Naming Conventions of High Seas

I discovered a suggestion that I have recently been putting to good use. The suggestion is basically "take a real name and change one letter".

I named Prior Trakis and Abbot Waxter of the Monastery of Pelor on Perch Hill after a pair of friends I have. Viblet Kewne is from a random regular-person name generator (the last name was Keyne or possibly Keene, and I can't remember what the first name was -- I don't think it was Violet. That just goes to show how effective this method is, if even I can't tell what name I started with). Jov Sauart is another with that method. I think I'll mostly use this for humans from Shell and a minority of mongrelfolk.

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For Sahuagin, I use roughly the naming conventions from the third-party Slayer's Guide to the Sahuagin. The BBEG's dragon from my first campaign was a sahuagin cultist called Searches-the-blackest-depths-and-loves-what-she-finds-there, with other sahuagin going by such names as Reading-reading-hunt-with-book and Big-fella-kills-whales.

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Mind flayer names, based on precedents from all over WotC canon, tend to be all Xs and Cs and Qs in unpronounceable configurations. Thus, the ascended mind flayer BBEG of High Seas, Quasxthe. And the level 1 mind flayer PC, Kibstellischa. And the old oracle of Ilsensine, Absterbossk. And the latter two, now that I consider it, contain no Xs or Qs and only one C. Huh. I think I used a mind flayer name generator for Absterbossk.

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Omorashi humans, of course, have Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and other East Asian names.

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I was reading Libris Mortis, and in the introduction, I discovered that the name is intended to be (bastardized) Celestial for "From the Books of the Dead" (you may hear people refer to this book as the "Book of Bad Latin" - it's actually perfectly acceptable Latin for this meaning). The interesting thing about this is that it implies (bastardized) Celestial = Latin.

Interestingly, before I discovered that, I had decided that Romus, the fantasy counterpart culture of ancient Rome, was ruled by a descended movanic deva. Obviously, the reason why the cives Romi (Romo? Genitive or ablative? "Of Romus" or "from Romus"? I'm not actually entirely sure!) have Latin names is because they actually have Celestial names, because Celestial is the state language of Romus, because Vozdael Arkhigael says so. (The capital is still called "Landrise" instead of something in Celestial because hey look a firetruck!)

Incidentally, my naming custom for celestial creatures was to look up words that describe them on wiktionary, consult the Arabic, Aramaic, and Hebrew translations for those words, string them together, and stick -el or -iel or -ael on the end of them. I'll probably add Latin to this system now, if I don't just switch entirely to Latin for celestials and leave the arabic/aramaic/hebrew for fiends. But there's precedent for celestials having this naming convention, so I think I'll stick with it, and just say that angels, archons, devas, demons, and devils all have names that are mixtures of celestial, infernal, and abyssal.

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Mongrelfolk, going from Races of Destiny, have either weird or normal contemporary human first names, normal contemporary human surnames, and appended onto the beginning of the surname, a random three- or four-letter word. Peph Box-Cooper, Laurence Tepp-Stewart, Bob Har-Johnson.

Mongrelfolk place names, of course, are just silly, but generally bizarrely descriptive. The Disreputable City, the River Easy, the Don't Drink This River (aka the Poison River), Noodleton, Winkle Village, Stank Cave, Perch Hill, Mount Dis. Endeesy, of course, is a quick way of saying N.D.C., New Disreputable City.

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Engineers have names randomly selected from both the gnomish and dwarven languages in Races of Stone.

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Anything dragon or dragon-descended has a name selected from the draconic dictionary in Races of the Dragon. (Well, more specifically, this draconic translator, which includes the RotD list as the core of its dictionary.)