A Fun Way to Ganerate Names

When you’re making any sort of story, whether you’re GMing an RPG or writing a book, chances are you’ll need names. And in speculative fiction, names can be pretty much anything. There are a lot of different ways to come up with names but I have a method I like to use that I’ve never seen anyone else do. I’m going to call it the Letter by Letter method.

First you separate the alphabet into two rollable tables, one for vowels (including Y) and one for consonants (not including Y). You then roll 1d20 for consonants and 1d6 for vowels. Then you choose which result you want to add onto the name. Often you’ll be kind of forced to choose one. Like if the name is currently Adz, and you roll a Q and an A, you probably don’t want the name to start with Adzq. After choosing which letter you want, you roll again, and again, and again, adding each result onto the end of the name until you have something you’re happy with.

Vowels:

1. A
2. E
3. I
4. O
5. U
6. Y

Consonants:

1. B
2. C
3. D
4. F
5. G
6. H
7. J
8. K
9. L
10. M
11. N
12. P
13. Q
14. R
15. S
16. T
17. V
18. W
19. X
20. Z

This method can give some pretty varied results, which I find works best in Star Wars-like settings where names can be pretty much any old soup of syllables. Here’s a few example names I made with this method: Jzuyo, Dovdogo, Zvostoi, Nuohed, Jan, Tam, Biplo, and Elvet. They sound like they’d make a wild space faring rock band.

If you want names to be more consistent, you can use the LBL method to make a few starter names for each culture/language, and then extrapolate letter patterns from those to make more names that feel coherent together.

The cool part about this method is that there’s so many ways it can be altered. You can alter the tables to remove letters, alter letter probabilities, or add letters that aren’t used in english. Or you could roll more dice to give you more freedom in letter choices. I sometimes use it just to make a starting point name that I then change to sound better. The only limit is your imagination 🌈

As always, feedback is much appreciated. I’d love to know if you use this process to name anything, and if you’d like to see more in depth posts on creating names for world building. I’m pretty into linguistics and conlanging, so I can go a lot deeper than this.

I will leave you with this:

Certain small birds native to the lands surrounding Paris have gained a peculiar habit as of late; they have been biting passers by, but only when perched atop man-made barriers. The locals have begun referring to this phenomenon as the French finch fence pinch.