What's in a name? - Name List - Dungeonmaster Tools

When you absolutely must roll a 100...

Dungeons and Dragons can involve a lot of improvisation. You can plan out your adventures, roll up your stats for monsters, and attempt to anticipate your player's every move or reaction. But in the end, the players will do what they please. You may prep for the dungeon delve beneath the mountain, and your characters decide to seek out the floating castle they heard about six sessions ago. You've got nothing prepped for the floating castle, and now your players are obsessed with finding it. Quick thinking is needed.

This kind of thing happens all the time, but you can have some tools ready to make the minor challenges roll a bit smother (yes, a dice pun in a Dungeons and Dragons blog, big shock). One issue that I've run into many times is the characters deciding to talk to a random non-player character (NPC) they pick out of a crowd. All you said was, "you are on a crowded street" and suddenly our players are questioning a washer woman about the dragon they saw flying around the town. Sure you have to improvise her reaction, but the worst part is when they ask you her name.

Here's a tip: you can't name every random NPC "Bob", it is going to break immersion.

Instead you should always have a list of NPC names handy. At the very least have 10 male and 10 female. If you want to go crazy you can narrow it down by race too. So you can have 10 male dwarf names and 10 female dwarf names, and elf names, and halfling names, and dragonborn names and... well you get the idea. However you decide to do it, this little tool will save you a bunch of time head scratching and endless NPCs named "Bob".

It has just a lot of stuff, if not "everything".

One of my favorite supplemental books for 5th Edition Dungeons and Dragons is Xanathar's Guide to Everything. It is packed with great stuff for players and dungeonmasters alike. Well worth picking up after you have the core rulebooks. In its Appendix B at the end of the book it contains 17 pages of names that you roll up using a D100. It gives you fantasy names as well as historical names. Plenty of names to pick from when building adventures, characters or just to have handy for those random NPC moments.

There are also plenty of online tools for name generation out there. And these can be very handy to create your lists ahead of time.

When you do assign a name to the random NPC make sure you make some note somewhere with a brief description of the NPC, what name you gave him or her and what they told the party. This is necessary because for some reason your players are going to latch onto that one random NPC instead of the ones you spent hours creating, and they will proceed to bring them when you least expect it. So make sure you have these notes handy so when they ask to speak to Rezena the Dragonborn clerk in the tiny fishing village from session 2, and you are now in session 40 and you just happened to be passing that fishing village and they want to pop in and say "hi" you have an idea of who they are talking about.

So there you go, one of the most valuable DM tools and one that you won't regret having around, even if you are running a published adventure.