In Short

Years of use with dozens of games has led me to conclude that A World of Baby Names is incredibly useful for the RPG fan when it comes time to choose an interesting name. With a huge number of names presented along with an easy to read description of the origin and meaning of the name, this book provides enormous support for both GMs and players.

The Physical Thing

For $16.95, this 626 page black and white softcover showcases excellent production values for its cost. It lacks art and pretty formatting, instead focusing on delivering as much content as possible. The formatting used is good at delivering a lot of useful information in a small amount of space. What's more, an index of all the names included is located in the back which can serve both as a general overview of all names by letter and as a quick resource for finding a given name and its meaning.

My Take

I had heard interesting stories of using naming schemes by culture to produce fun at the table, and so I decided I wanted an actual baby names book. While there are plenty of online resources, having something to pass around the table has proven itself to be far more useful. I researched various name books, even flipping through them at the local bookstore until I stumbled upon A World of Baby Names. The only thing I wanted was names separated by culture and sex, with a brief description and nothing else. This book does exactly that, and with over 30,000 entries drawn from over thirty cultures I've never had trouble coming up with a host of worthwhile names in play.

Let me give you a few examples of where this book has really shined. The most obvious is for naming my characters. Consider a Dungeons and Dragons game where I'm playing in a generic fantasy world. I want to be a human Paladin who was part of a large established military. I present the character as being very similar to an English knight, so I can go and look over male English names. I spot Leland, which sounds sort of right for the character I've pictured in my mind. The entry tells me the etymology of the name, offering up that it's derived from leah, laege, and land. The name has a meaning like “clearing” or “fallow” and sounds like the sort of name that might have come from an old farming family. The book even provides me with the correct pronunciation of the name.

From a DM's perspective I've found assigning real world naming schemes to certain areas in my fantasy and sci-fi RPGs can add a much more immersive feel to the game. For example, the last time I ran Exalted the naming convention for citizens of the Blessed Isle was to use a Roman naming pattern. This resulted in Dragon Blooded NPCs that had very intimidating sounding names, and as I used the same idea for other parts of Creation the players were able to generally NPC point of origin based on their name. It worked well for that game, and it has continued to work well for other games.

I've also found the book to just generally be useful in all forms of gaming. I use it to make lists of NPCs so my games can take on a sandbox feel and I don't have to come up with lots of interesting and unique names on the fly, instead just writing down NPC information by the name on my master list. Players use it to name their family members, invent interesting contacts, or to create false names for their master spy. Even outside of pen and paper RPGs I've found the book useful. I've used it to find names for MMO characters, to aid in writing, and even to look up names in order to understand their meaning.

Simply put, this is the best gaming purchase I've ever made and it has seen enormous use in play. I highly recommend it to anyone looking for a name generation resource.