The lack of NPC names in Keep on the Borderlands, that famous starter adventure for early Dungeons & Dragons, is a feature, not a bug. So often names in adventures are so goofy that there is no way that I’d be able to say them with a straight face. I’d rather give characters my own names that fit with whatever milieu I am going for and don’t want the adventure text to pressure me into saying “Sildar Hallwinter” or “Winko Battleblade” for their NPCs. For an adventure that is very specifically tapped into a setting, there is definitely an argument that adding names heightens that sense of setting, but Keep on the Borderlands is no such adventure; it is generic to the extreme. Winko Battleblade would dilute that appeal.

However, if we apply the “D&D is Always Right” principle, perhaps the lack of names implies something interesting about the setting of Borderlands. My favorite explanation for the lack of names in the module comes from the article “Borderlands” by Nicolas Dessaux, published in Issue #1 of the Knock Magazine. The article provides several fascinating conclusions (such as the fact that the Borderlands must exist in British Columbia, based on the flora and fauna of the adventure) drawn from the text of Keep on the Borderlands, using a “D&D is always right” mindset. The first such conclusion is that:

“In the Borderlands, it would be very rude to address someone by their name rather by their title, and knowledge of a personal name is a mark of real familiarity. Asking someone their name would be considered as offensive, and asking someone the name of another, a mark of silliness. So, people find absolutely natural to speak about the Castellan or the Money-lender.”

Nevertheless, I understand that it is convenient to just have the names right there in the adventure. Sometimes the referee just wants to be able to read something aloud, even if that thing is “the dwarf is named Winko Battleblade.” There is enough referees have to keep bouncing around in their head as they run games that even the slight burden of having to name NPCs on the fly could result in more “loading screens” (which is what I call it when the referee has to stop to think about something). My colleague, Luka Rejec of the Wizard Thief Fighter blog, has a post describing a process for inventing names, but referees often lack the computing power to do something that detailed on-the-fly. So if you are unconvinced that the namelessness of Keep on the Borderlands is a feature, or an interesting lore-implication, and just want the least friction in running the game, you want names.

When writing Barkeep on the Borderlands, a module inspired by that aforementioned ur-adventure (currently available for pre-order), I wanted to continue the tradition of not using proper names as much as possible. However, it wouldn’t spoil the purity of that adventure if I at least had an online list of names for referees to use when they run it. So this is my attempt at that. If you are running Barkeep and curse me for not including names throughout, you may refer hereto for all your naming needs. You could perhaps also use it for naming NPCs in other situations too.

As a starting point, Keep on the Borderlands does at least have a tool for generating NPCs. Not names, of course, but it has a d20 table to roll NPCs, which includes their race, class, ability scores and personality. What is nifty about it is that it is a backdoor way at looking at the demographics of the Keep: 70% of its residents are humans and 10% each are elves, halflings or dwarves. Of the humans, 50% are fighters, 21% each are thieves or clerics and 8% are magic users. My own Keep is the same place, but over 200 years in the future, in which the Keep has grown into a metropolis, absorbed the various “monsters” of the Caves of Chaos, recently fought a bloody war against the remaining tribes of lizardfolk to the east, and founded the Academy of Sorcerous Sciences, a school for magic users. So I think magic users will have become somewhat more common, but the big change is that I need to include goblins, orcs, lizardfolk, etc. in my table to represent the demographics of the modern Keep. I’m going to have to use a d100 table, aren’t I?