This 24-page game supplement lists thousands and thousands of individual and family names, categorized by language/geography and (more haphazardly) by historical era. The book includes several dozen name lists covering:
Europe and the Americas--including American 1700s-1800s, British, Croatian, Danish, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Ancient Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Jewish (contemporary, not Hebraic), Latin, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Scandinavian (sorted by region), Serbian, Spanish, and Viking names.
The Middle East and Africa--including African (sorted by region), Arabic, Ancient Egyptian, Iranian, and Turkish names.
Asia and Polynesia--including Chinese, Indic, Japanese, Korean, Mongolian, Polynesian, Thai, and Vietnamese names.
Each list is arranged in a d100 or d20 table, so GMs and players can randomly generate names. Supplements don't get any more universal than this--and this edition helpfully points out on the cover that it is "compatible with all d20 System Role Playing Games!"
Gamemasters like me, who run things more or less by the seat of their pants, will find this supplement very useful. GMs who are tired of running games for Joe-Bob the Barbarian will find it a genuine boon to their existence.
On the downside, the art (what little there is) is decidedly so-so and the layout is clunky and hard on the eyes. It is sometimes difficult to see where one list ends and another begins, because the type is very small, the lists wrap from the bottom of the page back to the top, and lists are piled on one another in columns. The type size problem could only be improved by bumping up the page count, and thus the cost, so I think it's forgivable; the same is probably true of the wrapping lists. A light gray background behind every second list would improve readability, but this too would drive up the cost (since it would have to be printed in grayscale instead of pure black and white).
While I'm wishing, name lists for indigenous American cultures would be nice (Aztecs and Eskimos, among others), as would name lists for the ancient near east (Sumer, Babylon, etc), and, hey, why not Australian Aborigines, while we're at it? There is very little text here about naming customs--actually, just a note that "in Oriental cultures, the family name comes first." It would be nice to have more on naming customs, but of course that would expand the scope of the product beyond a simple (if extensive) list. The only rhetorical flaw I noticed in this is the recurrent use of "Oriental" for the more current (and PC) "Asian" or "East Asian."
All in all, I can see this supplement will become a valuable part of my GM arsenal. I wish more people were producing such pragmatic tools for GMs.
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(Due to spamming, old forum discussions are no linked.)