By Thilo Graf

This pdf from Raging Swan Press is 12 pages long, 1 page front cover, 1 page advertisement, 2 pages editorial, 1 page ToC/foreword, 1 page SRD and 1 page back cover, leaving 5 pages for the lists of names, so what’s exactly up?

The names are presented by origin land with three columns: 50 male names, 50 female names and a third column with 50 additional names, Tribal names, Place names or names by profession, depending on the culture of origin of the name.

First are Carolingan Names and while I did not notice a name the German nit-picky linguist in me can’t let stand like this: While the French accent aigu is retained, the Umlaut in AltmÜnster has been replaced by an “u”, although an Umlaut is just as significant a distinguishing component.

Next up are Egyptian names, with which I’m not as familiar, but skimming through them, I did not notice any botches. The same holds true for the Germanic names – in fact, I was rather impressed by the selection of names here – there are some rather rare names included here that might be uncommon/unknown to even people from Germanic cultures.

In the list of gothic names, a male name is included that means “boarwolf” (Eberwolf). However, this is actually a valid name! One, though, should be omitted in games in German/with people adept at the language: The name “Patza” is a homophone with “Patzer”, which essentially means “botch” – way to jinx a character! But again. nitpicking, the name actually exists and is a valid choice.

The final list includes Sumerian names and is actually the list I was looking forward towards – I love the ring of the names and ever since reading the Gilgamesh-epos. Subsequently, I asked an archaeologist-friend of mine to skip over the lists and he didn’t notice any glitches regarding gender etc. in this list.

Conclusion:

Editing and formatting are top-notch, I didn’t notice any gender-mix-ups and glitches apart from the Umlaut-omissions. Layout adheres to the 3-column layout and provides three tables per page. The pdf comes with bookmarks and a printer-friendly version. Seeing that this time I did not encounter gender-hick-ups, I can’t complain about anything there. However, meanings for the names would have been awesome and the bit of additional oomph that would have made this truly awesome. As written, I’ll settle for a final verdict of 4 stars.

Endzeitgeist out.

So What’s The Human Called, Anyway? II is available from: