, and indeed I wrote to someone just the other day about it for randomly different reasons. Most of my characters are called Vometia which also leaked over into my online identity; the choice behind that name wasn't necessarily a sensible one but more pragmatic or resigned and begun with trying to choose a nice, lore-correct name for my Oblivion character back in the day. Couldn't, even after spending a long time prevaricating and researching, so I eventually went to the other extreme out of sheer frustration and chose a stupid name instead. Even that took a while but I settled on Pratchett's minor Discworld goddess of binge drinking and hangovers. It originally took the form Red Vometia as an amusing take on Red Sonja but I figured that level of fantasy was too cheesy even for video games so I dropped the Red.

Occasionally I diverge and use a similarly unhelpfully-named sibling in her place like Anoia and Lucretia, but I normally just stick with the usual and she's remained my ever-present companion in RPGs since 2006.

I think you did the right thing ditching "Red".

I was hoping this would fish out a few more forum users but I guess they're all in the OS-II area.

I think very few people scroll down to the bottom of the list, unfortunately! I periodically pester Raze to move the general section nearer the top...