About the book:
First of all, the Nomicon is designed for the GM as much as for the player, so it focuses heavily on place names as well as character names. As a companion book to the Tome of Worldbuilding, it’s designed to help the GM generate names for cities, countries, civilizations, and terrain features such as forests and marshes.
Secondly, the Nomicon contains mostly name generators rather than lists of names. There’s an upside and a downside to this approach. The upside is that the book “contains” more names than a book consisting of lists, by an order of magnitude. It also means that if your objective is to generate a “new” name that’s not historically based, you’ll only generate a historical name by coincidence. The downside is that since the names are generated, they have a higher chance of stumbling on something that sounds “wrong” in the language being emulated.
