Name Generator Options

[James McMurray]

It's not hadowrun specific, but I thought it might come in handy.

I made a random name generator. In many ways it's just a conglomeration of the dataases from other name generators I could find on the web, although I've added nicknames to the options.

If you do want a nickname, be prepared to have to do a little mixing and matching though, as the nicknames don't conform to the source filter. For instance, generating 10 Chinese male names with nicknames got me:

1. Rongfang 'DiBi' Tsien
2. Xiumin 'Frankie Breeze' Hsiao
3. Yanjun 'Fat Vinnie' Jianbua
4. Shing 'Shorty' Fong
5. Fai 'Mongo' Lan
6. Jing-wei 'K.K.' Lau
7. Lok 'Madame' Chen
8. Yuying 'Jimmy Nap' Song
9. Shipeng 'Hippie' Shing
10. Xingjiang 'Underdog' Kou

Frankie Breeze, Jimmy Nap, and Fat Vinnie don't fit very wel, and if the guy's nickname is "Madame" he'll be an interesting character one way or the other. Underdog and Mongo could fit, as might some others if translated (either actually or by using my lazy man method of "his middle name is Tak Ban, which means Shorty").

If you know of a good website for names, please let me know. Right now I've got Middle Eastern, Spanish, Chinese, Egyptian, English (and Americanized), German, Greek, Hindi, Japanese, Latvian, Russian, African (mostly Swahili), Thai, and Viking names. For a bunch of those I'm having to use first names as a second lookup for a surname because I couldn't find a good list of surnames from that area. They look ok to my layman's eyes, but for all I know they're the equivilent of giving someone the last name of Jimmy or Sarah.

I'd like to keep the database growing, so if you've got any cool name resources you use please let me know, especially if they're sorted by region.