I read Brandon Sanderson&#x27;s &quot;Stormlight Archive&quot; and &quot;Mistborn&quot; series, and I couldn&#x27;t stop thinking about how awkward the names sounded, from Kaladin to Kelsier. It repeatedly took me out of the scene.<p>Meanwhile, the team behind Morrowind seemed to have an uncanny ability to produce names that just felt completely right. Somebody responded to my random thoughts on the topic with this very sound summary:<p>&gt; <i>Morrowind&#x27;s names are a pretty remarkable achievement. I don&#x27;t know who was responsible for it but whoever it was did a really good job of ripping off name &quot;templates&quot; from disparate languages, tweaking them enough to retain their associations but not their meanings, and then sticking with those templates across the board. Modeling the Ashlander names on Assyrian was a stroke of world-building genius.</i><p>&gt; <i>Mistborn&#x27;s names, in contrast, never seem to have much purpose behind them. The templates are inconsistent and arbitrary, and convey no information to the reader. You have fantastical gibberish like vin&#x2F;reen&#x2F;camon, standard anglo names like dockson&#x2F;hammond, bizarre nicknamey nouns like breeze&#x2F;clubs&#x2F;spook, and cod-french like valette renoux. It&#x27;s a mess and it makes it difficult to figure out what this world is when there doesn&#x27;t seem to be any natural way those names could have emerged in one culture. It&#x27;s fucking weird.</i><p>&gt; <i>That being said the only names I never liked in Morrowind were the Redguard names. I could never figure out what they were supposed to be doing.</i>