The shared WoW blogging topic over at Blog Azeroth asks, “How did you come up with your character names?” So, where did I get Pummra? Where do I get any of the names I use? I suppose it helps to start at the beginning. It is not THE beginning, but it is A beginning.

Pen and Paper. I know that a good percentage of the MMO community cut their roleplaying teeth the old fashioned way, with a pen, paper, a few books, and a 20 sided die. For me it began when I was about 19 years old. My best friend Mark had been hanging out with a few older guys who lived nearby playing D&D and Rifts. I was your typically direction-less 19 year old, so it sounded alright to me. So came my initiation into Pen and Paper RPGS in the smoky, dusty basement of a guy named Emmitt. (Is that the perfect name for a guy who lives in his parents’ basement playing RPGs or what?) The first step, of course, was to roll a character. Most of you know how this drill goes, pick a race, roll stats, pick a class, pick skills and on and on. At least, that’s the order I always went in.

So what came last? The name. And the name was, by far, the part I spent the most time on. Here I had spent all this time “assembling” the character I was to play. Thinking about how and why he would fight, where he came from, what kind of goals he might have. So I sat and thought. I thought some more. I walked around, got a drink. Thought some more. Ugh. The hardest part of creating a character, right from the start, was coming up with a decent name! I wanted it to be memorable and unique, but everyone knows how difficult that is!

Since then, I’ve changed my philosophy. I’m not so worried about the “perfect” name for my characters. I just want something that says something about ME. This is especially important with WoW - are there any names left? At least the Gold Sellers have it easy. They just seem to roll their faces on the keyboard warlock-style to come up with their names. (Which has always made it hard to report them….”Uhh, laksdfowien just tried to sell me gold!”) Anyhow, I started to think about things that I liked a lot to make me unique. For awhile on Asheron’s Call I went by Hombre Lobo because I was a big fan of monster movies and had a Spanish dictionary. This also started my philosophy of carrying a theme. In WoW, I started with Mummrah, which was the name of the bad guy mummy dude in Thundercats. I loved that show as a kid, and it sounded like a cool name for a warlock. My other character names are almost all variants on “Mummrah.” I have Mumm, Pummra, Pumrah - you name it! With my alt-itis, it also helps the people in guild identify me no matter what character I’m playing.

So, how do you come up with your names? The Blizzard random name generator? A complex mathematical formula? Identity theft?