I definitely don't need that many, they just keep showing up.

Maybe they need me.

I like your ideas about scarcity.

What about a world where we are nameless until we take a name from someone else?

(When an unnamed kills a named, they assume the name. This is not a crime.)

What if the number of names are decreasing, like musical chairs?

(When a named kills another named, the name dies with them. This is the only crime left.)

Who do I become when I give my name away as a gift?

OK, no one asked, but I'ma overshare.

I'm MCing my first game in February and I've been daydreaming apocalyptica, but
mostly what comes out is just names. Over a thousand now. They just sort of
float the the surface of my unconscious and then they're up in exploding neon
like Dirk Diggler.

(Please don't get me started about names for bands or spaceships.)

I wanna say: Leap Forward With Named Characters is genius. Tabletop is a textual
medium. It's spoken text, but it's text. When we introduce a character by name,
we meet them. The name's connotations suggest a whole life behind it. A good
name is generative, a seed crystal around which a living character can
self-assemble.

Many of my names are handles, nicknames, words ripped from their context
according to hallowed Apocalypse World tradition.

(There's also an in-fiction reason for this in my world, a widespread
superstition that Bad Things somehow found people by their names during the
apocalypse. Our ancestors discarded their legal names as a hex against
revelation. I might have more to say after I find out more about this.)

Things that seem to push my buttons: (Your buttons may vary.)

  Characters who are referred to only by their last name (Vasquez, Steckler).

  Homophones (Case, Bering, Planck).

  Place names (Corvallis, Calais, Madras, Arcadia, New Jersey).

  Names of tools or machine parts (Mattock, Crowbar, Fanbelt).

  Names of ambiguous gender (Cassidy, Schuyler).

  Women with feminine names that are shortened to masculine names (Sam, Max).

  Men with delicate names (Jasper, Quinn).

  Nouns that are also adjectives or verbs or which convey a quality of movement
  (Mince, Shear, Hopper).

  Evocative animal names (Cormorant, Badger, Heron).

  Names of inventors that are used to refer to the thing they invented
  (especially Halligan).

Names are modifiable with titles, honorifics, and diminutives from as many
cultures as I can get my hands on. (OK, I also have a list of these.) Also,
colors. A few of these make it into the list (Lord Meg, Trash Master, MC Donald,
Ogrina, Remnant King) but you can hack any name as long as the result is cool
and/or affronting.

(Remnant King is actually the name of a carpet store that was on ran ads on the
radio in New Jersey when I was a kid.)

There are names that I love, but which are too prominent in recent pop culture
or are from content too close in tone to Apocalypse World not to feel corny or
distracting. Finn, Stannis, Corvo, Tracer, Chell -- I adore you and all your
running around and getting shot at, but you're not invited to this party. (Uhh,
unless a player insists on bringing you, all starry eyed, in which case I might
have an awkward time turning you away.)

Once a name from pop culture has had time to ripen and ferment, it feels like
fair game again. Thumper is the rabbit from Bambi, but also the device Fremen
use to distract sand worms, and evokes future slang for a defibrillator. Thumper
may be a dashing young angel with inappropriately perky bedside manner and zero
fear of monsters. A good, kinetic name.

I want to avoid mis-applying names in ways that are too on-the-nose or that are
act as slurs. "Ace" is a fine name, but maybe not for an asexual character? I
think "Spade" is a great name for a Gunlugger, but wow OK it's super offensive
if he's African American. Avoid racist caricature.

I love names from cultures different from my own, but as a white guy, I also
want to be careful about appropriation and representation. I love these names,
but I'm also uncomfortable. I'm OK with being uncomfortable. I'm not OK with
making other people uncomfortable.

Meg and Vincent's names from the threat map and playbooks are fantastic. I've
tried to avoid duplicating any of them, though one or two may have snuck in via
parallel invention.

So OK, here are too many names I've collected:

https://gist.github.com/bonkydog/b4fd2863edae3df5a0145705f74502e2

I've put them in a Gist so I don't break Vincent's CMS, so I can add more names
(send help), and so you can fork and modify it if you are some kind of nerd.

There's an interesting contrast between this (ab?)use of Bonefeel and the Driver & Gunlugger's escape moves.

OK, now I've collected over 550.  Some of these are so good -- I can't wait to find out who they are.

Does anyone else have a mild obsession with collecting NPC names?

They pop into my head at any time of day and I jot them down on an index card or my phone.

Writing them down seems to encourage my subconscious to suggest more and more of them.

Adam Cadre has a game where the main characters are named after cities in Oregon and it's just so good.

Went to look at Wikipedia and dumped about 2/3 of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_in_Oregon into my file.