Naming the Borderlands

I've started working on some details for my new LL game, since it's supposed to get started on the 13th. One of the players requested that we start with the Keep on the Borderlands, so I'm especially excited to get going with that again.

The players all wanted to play something like a mega adventure path, so I'm going to start with B2 and then move on to other old school modules. I've got several to choose from, including the Temple of Elemental Evil, the Slave Lords series, both of the I series, the S modules, and more. The actual modules we end up playing will depend on the choices the players make and the leads they follow. I'll be dropping hooks and rumors about different things that could lead to the other modules during their time at the Keep.

Because most of these are set in Greyhawk, I'm putting the Keep into Greyhawk. I decided to put it in the Kron Hills near the Lortmil Mountains. That gives fairly easy access to most of the main adventure sites in the modules.

This also highlighted one of my favorite things about the Keep. Going through the module again and making notes to hook it to later adventures and other places in Greyhawk, I'm reminded about how much detail is left to the DM to develop to fit their own game. None of the NPCs in the module are named. None of the places are detailed or described too clearly, and all of the various story arcs are left vague enough to be placed anywhere. It's easy to hook to anything else with just a little work.

One of the ways that I'm going to start hooking things to Greyhawk is with some names. I am horrible at naming things, and creating appropriate fantasy names always drives me a little crazy. So I'm cheating. I downloaded a couple of free baby name apps on my iPhone, and I'm going to use those to create names for NPCs. I'm going to choose a nationality or ethnic division to correspond to each of the main Greyhawk races and then use the baby name programs to generate some lists of names. Then as the players meet NPCs in the game, I'll just grab the next name off the list. Hopefully that will let me use less concentration on trying to create names and more on keeping the story going.