Bello, my Aquilonian Guardian, is looking good at level 20. He's escaped the confines of Tortage and has moved on to the world of Hyboria at large. So far though, he's mostly sat around Tarantia while his controller (that would be me, Rog, heh) sniffles and sneezes trying to kick a nasty cold.

I have managed to poke around a few places, doing some casual exploring. It's all so huge and overwhelming at this point.

I've also decided that for now at least, Bello will be my main character. And as such, I created our guild (Left Hand Path) under his name. His guild title is Chaos-lord, which is pretty suitable. Hmm. Chaos-lord Bello. Yeah I like it.

While poking around the files from the Age of Conan early access install (I was looking for music to play), I noticed files for the random character-naming suggestions. This reminded me that I should start coming up with names for my characters.

As both a writer and an avid MMORPG player, I highly recommend The Writer's Digest: Character Naming Sourcebook. I've had it sitting on my desk for years and recently purchased the second edition.

Names are sorted by racial / language categories, which makes it perfect for choosing a character name for Age of Conan. You can generally cross-reference the names this way:

• Cimmerian = Celtic. Scottish, Gaelic and perhaps Norse would do as well.
• Aquilonian = Roman (Latin), Greek. It's a big empire, much like Romans, so you can go with most any latin-based names or areas that empire covered, which includes Spanish, German, French, etc..
• Stygian = Egyptian. Persian works too.

Names in the book are also listed along with variations and a basic definition source. For instance Conan is a celtic name with many variations that means "dark-haired wise man". Don't expect to use that name of course, Funcom has already reserved it. =)