Publisher's blurb:
There are lots of name lists out there, so what makes this one different?
When creating a single character we can choose their names based on the name’s meaning, or how it sound, or what names we like, but what happens when the players ask the name to a barman you barely thought about? Or to an NPC you made up on the fly because they decided to follow something that resembled a clue but that you didn’t intended as such?
Some GMs decide names on the fly, unconsciously drawing from their own experience, but that is a rather limited pool of names and lots of NPCs end up named as John, Jack or Michael. Some GMs use celebrities’ names to instantly get an appearance and maybe a personality, but that pool is just as small and maybe you don’t want those NPCs to be as obvious. Some GMs even hand-wave the names so the players know which persons are important and which ones are atrezzo. Last, some GMs use names lists.
There’s nothing wrong with names lists, I have used them myself, but they have the problem of frequency. The names “Maud” and “Michael” have the same chance because they both appear once, but in real world they don’t. Adding racial ancestry to the NPC can make the problem worse, making a lot of NPCs in a Triads Gangs story share the surnames Lee, Wang or Yen.
Those two problems are what we try to address in this notebook.
Each of the five hundred entries includes information about gender and racial ancestry along with spaces for you to write your own notes when creating a NPC on the fly, just so you can print a bunch of pages and use them in your session or during prep.
This work uses the public information in the United States census to consider names and surnames with regards both at how frequent they are statistically and how frequent they are statistically to a particular racial ancestry.