The Rule Nobody Writes Down
Pick any established game world and you can sort its names by faction without being told which is which. That is not an accident, and it is not really about lore either. It is phonetics. Each group gets a sound, that sound gets used consistently for twenty years, and players learn it without ever being taught.
The practical upshot for anyone naming a character: you are not inventing a name, you are joining a pattern. Get the pattern right and almost anything sounds correct. Get it wrong and no amount of lore justification saves you.
What follows is what those patterns actually are in ten games, and where each one will trip you up.
World of Warcraft: One Sound Per Race
Warcraft is the clearest case because Blizzard has been consistent for two decades. Orcish is built from hard consonants and guttural clusters — gr, th, kk, zg — usually two syllables, usually ending on a consonant. Night Elf names run the other way entirely: flowing, vowel-heavy, and fond of the suffixes -ian, -iel and -ara.
Draenei names carry apostrophes, which is the one convention people copy without understanding. The apostrophe marks a genuine syllable break, so it belongs between consonants that could not otherwise sit together. Dropping one into the middle of a vowel run does nothing except mark the name as a tourist.
Tauren names are the outlier: they are descriptive compounds in plain English — two concrete nouns, or an adjective and a noun. That is a real naming tradition rather than a phonetic one, and it means a Tauren name has to mean something, not just sound right.
The Elder Scrolls: One Language Per Race
Bethesda went further than sound and gave several races an actual constructed language. Dovahzul, the dragon tongue, is the obvious one, but the effect reaches the mortal races too: Nord names lean hard on Old Norse, Dunmer names use a distinct Dunmeris word-stock, and Khajiit names are built on Ta'agra roots with the J-, Ra-, S- and Do- honorific prefixes marking rank and age.
That prefix system is the thing most people get wrong. Those letters are not decoration — they carry meaning, and stacking them at random produces a name that reads as nonsense to anyone who knows the setting. Argonian naming works differently again: many use translated Jel names, which come out as short descriptive English phrases, so they read closer to Tauren names than to anything else in the game.
Generate Elder Scrolls names by race ›
Final Fantasy XIV: Naming as Grammar
FFXIV has the most rule-bound naming of any game on this list, to the point where the community maintains guides to it. Several races do not have naming styles so much as naming grammar.
Miqo'te Seekers of the Sun encode tribe and birth order into the name itself, so the leading letter and the suffix are both doing structural work. Keepers of the Moon use a different scheme again. Roegadyn names are Germanic compounds where each half translates to something specific. Au Ra Xaela names draw on Mongolian roots, Raen on Japanese.
The practical consequence: FFXIV is the one game where a name can be wrong in a way that is checkable. Everywhere else you are matching a vibe. Here you are matching a spec.
Generate FFXIV names by race ›
Baldur's Gate 3: Inherited from the Tabletop
BG3 does not invent conventions so much as inherit forty years of Forgotten Realms and D&D naming. Tiefling names split into two traditions that sit oddly together: infernal names drawn from real demonology, and Virtue names — Hope, Sorrow, Reverence — taken as a deliberate rejection of the first.
Drow naming is the most rigid thing in the setting, matrilineal and house-bound, with the house name doing more work than the given name. Githyanki names are the opposite: harsh, clipped, and built to sound like nothing else in the Realms.
Generate Baldur's Gate 3 names by race ›
Guild Wars 2: Names as Job Descriptions
ArenaNet made a choice most fantasy avoids: for two of its races, the name states what you do. Charr names pair a short given name with a legion-style surname that reads as a role — the second half tells you where they sit in a war machine. Sylvari draw on Welsh, which gives them a completely different mouthfeel from everything around them.
Asura names are the fun ones. Short, sharp, often ending in a hard consonant, and chosen to sound clever, because Asura are insufferable about being clever. That is characterisation smuggled into phonetics.
