Silly Names (for NPCs)

The above screenshot makes the rounds every so often, and I always get a good giggle out of it. It’s from a Japanese baseball game for the Super Nintendo (Faitingu Baseboru, or Fighting Baseball; 1994). The clash of linguistic and cultural convention, as well as the game’s original title, always makes me happy. And I think I’ve figured out how to apply these laughs on the tabletop!

All Judges, DMs and GMs are surely familiar with the feeling of a game going of on a tangent, players focusing on the wrong thing, requesting names for irrelevant NPCs and so on… Why not solve this by giving these sidetrack characters distinctly stupid names! If they request the name of the third squirrel on the left, why not give it to them! It’s Dwigt Bonzalez! Make sure they write it down on their notes! Hopefully doing this a few times gently points the group towards a more productive direction. That, or your game shifts towards a fair bit sillier direction…

With this in mind, I wrote up a table for generating silly NPC names, in the spirit of the above screenshot. It’s actually the only KitN related thing I managed to do last summer, what with my health and medication stuff being as rough as it was. Surely not my best work, but I hope someone gets a little laugh out of it.

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Stay safe, stay healthy.

Cheers,
AMP

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