Real-World Names in Oblivion

[jamochawoke]

There are plenty of real world names related to the Dunmer names.

 

Plus, all you have to do to make a "unique" name for a fantasy is to snag a real-world name and rearrange the letters, add obfuscating consonants, or add useless apostrophe's. Look at every drow name used in D+D or Dark Elf name used in EverQuest for extreme examples of this.

[Lodur9000]

There are plenty of real world names related to the Dunmer names.

 

Nope. Only to the Ashlander names, which are lifted from Assyrian. The other style of names, the 'Settled People' names, aren't taken from the real world. Any similarities are coincidence and are bound to happen when you have hundreds of samples to sift through.

[jamochawoke]

Any similarities are coincidence.

 

That's kind of my point buddy. :thumbsup:

[Lodur9000]

Is it? I don't think that it is. You said that almost all RPG names are derived from real-world names because that's the most practical way of doing it. What I said was that alternatively a developer can procedurally/randomly generate names. These are two entirely different methods and you only talked about the first one of them.

[jamochawoke]

Either way, they end up with elements from real world names.

 

My point was there's only so much information in the world that no matter what you do, whatever system, it's going to have a real-world correlation SOMEWHERE.

 

You can be as creative as you want, toss in as many consonants and extraneous apostrophes as you want, it's still going to be part of how people around the world have been naming things and people.

 

Just because the correlation exists doesn't mean that a game world is automatically a "parallel universe" which is what I've been addressing all along.

[WarRatsG]

It may not be the name of a person, the leading members of the Dark Brotherhood are known as the "Black Hand", a name shared by the assassins who killed Franz Ferdinand in 1914.

 

For those who think "Franz Ferdinand" is just the name of a music group, he was actually the Archduke of Austro-Hungary. He was assassinated by the "Black Hand Gang", a group of Serbian assassins, in 1914. This caused a war between Austria and Serbia, which then spiralled out of control into World War 1.

 

For the record, the two "Black Hand"s were nothing alike. The Dark Brotherhood were precise and ritualistic, the Serbs were very lucky, considering how poorly they did their job. I say "poorly" because while the plan was to throw 2 grenades in his car as he went past, one person missed, blowing up the Archduke's entourage instead, and the other assassin did not throw his grenade at all. Then their plan was to commit suicide afterward by ingesting cyanide and jumping into a river, however the cyanide was 6 months out of date and the river was 2 feet deep. Needless to say, neither assassin died.

The Archduke was only killed when his driver took a wrong turn on the way to a hospital, and the leader of the Black Hand Gang happened to walk out of a sandwich shop while his target was performing a 3-point turn in the middle of the road in front of him. He took 2 shots and killed the Archduke and his pregnant wife. The leader was then jailed, dying of syphillis he got from another prisoner.

 

Hopefully thats not too off-topic :wink:

[MooseTail]

You forgot the big one!!!

Martin Septim