> Sam, I was just wondering how you came up with the names for the towns and the charaters like Murkon, Ceratil, Brewelry, Lehowy, and Anwyk Arisses.
>
> For that matter, did you use the Fantasy Name Generator for the names of the freeborn parties?
>
> By the way, you've misspelled Anwyk in the second paragraph of MV's story.

I fixed the typo, which has an interesting explanation that partially answers your first question. If you shift your fingers on the keyboard one spot to the left and touch type "Samuel Stoddard," it comes out "Anywk Arisses." (Typing the two a's in my name winds up toggling the caps lock, which explains why "Anywk Arisses" is two letters shorter.)

I think I was playing around, seeing how different words came out when I typed them with my fingers in the wrong place. Well, one's name is a natural starting point for experiments like this, and when I typed my name out and got "Anywk Arisses," I thought that sounded like a pretty cool name. It looked a little better if I swapped a couple letters around to make "Anwyk" instead of "Anywk," so I did that, and presto, a new name was born.

The rest have considerably less interesting stories. There's no great secret to it. I played around with sounds and syllables until I got something I liked. "Lehowy" and possibly "Brewelry" have a bit of a Welsh flavor to them, but only becaues I played around with syllables from Welsh names. "Murkon" came about because I was playing with something with a syllable resembling "mord" or "mort," which suggests death. Far more often, though, I'm not angling for anything even this specific. I just play around with letters and syllables until something works. I do use the FNG on occasion, sometimes just browsing randomly, other times using the advanced interface to force names with certain letters or syllables in them that sound good to me.

As for the freeborn parties, yes and no. Murkon's Vengeance has a form of the FNG actually built into the MV code itself. So when a new freeborn party is called for, the generator code gets run at that time to make a new name. I didn't premake any of those names.