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[Dragonslayerelf]

This post serves as much as a suggestion as it is for a discussion. Right now, surnames have little point aside from differentiating one Urist from another and are generally amorphous, however, I think it'd be cool if surnames could be attached to a family to give better sense of relations over time. It'd also be cool if naming conventions could be attached to an entity, and surnames could be passed down patrilineally, matrilineally or randomly like they are now. This would serve to give more of a sense of family when it comes to dwarves, especially on long-running forts or even worlds where you can lose sense of who's related to who and, when you get a migrant that you see has the same surname as a dwarf from your past forts, you have that impetus to look at their relations and see which dwarf they were related to. Also, to avoid the problem of having 2 Urists in a family with the exact same name, they could be ascribed suffixes like Urist Sr., Urist Jr., Urist III, etc, when you have more than one name recurring in a family lineage (which on a 1050 year long world, is likely to happen.)

Thoughts?

[Shonai_Dweller]

10 pages of thoughts here:
http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=170319.msg7739209#msg7739209

[VABritto]

Since I noticed that female and male dwarves seem to be regarded for both military and political functions without any distinction, I decided that indicated that they were mostly physically equal in strength (but the females being beardless) so I usually RP their surnames being gender specific. As in males get the male surname and females get the female surname. To make it more interesting, I mixed the surname elements of their father with their mother, but they only pass along their gender specific ones. Doing this made Legends mode a lot more interesting because you could see the incredibly epic political shenanigans that were happening behind the scene (the main male royal line of one of my civs regained the throne after 1000 years. It was pretty epic). I noticed that a lot of the same matrillinial and patrillinial families tended to hold power at the beginning and slowly faded away to self made nobodies as the centuries passed.

Example of the naming convention I used:

Urist Shorastrîsen married his wife Sigun Ilrilrigoth

They had a son called Monom Shorastrigoth and a daughter called Olen Shorastrigoth.

Monom married a gal named Erith Kirostlitast and they had a son named Urist Shorastlitast. Urist inherited the Shorast from Monom and the Litast from Erith. Being male he will pass on the Shorast element.

Olen Shorastrigoth married a lad called Etur Ortillat. Their son is called Urist Orrigoth. Urist inherited Rigoth from his mother and Or from his father and will pass on the Or surname.

Labelling historical figures like this made me have a very clear notion of both their patrillinial and matrillinial pedigree. It was pretty insightful and it would be nice if we could actually choose to have that happen automatically or have other parameters randomly generated.

[Dragonslayerelf]

Since I noticed that female and male dwarves seem to be regarded for both military and political functions without any distinction, I decided that indicated that they were mostly physically equal in strength (but the females being beardless) so I usually RP their surnames being gender specific. As in males get the male surname and females get the female surname. To make it more interesting, I mixed the surname elements of their father with their mother, but they only pass along their gender specific ones. Doing this made Legends mode a lot more interesting because you could see the incredibly epic political shenanigans that were happening behind the scene (the main male royal line of one of my civs regained the throne after 1000 years. It was pretty epic). I noticed that a lot of the same matrillinial and patrillinial families tended to hold power at the beginning and slowly faded away to self made nobodies as the centuries passed.

Example of the naming convention I used:

Urist Shorastrîsen married his wife Sigun Ilrilrigoth

They had a son called Monom Shorastrigoth and a daughter called Olen Shorastrigoth.

Monom married a gal named Erith Kirostlitast and they had a son named Urist Shorastlitast. Urist inherited the Shorast from Monom and the Litast from Erith. Being male he will pass on the Shorast element.

Olen Shorastrigoth married a lad called Etur Ortillat. Their son is called Urist Orrigoth. Urist inherited Rigoth from his mother and Or from his father and will pass on the Or surname.

Labelling historical figures like this made me have a very clear notion of both their patrillinial and matrillinial pedigree. It was pretty insightful and it would be nice if we could actually choose to have that happen automatically or have other parameters randomly generated.

Am I misunderstanding or did you somehow get this to actually work? If you did, that's pretty damn cool & can you toss the raws/dfhack scripts you used? If not, ye I think a system like this would also work pretty well.

[VABritto]

O no. I just RP this lol I like to annotate the history of the worlds I make and when I do so I use my own naming convention so as to keep track of the lineages of the dwarves I am studying. So it is all pen & paper (well, actually, kerboard & notepad lol). But I would also love to see such a thing at least as an option among others.

[darkhog]

How about a dwarven child inheriting part of surname from both of its parents, eg. first half of last name from the mother and the second half from the father? So a son of Urist Thoughtbleed and Urista Cowbleed would be called Urist Cowbleed.

[Timeless Bob]

Surnames could follow id tags.  According to Toady's new changes, unitID's in a married couple come from the oldest of the two and are handed down through the mother.  If there is a way to link unitID tags with the surname of a sentient, this could be implemented using DFHack too. Expwnent had script for doing just this back in 2012, and Putnam updated it in 2016: http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=112381.msg4384489#msg4384489

The call for a surname function in DF keeps getting repeated. Seems like there might be a need for it...