Off the Shelf Review: Gary Gygax's Extraordinary Book of Names

Well, well, well. It’s been a while since I put up an Off the Shelf Review, so here goes!

Looking up at my shelf, I happened to notice “Gary Gygax’s Extraordinary Book of Names“. “Well,” says I, “I think I’ll do a little discussing of that!”

Published by Troll Lord Games and written by Malcolm Bowers, it is part of the “Gygaxian Fantasy Worlds Series” in which it’s Volume 4. The only other book I have in that series is “Gary Gygax’s Nation Builder“, which is Volume 6.

Gygax (may he ever roll 20s) didn’t write the book, as I said before. He simply oversaw the writing of the series, and he provides a foreword in each book.

The Extraordinary Book of Names is excellent. I’m just going to put that out there.

To quote Amazon, “with over 100,000 names, name generators, and more, this sourcebook is a must-have for any game designer or writer. A veritable host of nationalities and cultures are covered from Indian, Korean, and Mongol to Aztec and Mayan. From Medieval English to Spanish, from the fantastic to the mundane, from Italian, Jewish, Polynesian, and more, this extraordinary collection covers it all. Furthermore, a whole chapter is dedicated to place names and another to epithets. For the d20 enthusiast, a new core class, the Onomancer, comes to life with new rules on the magic of names and the naming conventions used by your world’s powerful magi.”

Currently, over my shoulder, my wife is rolling up names in the fantasy section at the back of the book.

I’m going to be playing a Vistani Fortuneteller (yes, we’re periling the Mists of Ravenloft) in our next game, and so I simply looked up Gypsy names. And what a plethora of names there was. I didn’t know much about gypsies, and the section gave me a lot of information about their culture, which I found interesting.

In short, it’s a great book to pick up if you want to be able to quickly come up with names for NPCs or even PCs.