Such as different names for a warrior class, rogue class, mage class etc. Most of the time i'll get some inspiration from some previously played games, and attempt to warp it into something nice. Although i've only got about 1 name im happy with

Starting with oblivion: Phantasma is just a "play" on the word "Phantasmal"(unreal)

For Skyrim, Veronica is more like a departure from my standard "unique-esque" naming scheme.

I take names of NPCs from other games - for example, my current character, Aerin, shares his name with a Skyrim character.
Edit: forgot to mention that I get the names from the links provided on this page: http://www.uesp.net/wiki/Lore:Names

I don't name my characters according to their class. I'm a roleplayer so I strive to make my character as 'round' (in the E.M. Forster sense) and as real and vivied as possible. When I look at the people around me in real life I don't think: secretary, plumber, car salesman. I think: Jack, Bob, Anne. Likewise, when I look at my characters I don't think rogue, warrior, mage. I think Nariene, Liriele, Aemyn. People are not their jobs. They are people first. As a roleplayer, I feel I should take the same approach to my characters.

I have a very simple procedure for finding my character's names. I ask my character what her name is.

If she doesn't tell me her name I know I haven't put enough thought into the character. My rule of thumb is: a character is ready for a name when I can hear her laugh. I'm confident that I know the character pretty well when I know what her laugh sounds like. When I reach that point I ask my character what her name is. If I don't get an answer I ask again later. Sooner or later I will have the right name. I will know it when I hear it.

In short, my advice is to name the character, not the class.

Same here and for the first three years or so he didn′t tell me. But back then I didn′t listen either so how could I have heard? He just had a default name and it wasn′t until one immersive day in Bruma I learned his true name. I remember it vividly. It was midday right in front of the Mages Guild. I was about to enter it and BAM! there it was. His name finally revealed to me

Hate to say it but most of mine come from TV shows. Yea not too original.

Then I guess you have character named MacGyver, Sheldon and Chandler?

Glances at signature. . .

For characters or for classes?

For characters, some have been a mixture of my kids' names, the best barbarian I ever had was named for an ex-gf's nickname and I sometimes peruse the Silmarillion, or just make it up right there, like Rodrigo, my current mage.

For classes, it's a little more difficult.. I don't want to enter cheesy land: Mage Slayer!! (evil voiceover) "Seer" or "Scry..." is nice to include in a class. I had a barbarian/druid Beast Seer. He used a lot of command spells for his woodland buddies. Perhaps a melee warrior from Hammerfell, from a particular village would be the "(insert clan name) Skirmisher", etc.

Perhaps for a rogue class, take a page from Harry Potter and include Padfoot in your class name. Stuff like that.

Most of my character's names in all games I play come from music or movies, as I'm an obsessive about them. My WoW main is Kranmar. My OB is Mulder and my Skyrim is Scully. To name a few.

The very first time I started an Oblivion game character I had no idea what type of names would be fitting so I just called my Khajiit "Bob" because I had never heard of the UESP wiki or had any idea of the races differences. "Bob" didn't live long enough to make any kind of impression on me other than he was very weak from being imprisioned so after wandering around Imperial City and talking to a few NPC's Bob left for Weynon Priory.The first bandits he came across ended his miserable life with a barrage of arrows and a few slashes of a blade.The next character and the one that I am still having adventures with is named "Erin Bantien",a nephew of Samuel Bantien,a retired locksmith who lives in Imperial City. My friend Erin trained under his Uncle and has become quite adept at gaining entrance to all those places that are thought to be secure by their owners.Not only is Erin a master locksmith,he has become very handy with a blade and is not to bad at destruction/illusion magic.Erin is a level 18 character at this point and I see him retiring to his home at Arbor Watch and maybe settling down with some pretty Breton in the future....we shall see as time goes on....

My Oblivion character (I've ran only one, used in both my two plays-through) is known throughout Tamriel, in these forums and to myself as "decrepit", or more rarely Decrepit with a capital D. It should come as no surprise that that is not his actual birth-name but rather a descriptive nom de plume. Truth of the matter is, I saddled him with an inappropriate name during character creation. Nothing vulgar or naughty or silly mind you. Just one you'd not normally associate with someone of Nordic extract. I therefore do not and will not make reference to it when reporting his misadventures.

How came this to pass? As mentioned elsewhere my decrepit avatar was originally conceived as a throw-away character, one with which to learn game mechanics, delete, and move on to bigger and better things. It didn't work out that way. We bonded early on and have been together ever since. (My saving grace is that I did spend a lot of time on his homely face.)

Had I known him to be a keeper I'd likely (but not assuredly) have given him some variant from my small pool of preferred RPG character names. This list of names has a unique and possibly amusing origin. It derives from a piece of junk-mail received during the last two years of my military career, placing its arrival in either 1991 or '92. The flyer's message has long since been forgotten, assuming I bothered to read it in the first place. What matters here is to whom the mail had been addresses.

My own name is rather bland, and I am not over fond of my middle name. The flyer had total mangled it, combining the letters from all three of my names in a quite unorthodox manner. In the process it transformed them into a thing of beauty. Having been into computerized role-playing games for several years by this point, I saw the possibilities immediately. From that time onward the vast majority of my game characters use one of those names or something derived from them.

Come to think on it, and here I contradict myself, my current decrepit avatar does indeed officially bear one of those names. Problem is, it's the wrong one. It's a fine name for an wood- or dark-elf but not, in my opinion, a Nord. That's the thing. You see, my character in all three previous Elder Scrolls entries had been a dark elf. Assuming my Oblivion character would end up that way too, I gave him a name to fit his ultimate race.

