Last names oughtta be tied to legends. When your adventurer gets a special name, he might pass it onto his kids. When a civvie serves the king faithfully for his whole life and becomes near-legendary in his craft, he should get a name, too. If a person gets a whole bunch of enemies and is widely known as pond scum, hey, that's almost legendary too.
> Ask about ancestry
] Urist Goldenbeard says "Six generations ago, my maternal grandmother's ancestor Bomrek Goldenbeard acquired the name Goldenbeard for service to the king as a metalsmith."
More ideas:
Naturally, a person can acquire a new last name at any time. When dwarves marry, they should take the most valuable last name. Names are valuable if they are A) rare, B) related to a legend of high fame, good or bad, and C) to a much smaller extent, recent. So if someone slayed a dragon in year 5, that'll be very highly esteemed...if their ancestor in the year 800 married someone whose father slew a titan in 750, though, they'll probably take the titanslayer name instead as it's much more recent. Also, if that dragonslayer goes and has a hundred children, that name starts being worth less and less...
Hey, maybe earlier-born children are considered more highly esteemed bearers of their family name. So in year 500 or so, the firstborn daughter of the firstborn son of the firstborn daughter of that dragonslayer's family is going to give that family name to whatever person she marries. However the eighthborn son has such little claim to the name, that he might end up with the name of some family that is known for raising goats. Tough luck.
In early years, almost every event is notable enough to earn you your first REAL last name (maybe you gotta start with some bogus random one just for sanity's sake). Later on, any name you have probably has some important history. The esteem of names can rise and fall, too: If your father was a goat herder, then if YOU herd goats too, it actually adds esteem to that name. So ten generations of goatherders, and it's a very well known name. Family wealth might add to that family's name. If you create an artifact, well, that's neat...But if your artifact slays ten goblins, then it adds esteem to the name related to creating that artifact.
Ancestry should have an impact on someone's personality or career choices too. If your family is known for herding goats, then you should be inclined to do the same. If your family is known for slaying dragons, your personality should get nudged towards bravery.
I'd like to say that it's impossible to revive a 'dead' name, you can only get one by being the originator of some great event, by marrying into it, or by being born into it...so if you were a goatherder, decide that name sucks and take a soapmaker's name instead, then goatherding gets popular, you're SOL. Still, maybe that wouldn't always be true--if creating an artifact wasn't awesome enough to bump off the dragonslaying name you had, then killing a thousand goblins with it should push the creation of that artifact over the edge and give you the name after all...Hmm.
Oh yeah, one last note. This idea still works fine if the actual names themselves are totally random. "Copperygears" is a totally reasonable name for a family of cow milkers. It'd be more fun if names had meaning but it isn't necessary, yanno?
[ March 04, 2008: Message edited by: Sowelu ]
Author
Topic: Lineages (Read 464 times)