I recently added Gary Gygax’s Extraordinary Book of Names to my gaming library. The remainder of this post reproduces the review I posted at DriveThruRPG.

Okay … it’s a book of names. A big book full of lots of names. What else do you need to know?

Seriously, this book does have a few features that set it apart from other name books (like the Judges Guild Book of Archaic Names, for example). The first 20 pages, more or less, present an interesting and often useful discussion of names and naming. It’s not perfect; some of the phonemic associations suggested on p. 20 are over-the-top and have no actual linguistic validity, while some of the claims made are just plain sexist (“A blunt or forceful name like Darg or Rathek should belong to a male,” pp. 19–20) and others reflect the author Malcolm Bowers’s (no, not Gary Gygax, despite the series title) own sense of aesthetics, which may not match the GM’s. Indeed, some of the aesthetics proposed here are inconsistent on the same page; p. 20 tells us that a final /k/ sound “help vicious invective” but also convey “beauty, peace, and grace”—which should have clued Bowers in that his phonemics are mostly impressionistic nonsense. On the other hand, the brief discussion of onomancy and “true names” (pp. 21–24) could give GMs lots of interesting ideas to work into their campaigns, regardless of the rules set.

The bulk of this book really is a big list of personal names, arranged chiefly by geography and culture: Britain, Africa, America, Asia, Europe, the Mediterranean, and Oceania each get major sections with multiple subsections. Within each subsection, readers get a brief orientation to the geo-cultural group in focus, pronunciation guides, and lists of personal and family names, with other types of names (bynames or surnames, for example) also provided where appropriate. According to the publisher, readers ultimately get over 100,000 specific names in this format, making the book a good resource for GMs who need lots of NPC names, even on the fly.

The aforementioned name lists take up a little over half of the entire book, but there’s more. A colorful epithet can add a lot to a name (“Richard the Lionheart” sounds so much more buff than “Richard I”), so Bowers gives readers a whole section devoted to generating colorful epithets. As befits a “Gygaxian” product, Bowers supplies a random table for generating the form of an epithet (d20 roll: 01-06 yields “description,” 07-09 yields “thing,” 10-12 yields “description + thing,” and so on), but then the source lists that follow the random table aren’t organized according to these categories! Not that GMs will have a hard time using these lists, but it would have been more convenient to have lists of “descriptions,” “things,” “actions,” and so on labeled as such. The tables of titles are very Eurocentric, and while Bowers does offer some titles from non-European cultures to offset this, a strong bias remains evident (“Usually generic titles are enough. ‘Chief’ applies equally well to the head of any clan or tribe, for instance.) Book 3 also includes some suggestions for deriving names of organizations, military squads, and so on, which a GM can quite easily put to good use.

Book 4 deals with place names, and I was very pleased to find this section. Europe still dominates, but plenty of non-English words and word-fragments are given to fire a GM’s imagination. Yet here the book fails to provide a service that would have been invaluable: the theoretical discussion of place-names stresses the meanings of names, but Bowers does not tell his presumably English-speaking readers what all of the various words mean! Thus, for example, Bowers gives readers a list of Arabic colors—aswad, azrak, asmar, akhdar, sinjabi, ahmar, abyad, and asfar—but he provides no guidance as to which color is which! For Bowers, “place names” includes names for taverns and inns—quite commonly needed in fantasy RPGs—and this section comes in quite handy.

In book 5, Bowers discusses the construction of completely fantastic names. Some of this discussion is very helpful (“One [thing] that stops most people is the dreaded ‘unpronounceable’ … This sort of thing is pretty much pointless in a game where you have to speak the name out loud”), while other parts devolve into purely arbitrary pedantry (“One [apostrophe] in a made-up name might be considered debatable; more than one is unforgivable”). If you’re stuck for a fantasy name, try choosing one from Bowers’s lists on pp. 172–182. There’s even a random syllable table on p. 183 if you want to throw caution completely to the winds, and this table is followed by a whole series of tables broken down by creature type (for goblins, trolls, orcs, fairies, etc.).

If you’re in a silly mood, grab one of the names from Appendix A – Spoof Names, and throw your PCs into an encounter with the wizard Levy Tate or sic on them the unshakable bard Oliver de Plaice.

Although published in the “Gygaxian Fantasy Worlds” line, this book is not just for fantasy RPGs. Since most of the names presented are real-life names from real-world cultures, modern games can benefit from the book almost as much as fantasy games. Indeed, Appendix B – Name Distribution seems more useful for a modern game than a fantasy one. In this appendix, Bowers presents a country-by-country breakdown of naming proportions (based on a d% scheme). Yet the usefulness of this appendix is hampered by its use of categories that don’t appear elsewhere in the book. For example, the entry for Denmark reads “Danish (01-99), Turkish (00).” “Turkish” is also an entry in for Germany, the Netherlands, Macedonia, Bulgaria, Iraq, and of course, Turkey. However, if you pull out your d%, roll a Turkish name, and then go looking elsewhere in this volume for appropriate Turkish names, you won’t find any (save for four titles on p. 140), so you’ll probably have to fall back on Arabic, though Arabic and Turkish are not the same language. So what’s the point of listing Turkish and such in the name distribution tables if no Turkish names are provided in the book? (And what’s up with the d30 tables? No, really, d30?)

The content of the Extraordinary Book of Names is quite helpful. I’ve used it to good effect as a GM, and expect to get a lot more use out of it. However, as a PDF product, the Book of Extraordinary Names falls terribly flat in one important regard: it’s neither bookmarked nor hyperlinked, making navigation through the 210-page beast an annoying and time-consuming proposition. And since the book is sold as a secured PDF, one must either crack the security to add one’s own bookmarks, or live without bookmarks and spend precious time scrolling through to find the right page.

Some players and GMs might be put off by the $20 price tag on the PDF download, even though this represents an enormous savings off the $35 printed edition. Compared to other name lists, though, it’s by no means out of line. Some other “name generator” products give you c. 200 names for $5—that’s about 2.5¢ per name—but the PDF version of Gary Gygax’s Extraordinary Book of Names gives you over 100,000 names (or so says the publisher) for $20—that’s more like .02¢ per name, plus you get all of the value-adds that I’ve mentioned above. So yes, $20 is a significant outlay, but if you accumulate several smaller products for $5 each, you’ll soon find yourself at $20 with only 800 names in your pocket. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend the product for players, who just need to generate names for a few PCs, but for a GM looking to fill a world with memorable NPCs, this book comes in very handy and beats the price curve on similar products (even in its printed version, actually).