The Blog of Roon

This week’s Game WISH is about names. Duck. Duck now. I’m telling you.

No, seriously. Here’s how I do names: I check out the game world and the campaign, and try to do a name to match. Really. That’s all I do.

Take Dragonhunt. The area of the world I chose for my character’s home uses Germanic names. Okay, so Google a few namelists, and not much later she’s Renate von Adler. (Which may be a travesty, because I don’t know much about German, but it’ll do for now. Yes, I do know the first name is Latinate, thank you.)

Hannah Fisher needed a plain, ordinary Southern name, so she got one. Juskinah was originally Josquine, from a not-quite-French “Northern melancholy” setting (I’d been listening to Josquin desPrez for some reason). The Zakharans (who don’t quite speak Arabic) found the name unpronounceable and modified it suitably.

All right, I admit it, that isn’t all I do. I play with language and expectations thereof sometimes. “Shirley Addam” was chosen very deliberately and with malice aforethought, after I’d decided on his MacGuffin—and that is all the extra hint you’re getting until the Ellipse ends.

To tie this into last week’s WISH, sometimes names themselves can be character hooks. Afletana’s was, though it also fit the world. I adopted the bit in the 3e PHB about elves changing their names on adulthood. Afletana was from a part of the gameworld whose name was Bairhts, which is eminently Gothic, so I went to David and asked for the Gothic word for “forsaken.” (I do this to him a lot. More on that in a moment.) “Hm,” he said, “you won’t like this; it’ll end in -a.” As a rule, I hate and avoid female names that end in -a. Just too stereotyped.

“I’ll live with it,” I said. “Lay it on me.”

“Well, the word you want is ‘afletana,’ and it has the secondary meaning ‘forgiven.’”

Does it? Does it really? Hmmm… and that became her backstory and her goal, earning forgiveness for a bad mistake that cost ten lives and nearly got her forsaken by her goddess.

I did a similar thing with Tamasi. Her name is Sanskrit, which language I chose because she hails from a not-well-understood people from deep undersea, and the GM didn’t have any objections to an odd language. So I asked David for a word meaning “darkness,” as I had some vague ideas about a deep-mer darkness cult. “Here’s one. Tamah. It also means ‘ignorance.’” Well, bam, there’s my cult, right there, and I know Tamasi’s place in it to boot! You can read the result.

The GM, by the way, totally ran with my idea. It was great. Ireth’s taunt took some research on his part, but it’s working beautifully in context. Stanabhara, figuratively, means “brood sow;” this is nowhere actually stated on the bboard, though I did improvise a story behind Lokaapavaada (and was highly amused when the other players seized on the story instead of the literal meaning of the epithet, which was what the GM was getting at).

Okay, now I climb on the soapbox.

Grotty names—I’ve been guilty of them, but I got better and you can too. Just remember that names come from languages, okay? There’s lots of languages in the world. You don’t have to learn a language to pick a name from it, or create a name that might have come from it. All you have to do is get a sense of the sound system. Which is way easier than learning the whole language.

Would-be namers: the linguistic discipline you want a handle on is called “phonology,” and you can pick up the basics very quickly. The general ideas are that sounds can be classified, and classes of sounds change in fairly well-defined ways when they rub up against other classes of sounds. Once you understand some phonology, you can create names (for places as well as people) that don’t sound like something out of a crappy fantasy novel by a tone-deaf Tolkien imitator.

I hopped onto Blogshares to pick up a stake in Frogs and Ravens (I own ya now, Rana!). Shaking my head at my own valuation (okay, only now they decide it’s overvalued? sheesh!), I went to the news page to see if there was any news about P/E levels.

Isn’t this interesting. A spontaneous role-playing game based in BlogShares, with a clear setting, plenty of character interaction, and some nascent story arcs.

Roleplaying isn’t so strange. Much of it isn’t anything more or less than collective storytelling. Humans have been telling stories since they learned how to talk. Give them half a chance, and stories just bubble over from them.

Very cool. I’d be tempted to hop in, but I have my hands full with Passions, two Ellipses, and a Dragonhunt a-borning.

So Nacreon is having an extremely disturbing conversation with his rival General Krill, who got into House Amyriand disguised as a pilgrim.

