One benefit of getting to know Ken Rolston was that I finally got to ask someone how they came up with the thousands of fantasy names in Morrowind.  I had always pictured that there was one guy sitting at a desk for months on end putting together evocative cognomena, and this sounded like an ideal job.  But my suspicion was that they had a procedural solution.  According to Ken, “I created custom name seed sets for many of the races, and then edited the name-forming rules to generate a better quality dump, and THEN had to be a little choosy about what we used.  But this is a delightful tool to play with.”

And indeed it is:  The Everchanging Book of Names.