Faced with possibly having to name the whole 480+ crew of the Deepnight Revelation (well maybe only some of them) I started looking for a better way to generate "ordinary" names since the standard (including my own) Traveller Word Generators are very hit and miss - particularly for languages you know! A quick hunt on the web found that https://forebears.io/ had lists of the most common 1000 first and last names globally. Whilst the list is bound to have some biases it certainly seemed to be pretty representative, with strong showings from China/Africa/South America - far better than most "baby name" lists. So I screen-scraped the two lists and dropped them into a little Javascript app that just randomly matches a first name with a surname. The list didn't have any gender information, so you'll have to check that yourself if it's vital, but otherwise I think the app generates really usable names - and moves nicely away from the Anglo-Saxon centric naming that can dominate in some SF RPGs.
You can find the app here:
http://www.taunoyen.com/traveller/solomaninames.html
Next step will be to add it into my Traveller Word Generator so you can get Vilani/Galangic first/last names matched with Solomani last/first names!
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