Reddit reviews Gary Gygax's Gygaxian Fantasy Worlds Volume 4: Extraordinary Book Of Names (Gygaxian Fantasy Worlds volume IV)

"Gary Gygax's Extraordinary Book of Names."

https://www.amazon.com/Gygaxs-Extraordinary-Gygaxian-Fantasy-Worlds/dp/1931275564

There are lots of good online name generators out there; one of my favorites is [Rinkworks[(http://rinkworks.com/namegen/).

I also always suggest investing in Gary Gygax's Extraordinary Book of Names. I'm sure you if you cruised eBay and Amazon for a while, you could pick one up for cheaper than $100.

A fantastic book for this is _Gary Gygax's Extraordinary Book of Names_. Includes tons of names from various human cultures as inspiration, plus hundreds of fantasy names, and tables for randomly generating names.

Sadly, very expensive right now even used, but keep an eye on eBay.

Well, there's also Gary Gygax's Extraordinary Book of Names.

It's pretty hard to find (and as a rsult a bit expensive) but the best resource for names of any type is Gary Gygax's Extraordinary Book of Names. It has thousand of names organized by region and time with detailed explanations of naming structures of different cultures and pronunciation. It also has a decent section in the back dedicated to "fantastical" names for inns, dragons, etc. I found a copy in the back of a Barns and Nobles on sale years ago and it remains one of my most prized RPG books.

AmazonSmile Link: Gary Gygax's Extraordinary Book of Names (Gygaxian Fantasy Worlds volume IV)

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https://www.amazon.com/Gygaxs-Extraordinary-Gygaxian-Fantasy-Worlds/dp/1931275564

Gary Gygax wrote an entire book on the subject. Rumor has it he wrote it when he hiding from the CIA for possibly colluding with demons and starting a death cult as a means to show that his primary focus is on humans and human culture.

I bought this book years ago:

http://www.amazon.com/Gary-Gygaxs-Gygaxian-Fantasy-Worlds/dp/1931275564

It mostly helps if you're playing games set in the "real world" (like White Wolf, Call of Cthulhu, or Cyberpunk), though a lot of the names can easily apply to D&D universes as long as your DM isn't anal about not using "real" names (ie, you can have a character from Calimshan named or someone from Luskan named Otto). I've personally used names like Lysandra (an Elf Battle Master Fighter) or Vaughn (a Ffolk Dunken Master Monk) for D&D characters. And that book in particular has a chapter on "made up" names that are mostly just random syllables jammed together if you want something more exotic.

That book's probably not a realistic option for most players today, but you can get more or less the same thing by looking for baby name books (which you can probably check out for free from your local library), or just use online baby name sites (or even Wikipedia's "given names by culture" categories). Just pick a region that fits the feel of the character you're trying to make (ie, for Illuskans go Germanic, Calimshan tends towards Arabic names, the Ffolk are blatantly Irish/Welsh, etc), and pick a name that feels like it would fit someone from there.

As long as you're not naming your elf royal "John" or "Bob" or something, you're probably good.

I've collected names for years but have never had enough. I have an old baby name book around here somewhere, as well as Gary Gygax's Extraordinary Book of Names. I keep my own general lists but for my recent drow book I've generated names per chapter based on the sounds I want. (The part of GRRM's talk, when he mentioned knowing the kind of sound you want for groups of people spoke to me.) But I still try not to have repeating names when I run games to help players tell and keep NPCs apart.