GM's Notebook, pt 3

I've been fiddling with Google Spreadsheets, but it looks like it's not sufficient for my needs. It's slow, the toolbars take up too much space, and it doesn't look like I can do some of the useful randomization features I can in Excel. Excel is faster and I can customize it more too, so I think I'll go with that for now.

I also took a step back and changed sources. I'm using Kate Monk's Onomastikon for most of my names now. It has some unfortunate formatting problems with some names, like Arabic, but it's good for the most part. Plus, since a lot of the names are divided by source, I can leave out sets of names I'm not interested in, like Biblical names. I realized I don't care about name meanings, so I removed those.

I started gathering Romanian and Arabic names, for the Tiefling and Elven areas, respectively. I had to fall back on 20000-names.com for readable Arabic names. I also made a simple combination generator for them: FirstName RelationshipConnector FirstName Connector PlaceName. This produces full names like Sa'Id ibn Faiz al Aqabâ or Hana bint Farah el Fugayrâ. Not historically accurate, but perfect for my needs. (I envision my elves like the Valenar of Eberron. Skilled warriors and horsemen who venerate their ancestors.)

Right now, I have 5 random names generated for each of the following: Empire (German based) male, female, surname, city name, the same for Tiefling (Romanian based) and full names and city names for Elven (Arabic based).

When looking for Arabic city names I found the Geonames site. It's a great resource for this kind of thing. There's only a few city names for each country, but I grabbed them from multiple sources. It's also got multi-language glossaries and a ton of other similar things. I grabbed the months of the year in German.

I've added some Spanish and Maori names too, but I haven't decided who they will apply to. I also grabbed some random text generated by a Barsoomian name generator. I'm thinking those will make good intelligent monster names. I need some goblin/orc names, but I haven't found a source that's right yet. I tossed in some links in the sheet to other random generators on Abulafia, just so they're available when I need them.