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Aarakocra Name Generator [Draft]

JohnnFour

Game Master
Staff member
Adamantium WoA
Wizard of Story
Wizard of Combat
Gamer Lifestyle
Demonplague Author
Borderland Explorer
Here's a generator built for my Murder Hobos campaign.

Aarakocra are bird people and a key faction this season.

Status (pecking order) is important to them.

The lowest stratum has a mono-syllabic short name. These names are often also used as insults and curse words by the middle and upper stata.

Middle stratum aarakocras have two syllables split by a hyphen.

Upper stratum have three syllables, first split by hyphen, second split by an apostrophe.

Each stratum uses lower stratum as part of their name to signal explicit dominance. "I'm your name plus more."

I mostly stuck to hard consonants as I figured that would be closer to how they might speak. More neck noises than tongue/mouth.

Feedback is welcome. Especially if you get combos you don't like.
 

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  • name_aarakocra.json.zip
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Reactions: ELF

ELF

Generator Sage
Wizard of Story
Wizard of Combat
Aarakocra culture is not my specialty, but to me the generated names sound believably birdlike, yet pronounceable, and seem to reflect the cultural background well.

I would make one change, though: now the generator always produces multiple names from different social status levels. This means that the generator is usable on its own, but would not work well if called by other generators, for example to produce a name for a generated aarakocra NPC.

But if you use a separate subtable for each of the three status levels (named for example low, middle and high), you could produce just one name for that NPC, and even specify the desired status when calling the generator - like this: name-aarakocra#low or name-aarakocra#high:
Code:
    {
      "name": "low",
      "entries": [
        "{first}"
      ]
    },
    {
      "name": "middle",
      "entries": [
        "{first}-{middle}"
      ]
    },
    {
      "name": "high",
      "entries": [
        "{first}-{middle}'{last}"
      ]
    },

But since it can be good to have also a random option that does not require the status level to be specified, you could add subtable called any to call one of the status tables at random. (The generator could also automatically proceed to the any table if no status is specified.) Something like this:
Code:
    {
      "name": "any",
      "entries": [
      "{low}",
      "{middle}",
      "{high}"
      ]
    },

And if you want to have also the current multi-status output as an available option, you could have in a subtable like sample:
Code:
    {
      "name": "sample",
      "entries": [
        "Lower: {first}",
        "Middle: {first}-{middle}",
        "Upper: {first}-{middle}'{last}"
      ]
    },
You could call that with name-aarakocra#sample.

This would make the generator flexibly match just about any need. Which is nice, as there aren't too many aarakocra name generators available.
 
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