GM's Notebook, pt 2

I spent some time filling in bits of my GM Notebook. I started with people's names.

20000-names.com had a lot of German first names and meanings, almost 1000, I think. That's actually too many. I need to go through that list and pull out some of the similar variations and dull names. I should probably randomize the list occasionally too, so I don't see all the "A" names first. The site was kind of lame and trashy, but the content was good.

For last names, a good article on German Names from About.com had a few dozen good ones. There was also a nice little find that had German root words for place names.

I also found some good first and last names from the Story Games Names Project. Here's a link to the index of all the names.

Lastly, I rediscovered Abulafia, which is the worst name for a site ever. Fortunately the URL is http://www.random-generator.com. Abulafia is a wiki with some special code to make random generators really easily. If you want a generator that they don't have, you can try to make one. Or you can add options to an existing one. I've bookmarked several of their generators in case I need them in-game, but I'm not going to bother pulling out individual entries ahead of time.

After I was done with names for a bit, I hit up some of the Wikipedia articles I found earlier and used them to compile a list of common vocabulary that I can drop in. Stuff like Herr, Frauline, schnell, meister, etc... I also went poking around for German terms for weapons and armor. I didn't do so well on armor, but for weapons I found zweihander ("two-hander", greatsword), katzbalger ("Cat brawler", short sword), kreigsmesser ("war knife", falchion) and some more like that. MyArmoury.com was also good resource for info on weapons. I may hit it up later when I'm working on other areas.

I got a few town names as well, and found a site that cross-referenced modern German city names with a 16th century Czech list of cities in the HRE. I just pulled out the modern names, that's good enough. I'd like to mix up some of those names with the usual English descriptive names, so I should probably trim that list down as well.

I started looking for tavern names, but I ended up back at Abulafia and I think their generator will be sufficient. Next up, I might start looking at food and drink.