Review of The Everyone Everywhere List Random Name Generator, Third Edition

Believe it or not, there are some people who couldn't name their PCs if they had a BFG pressed against their skulls and told to do it in five seconds or become chunky salsa. For most people, there are a lot of generators available for free online or offline. For the rest, there's products like this one.

The idea is simple enough. You pick a culture from the list on the front cover, open the booklet to that page and then either choose or made a random roll--usually a D100 or D20--on one or more columns for that culture. The result is nigh-certain to sound right to anyone who isn't keyed into the peculiarities of that culture; I haven't hit any yet, but I'm not familiar with those peculiarities. Suffice to say that nothing that sounds grossly out of place has come up for me.

It bears noting that the names generated from this are from Earth's past and present; this isn't a lame fantasy name-making thing, so it's useful for historical games, present-day games, and science fiction games with a human culture (or more) in the setting. This is not a bonus, but a necessity; there's be no justification at all for this product if it wasn't grounded in reality and made generic.

Do you need it? Hell no; this is a pure fluff piece, one aimed at the gamers who have problems naming their characters or need to run off a lot fast without using either a computer or a phone book. As gaming products go, this is the cotton candy end of things. You need not feel good or bad for having it. That said, it does what it sets out to do in a competant fashion and with no excuses.