I’ve left the first couple of Blog Azeroth shared topics slide by since I didn’t have anything worth sharing, but I’ll hop on this particular bandwagon 
So character names. Going back to my teens when I was playing pen & paper RPGs (yes, my nerd roots are that deep), names which sounded more or less gaelic were all the rage with the couple of nerdy friends sharing that hobby, and that’s more or less a broad overtone I stuck with ever since.
Gwaendar, my current posting handle, has evolved from the simple Gwaen I used to pick for many female character names back in those days, not just P&P RPG but computer games as well - Ultima and Bard’s Tale series had Gwaen already.
Gwaendar I believe I first used in FFXI as there was a Gwaen character on my server already (although at that time it was neither my main handle nor first character created). The toon name then carried over to my generic net identity when I switched over to WoW, mainly because I was soon to create my first guild’s website and Gwaendar was my main at that time. I stuck to it because it was convenient.
Celerann is a name I picked for my pallies and I started using with WoW. For the inspiration I probably picked Tolkien’s Celeborn and transformed it to a female name.
Caythlin was / is my gnome lock (and the name passed on to a couple of other female casters since), simply a gaelic-sounding modification of Kathleen, a name I seem to like for some reason (it’s actually the second name of my first daughter, my wife likes it too).
Then we have Alastair, which used to be my main toon name for male characters for a long time, and my first main on FFXI for instance. I used this as a modified version of Allister (as in Crowley, go figure) for my male characters for a good dozen years, and was quite amused when I finally met an authentic (and very Scottish) Alastair at work a couple of years ago. The name eventually gave birth to the female form Alastaria, which I still use for mages mainly. On FFXI, when I made a taru-taru, the name more or less naturally gave Alasutaru, which coincidentally is pretty close of the Japanese rendering of Alastair.
I further use Grandak for orcs - I was looking for something with a more guttural sound than my usual choices, Farngath for some dwarves, some variations of Tramplegnome for certain Tauren toons (go figure).
When PCTing my shaman over to Doomhammer, I had to rename her so I decided to go for something a bit different than my usual routine. I wanted something to do with the shaman class, in line with certain first and last names you’ll find on NPCs. I rather unoriginally came up with Wolfdancer but I like the sound of that, so it’s OK, I guess.
And that’s more or less most of the names. For pets, it’s a lot simpler, my hunters’ best friends are usually either Nerf or Nerfbat, and that’s it.
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2 Responses to “Blog Azeroth Shared Topic: How did you come up with your Character Names?”
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In the pen and paper days of yore I used to stress about a great sounding name, with all the kennings and groove. These days something that is not stolen from other books or movies, and also not stupid is fine - especially in the online community where a little variation is good to help you stand out.
Nonsense names like: diamon, aurac, rill are for normal characters. And a fun names like casserole (tauren druid) is good becuase he’s a hybrid, as so is a casserole.
My main technique for character names was inherited from a friend. The goal is to take a phrase and then turn it into a name. My first character, a hunter, came out of “See you in the woods”. I decided to remove the vowels and came up with Synthwds. It slowly got better as my druid started with my name “Ty… Do… Dreamwlkr” -> Tydodrmwlkr and then I started adding vowels back in. My rogue came out of ninja hate as Honour among thieves became Honamothe. I’ve made a couple other hunters with names like Cuin (See you in) to reference my first. I haven’t kept up with it as much and tried to keep names a bit more vowel friendly, but it makes me smile now to see some of my names, though I can imagine my group members and friends are a little less fond of it