No, not the name of the project, but the names of the characters. The DragonMail name generator still throws me the odd surprise, and while I was play-testing on a map of badger scholars I came across one of those pieces of procedural generation which gives rise to emergent story-telling. And told me something I didn't know about how names work within the culture of my game.

So in one particular court I encountered a (rather large, which made me realise just what a good call it had been to add NPC size variation a couple of releases earlier) wise rabbit called M. Þórví. Then just around the corner a (smaller) humble rabbit called Ragi-Þórví. And their back-story was immediately born: they were siblings, one of whom had come to the court to study with the wise badgers there, and the other had tagged along. Which tells me that (a) the second part of a rabbit's name describes lineage, and (b) when they become scholars they take this part, not the first. It's probably the same with mice. But not dragons.

The design reason for these two-part names is that all the NPCs need unique names, and rabbits and mice are (usually) the most common, so combining two random names greatly increases the chance of uniqueness. It's a slightly different story with dragons: the list of seed names is really too short for the name generator, so doubling up reduces the risk of a new game clashing with an old one.

This game also has a pair of wise foxes called M. Hankinboroul and M. Mackinboroul. I'm sure there's another story to be told about the confusion that causes.