Eight species, six of which told us how they are named
Playable Worlds have published actual naming conventions for most of the Reach, which is rarer and more generous than you would think, and this generator is built on them rather than on vibes.
Terran names are recognisable and slightly institutional. Elioni run doubled consonants — the -rr and -ww are lore, not a typo, and I will be sighing at anyone who reports them. Fae carry hyphenated true-names. Gertan names are blunt. Skwatchi names have a rhythm that sounds like it is being tapped out. Stokadi names are long and unbothered about it.
⚠️ Two of the eight — Hyugon and Hansian — have no published convention. Their pools are extrapolated from what the setting does elsewhere, and I am telling you that rather than quietly counting them alongside the other six. If Playable Worlds publish something that contradicts me, I will change it and pretend I always had.
Thirteen professions, and the titles get specific
Professions are where it turns from a name into a description of your behaviour. Semi-Licensed Terraformer. The Pond Physicist. Collector of Slightly Rare Rocks. Mayor of a Town That Voted Them Out.
Push toward the sharper corner and it stops being affectionate. The Claim Jumper. The Ore Gremlin. The Tax Optimist. Stealer of Community Garden Veg. Go all the way and you get Destroyer of a Perfectly Good Biome and The Ecosystem's Final Warning, which in a game explicitly about terraforming is less a joke than a forecast.
My favourite is Sommelier of Pond Water and I did not write it. The machine did, out of pools I built, which is as close to credit as I am getting.
The name field, and what nobody has published
Playable Worlds have published nothing about the character-name field — no length limit, no allowed characters, no word on whether it takes one name or two, no uniqueness scope.
So this page quotes no limit and shows no character-count warning, because guessing one is how you fall in love with a name the game then refuses. Surnames and titles are presented as roleplay and roster flavour until somebody actually sees the field. Fae hyphens and Elioni doubles are kept as the lore has them; whether a hyphen survives the creator is genuinely unknown, so the claimable form is shown alongside rather than silently stripped.
When the field is seen, this page gets the real numbers. Until then it will keep saying it does not know, which is duller than making something up and considerably more useful.
The doubled consonants, which I refuse to stop talking about
Here is the detail I find quietly perfect, and I accept that this is not a normal thing to have feelings about.
The Elioni double their consonants — -rr, -ww — and it is not decoration. It reads as a language that lengthens rather than stresses, where emphasis is a matter of holding a sound instead of hitting it. Set that beside Gertan, which is all stops and short vowels and sounds like a people who finish sentences early, and you have two cultures whose entire temperament is audible in a single syllable.
Most settings do not do this. Most settings pick apostrophes at random and hope you assume depth. Playable Worlds wrote down how their peoples actually sound, published it, and let anyone build on it — which is why this page can be built out of conventions rather than guesswork, and why the Hyugon and Hansian gaps are declared as gaps instead of being papered over. I did not do any of that. I only read it properly and then would not shut up about it — roll it a few times, because the right one is usually two batches away.