Generate Guild Wars 2 names by race ›
Elden Ring: The Epithet Does the Work
FromSoftware's real trick is not the given name at all. It is the title welded to it. The Fell Omen. Blade of Miquella. The Grafted. The name identifies, the epithet tells you what happened to them — and it is almost always something that went wrong.
Strip the epithets out of Elden Ring and the names lose most of their weight. That is worth stealing regardless of setting: a plain name plus a specific, slightly ominous title outperforms an elaborate name on its own, every time.
The sound underneath is broadly Anglo-Saxon and Norse, roughened up. Long vowels, hard endings, a fondness for -th and -gg.
RuneScape: Deliberately Ordinary
RuneScape is the odd one out and the most instructive. Its NPC names are mundane on purpose — plain given names, often just a first name and a job. That plainness is doing real work: it makes the genuinely strange things in the world land harder by contrast.
The exceptions are regional. Fremennik naming is properly Norse, complete with patronymics, so those names carry structural weight the rest of the game deliberately avoids. Dwarven names lean Germanic and industrial. Gnome names are silly, and know it.
If everything in your world sounds epic, nothing does. RuneScape understood that early.
Warhammer 40,000: Gothic Latin and Orks
The Imperium is Rome in space and its naming says so — Latin and Greek roots, forty thousand years of drift layered on top. Space Marine names are usually a single name plus a rank, because the chapter matters more than the individual.
The xenos factions are defined by inverting that. Aeldari names are long, flowing and layered with titles, fitting a species that lives for millennia. Necron nobility take dynastic throne-names that sound Egyptian because the aesthetic is Egyptian. And Ork names are short, blunt and spelled phonetically — Snik, Gorzag, Badgruk — usually paired with a title describing what they do to people.
Chaos naming is the interesting case: it is Imperial naming that has been corrupted, so it works best when it sounds almost right. A Chaos name should read like a Space Marine name that has gone wrong somewhere.
Generate Warhammer 40K names by faction ›
Genshin Impact: One Real Culture Per Nation
Genshin is the most systematic on this list and therefore the easiest to write for. Each nation maps onto a real-world naming tradition and stays there. Mondstadt is Germanic. Liyue is Chinese, family name first. Inazuma is Japanese, usually with a clan name. Sumeru draws on Persian, Arabic and Indian naming. Fontaine is French. Snezhnaya is Russian. Natlan draws on Mesoamerican naming.
One trap worth naming: Russian surnames are gendered. Morozov and Morozova are the same family, and pairing a masculine given name with the feminine form is the fastest way to mark a Snezhnayan character as made up by someone who did not check.
Generate Genshin names by nation ›
Star Wars: Sound Before Meaning
Star Wars gives every species a sound and largely stops there. Core Worlds humans get clipped, faintly British surnames. Twi'leks get a flowing given name plus a clan name. Wookiees get names assembled out of growls. Mandalorians get hard consonants and a clan that matters more than they do.
Sith naming is the outlier and the most copied: a Sith discards the birth name entirely and takes a title. That is why those names land harder than anything else in the setting — they are not identifiers, they are statements. Droids go the other way, with letters and digits standing in for a name at all.
Generate Star Wars names by species ›
What Repeats Across All Ten
Strip out the lore and the same handful of devices keep appearing:
- Hard consonants read as aggressive. Orcs, Orks, Mandalorians, Githyanki, Charr. Ten worlds, one instinct.
- Vowel runs read as old and refined. Night Elves, Aeldari, Sylvari, Altmer.
- A title beats a longer name. Elden Ring, 40K and the Sith all lean on this, and it is the single most portable trick here.
- Plain names make strange things stranger. RuneScape's mundanity is a feature, not a limitation.
- Descriptive compounds need to mean something. Tauren and Argonian names fail immediately if the two halves do not fit together.
- Structure carries status. Khajiit prefixes, Drow houses, Fremennik patronymics and Space Marine chapters all encode rank in the shape of the name.
If you are naming a character for a game not on this list, those six lines will get you most of the way there.