I eventually learned his true name (and yes, it derives from the list) but it's a moot point. “Decrepit” fits him to a tee. No sense fixing what ain't broke. In any case it is highly unlikely that I will ever divulge either his mistaken or true names in these forums.

An aside. The name of what might be my favorite role-play character, Lackwit Lickspittle, has nothing whatsoever to do with the 'list' and breaks my common practice of insisting the such characters bear sensible names for their race and environment. But even here I knew that Lackwit was no proper name.

This harkens back to my MMO days. I concocted a description of how he came to be known as Lackwit for all to see. Amazingly, I found the draft of that brief missive on my hard drive. (It was written many years and at least three computers ago.) Here it is, misspellings and other errors for once intentional:

Ahhhhhh....those were the days.

-Decrepit-

There's a little blue cloud floating above my chair, and all of my characters' names come out of that.

Names always give me the most trouble. I hate coming up with names. So I used to recycle the same ones from one game to another. A few years ago I got the idea to start taking them from history/mythology, and have been sticking to that since. Although I usually try to pick a name that will somehow suit the character. For example, one of my pure mages was Aradia (the Queen of the Witches). One of my archers was Artemisia. One of my Nord warriors was Hrafngoelir (meaning "who makes the ravens sing"). I just created a Native American-looking character (I used a Redguard for race), and she will be an animal summoner using mods I created. I named her Kachina. I have also had Boudica, Morrigan, Hera, Penthisilea, Prytania, Tomoe Gozen, etc...

I joke about my "blue cloud" (imagination) but I'd have to say my process is something like SubRosa's. I have a few long-time names that get repeated. Glargg is my male barbarian-type character, who is usually my first "test-run" of any new roleplaying game I play (Even when the game's protagonist has a name, I call him Glargg for filename purposes.) I have another oft-repeated name, Bettilde (or Bettilda), for a female warrior-type.

The rest of my characters' names are either inspired by historic/literary references, or are made-up names from bits of Latin/Greek/French/etc. whose meaning conveys something about the character. Or they're jokes, like Wabbajill, or Reebok gro-Letis, or Swims-With-Humans.

So, "Fortja" means "strong, yes" and sounds kind of Nordish to my ear. Desdaemone was a conjurer. Etta was inspired by a character in Robin Hobb's Liveship novels.

For me, character and name develop together. When that character-creation screen opens, the three things that happen first are Race, Gender, and Name. I already know these things before that screen opens. I know those three things before I know the character's face. Quite often, I hit the Random key over and over, until something "clicks," and there's a face to go with the character. My best characters have had almost completely random faces, with only a bit of adjusting. Etta jumped out of the screen and became Real to me the first time I saw her; I didn't change a thing.

I like faces that are different, and not necessarily "attractive." The face is what "talks to me," and tells me more of what the character likes to do. I start with a vague idea of a "class" and "back story" when I begin a character, but the face is what brings it all together. The eyes look at me, and tell me "Forget about that dirty old axe you were planning; it's not happening" or "You are planning to give me Illusion skill, aren't you? You are."

Fort means fast or quick and ja means yes

And "fort" ( or "forte") means "strong" in French, and "loud" in Italian.

You spoke of the Nordic languages so I thought I′d explain

I'm grateful for the information. I was thinking of the Latin "fort" root when I named the character, and, as I said, I thought the name sounded "Nordish." My other favorite Nord characters were Heddvild (a resurrection in Cyrodiil of a character found in Morrowind), and Bettilde Long-Thigh (a character who is presently halfway through the Morrowind Main Quest, and who may eventually be brought back to Cyrodiil.)

The names of my characters come naturally to me. Personality and name come simultaneously, or almost simultaneously, with personality usually being the first.

The look of my characters is also very important to me. It's there ever since I think of a character for the first time, and I can't change it.

Most of my characters have silent "h's" in their names. Can't help but like the h's. Aelah, Theya, Kahmet, Athyn and a big Phoenix-like trickster bird character I came up for other business, Qverethak. I guess I like exotic spellings.

I dreamed one of my characters soon after I thought of her for the first time. Her look became clear to me then, and helped her become even more vivid. She's the light-hearted archer type. Name's Kahmet, but have only RP'd her for a brief, and I mean really brief period of time.

If the game engine doesn't allow me to properly re-create the face of my character, I tend not to look at her/his face.

Am I the only one who thought he was asking for CLASS names? Well, whatever.


For Class names, I usually just use one of the standard preset class names that's close to my custom class. Sometimes I might take something different from lore, like a Breton Witch or Redguard Kensei. I avoid elaborate names like 'Shadowguard Avenger' or 'Pyroclast Theurgomancer' etc because I always end up looking at them later and saying to myself "What the hell was I thinking, that's the worst Mary-Sue purple-prose sack of howling poop-covered monkeys that I've ever conceived", which usually ends up in an aborted character and a restart.

For a character's personal name, I base it off the NPC naming schemes from Oblivion and Morrowind.

I let the Character pick their own name. Its usually the right choice.

All my character's names are a variation of my own name, but I base it off of what race I am. For example a Breton character would be names Dris Meltone, an Imperial would be Drenus Mellius.

I hope so. The title of this thread is: "How do you think of your character names?"

If it's class names, mine are really boring. I follow the same routine I did in Morrowind, where my character was filling out a census sheet. The class name is always something to do with my character's back-story, not what they're going to do in-game (I don't really know that until I get to know the character.) So my characters' classes are things like "Student" or "Farmer." My newest character, Cybella, is a "Merchant," even though I learned five minutes later that it's her step-father who was the "merchant," and that the "merchandise" he was dealing in was stolen and/or contraband, which is why she was kidnapped and held for ransom by a gang of thugs...but I digress...