Epic Science Fantasy Name Generator
Why did I decide to do this? I don’t know. But here’s a name generator for science fantasy/space opera/sword and planet characters. There’s some more information about the dataset this uses after the generator, for those who are interested, but if you’re not and you’re just here to create long lists of names then please enjoy doing that!
(Since WordPress sometimes plays funny with iframes, that embed might break. If it does you can find the generator here.)
The Dataset
There are two sources for the names here. The first, and most common, is simply pulling from two lists of names, first names and surnames. The fun part of writing it was actually coming up with the names themselves. First names are drawn from these sources:
- Noir detectives and femme fatales
- Golden Age of Hollywood actors and actresses, and the characters they portrayed
- Philosophers
- Roman Emperors
- Celestial bodies
- “Classic” (read: 1920s-1950s) English first names with the first letters switched with different letters.
The surnames are even more simple, drawing from noir characters and Golden Age actresses and actors almost exclusively. Originally I didn’t include these in the first names lists, opting to use just their surnames, but it became more fun when I included their full names.
There are 199 first names and 109 surnames in the first dataset, so it gives plenty of combinations on its own.
The second dataset is generating the “English first names with the first letter switched” randomly, combining a random suffix with a random prefix. I’ve set the probabilities of the generator so that these names occur half as often as the more “curated” ones, since they have a higher chance of outputting nonsense.
Enjoy!
The art used in this post is by Rick Guidice, taken from Public Domain Review.