Krill thinks that Tamasi’s people are corrupting the Emperor and his family. Naturally he is suspicious of Tamasi herself. I keep waiting for him to demand that Nacreon kill his daughter-in-law, though thus far Nacreon has allayed enough of his suspicions that he has not felt the need to do so.

I can’t resist tiny creepy moments, when I’ve enough out-of-character knowledge to engineer them. So I had one of the servants mention the “pilgrim’s” presence in the household, and make the perfectly straightforward request to be permitted to feed and house him.

Tamasi, who despite her fearsome reputation is genuinely a decent sort of person, immediately agreed, saying, “Whatever he asks for he may have,” all unconscious that the pilgrim had motive to ask for some extremely unsavory things…

Tiny creepy moments. A good use of out-of-character knowledge.

There has been a burst of activity in Abyssia. We now know why Krill was absent from Nikolao’s audience with the Emperor. And we know a lot of confusing and contradictory things about Princess Ireth.

Do I think she had Nikolao poisoned? I keep wavering. She is the obvious suspect, but I can’t figure why she’d give herself away to Isleen. Even just to gloat.

I do keep wondering if the plan miscarried. The other epithet Ireth laid on Tamasi—I most cleverly threw mud all over the place with Tamasi’s little homily in order to keep from having to talk about it—indicates that Ireth, whether she is pro-war or pro-peace, is most definitely anti-marriage. Perhaps they really did poison the wrong mer. (Which, if true, is hysterically funny, because Tamasi said as much to Nikolao when it happened, in all innocence and unknowing, meaning something altogether different. I love it when games do that!)

Tamasi being Tamasi, she didn’t lay all her cards on the table. With some people she might have, but not Nikolao. For now, suffice to say she really does want to know how Ireth comes by her knowledge, and how far that knowledge extends.

I have figured out how I’m going to handle the possibility that the Empire is money-grubbing, marrying Tamasi into the family in order to grab her personal fortune. My plan is, if I do say so myself, beautifully devious, in the same way Shirley’s lawsuit was. (And it’s even another legal trick. I’ve absolutely positively been hanging around the sharks too much.) Stay tuned…

Update: Hm. On a second reading, I think I may have Ireth all wrong. Her message to Tamasi looks suspiciously like a warning to sit up and take an active interest. (A warning Tamasi doesn’t need, thank you, but nonetheless.) Whatever game she’s playing, it’s multi-layered… and I am starting to think she’s playing it against Rilagan.

This week’s WISH asks about hooks—little bits of character background that potentially spark plots or character interactions.

Do I create them? Yes, absolutely. Shirley’s MacGuffin bristled with plot hooks, and I’m thrilled at the ones that got into the game. Hannah, too, has some folks in her past who might turn up again, not to mention a fiancé in her present.

As for Tamasi… well, it just wouldn’t make any sense to think of getting her married again without bringing up her first marriage, which (you will not be surprised to hear) was an unrelieved disaster.

Nor that isn’t all, either. I set up a structure of Mysterious Prophecy around Tamasi, though I don’t know if it will come into play because the GM hasn’t responded to my email about it. I’m cool either way, because once you remove the pseudo-cultural accretion, it boils down to “this person is going to live an unusual life,” and that’s basically guaranteed by her being an RPG character!

(Goes to show that playing with what a game takes as given can be fun…)

And there’s the mother of all tragic plot hooks, which I’ve left with the GM and he likes. That one’ll be a doozy, if/when it plays…

So, um, yeah, I like hooks. Without them, the characters are in the world but not of it, a phenomenon I loathe.

I don’t mind the GM coming up with new hooks. If nothing else, it’s a compliment; the GM finds this character interesting enough to work further into the world. Shirley’s friend Angus is one such hook; their meeting in Glasgow ought to be a hoot.

I suppose some people end up with control issues vis-a-vis their characters, but I don’t understand it. The game is a cooperative effort. As the characters impact the world, so the world should impact the characters. I think turning up old, forgotten acquaintances is perfectly in-scope.

Hooks that didn’t work… well, as you can tell, I tend to cast hooks all over the place; some get bitten at, some don’t, and that’s fine—in fact, it wouldn’t make sense any other way. Hooks that involve new NPCs seem not to get bitten at as readily as hooks that affect my character’s own reactions. I’m not sure why. Is it pure ease of integration? Or maybe I just don’t do good NPC.