Fantasy Name Generator

Roll character names from a curated corpus of 174 surnames and 1,100 given names across five fantasy races. Every entry ships with its original spelling, a zh-TW rendering, and an etymology note, so a chosen name can be justified rather than merely produced.

This skill is self-contained: scripts/namegen.py is pure standard-library Python and reads only assets/corpus/. Copy the whole directory anywhere and it keeps working.

Generate

python3 scripts/namegen.py --race elf --sex female -n 8

Paths are relative to this skill's directory — use the skill's absolute path when your working directory is elsewhere.

Default output gives the display name, the original spelling, which pool it came from, and the etymology of both halves:

奇幻‧精靈（fantasy-elf）
命名慣例：精靈壽命長、氏族觀念淡薄，正式場合常用「本名、家族／棲居地複合詞」…

1. 戴莉爾‧威爾德布瑞亞爾  (Daeliel Wildbriar)  〔女性〕
   名：Daeliel — 霞光＋…之女 — 詞根 Dael（霞光）接陰性後綴 -iel
   姓：Wildbriar — 野薔薇

Options

Flag	Values	Notes
-r, --race	human, elf, dwarf, orc (beastfolk, half-orc), halfling (hobbit), random	Default random. Resolved once per run, so -n 8 gives eight names for one character, not one name each from eight races. An unknown race is an error, never a silent fallback.
-s, --sex	female, male, neutral	Omit it and each name rolls its own pool — useful when the character's gender is still open.
-n, --count	integer	Default 5. Ask for more than you need; picking is the cheap part.
--seed	any string	Reproduces a run exactly. Use it when a name must be re-derivable later.
-f, --format	full (default), plain, json	plain is one display name per line; json carries every part and is what you want when feeding another script or writing data files.
--allow-duplicates	flag	Collisions are re-rolled by default.
--list-packs	flag	Prints each pack's pool sizes, naming conventions, and style notes.

Run --list-packs first when you are unsure which race fits, or when you need the in-world naming conventions to write surrounding lore consistently.

Pick

Generating is one command; the value you add is the choice. Roll roughly three times as many candidates as you need, then narrow using what you know about the character:

Match the etymology to the character, not just the sound. The corpus annotates what each part means. A stoic frontier guard reads better as 寒水 (Coldwater, 冷冽水源的地景取姓) than as a name that merely sounds harsh. When you present a name, say why it fits — that is the part a person cannot get from the raw roller.

Honour the pack's naming conventions. They differ in kind, not just in sound, and a name that ignores them reads as a worldbuilding mistake:

• Human — hereditary surnames; bastards take landscape surnames (Snow, Rivers, Stone) that mark them apart from trueborn siblings. If the character is a bastard, choose deliberately from those.
• Elf — no fixed hereditary surname; the second element is a clan-or-dwelling compound that can change with relocation or a coming-of-age rite. Useful when a character's backstory involves exile or migration.
• Dwarf — patronymic and clan name run in parallel; clan names carry forge/mining imagery passed down for craft lineage rather than blood title.
• Orc / beastfolk — the clan name is a tribal totem or war honour that must be earned. An unproven character should carry the given name alone; drop the surname rather than award it for free.
• Halfling — hereditary surnames reflecting family trade or an inherited physical or temperament nickname; neighbours tease each other with them.

Read the note field when it appears. Some given names carry a note that they are gender-open, or that they derive from a particular morphological pattern. That is exactly the detail that makes a name choice defensible.

Watch the rendering, not only the spelling. Only the human pack renders surnames semantically (Snow → 雪原, Coldwater → 寒水), averaging just 2 characters. The other four packs transliterate phonetically and run around 5 characters, up to 8 (Duskwalker → 杜斯克瓦爾克爾, Skullcrusher → 斯庫爾克魯斯赫爾). So an elf or orc display name is routinely twice the length of a human one. If it has to fit somewhere narrow — a UI label, a combat log line, a name field with a length cap — check the rendered length before committing, and re-roll for a shorter surname rather than truncating.

Present the shortlist with reasoning, then let the person choose. Offering a single name without alternatives wastes the corpus's breadth.

Inside the MUD project

This skill is an authoring tool: use it while writing lore, presets, quest text, or seed data. The runtime path is separate and already exists — world/rules/namegen.py rolls over world/lore/names.py, which parses the same corpus from third_party/fantasy-namegen/. Never wire game code to this skill's copy, and never edit one copy expecting the other to follow.

The project binds three playable races to packs: human → fantasy-human, elf → fantasy-elf, beastfolk → fantasy-orc. dwarf and halfling are registry-only spares with no playable race bound to them, so a name rolled from either belongs to background lore, not a player character — unless the person says otherwise.

Attribution

The corpus is CC BY 4.0 by 弄墨 Inknomu (https://inknomu.com/namegen/fantasy). Published or derived content must credit the source; see assets/corpus/THIRD_PARTY_NOTICES.md for the full notice and the upstream source list. Do not re-fetch the corpus in CI or builds — it is a deliberate one-time static vendoring.