Orin asked Sebastien de Castell:

I just started reading the Greatcoats series, and I absolutely love their names, Falcio and Brasti being my favourites. I often have troubles coming up with good names, so how did you get their names/how did you come up with them?

Sebastien de Castell With Falcio, it was a case of looking for the phonemes that matched my sense of the character: something that contained a sense of both heroism and yet deep flaws ('Fal' has a kind of heroic resonance but also sounds a bit like fail, 'cio' with the hard 'c' has an almost comical stumbler quality to it.) Brasti was about conveying a brash braggart (hence the 'bra' syllable.)

With other characters, especially when you get into a relatively expansive world (the Greatcoats has a cast that hits into the hundreds now), I try to build out from combinations of older language sets that fit the background of the place where the character comes from. Much of Tristia falls into a mix of Old French, Italian, Latin, and English (that last one is a strange addition but felt right to me given the Greatcoats are partially based on the English Justices Itinerant).

With those language sets in mind I'll then look for words within them that best describe the character or place I'm developing. For example, "Tristia" comes partly from the French "tristesse" which means sadness – which is why Tristia is sometimes called "A Nation of Sorrows".

Hope that helps!

Sebastien

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