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# namegen (V1.2) - a d20 fantasy role playing game name generator
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# (c)2009 by Stefan Giesen, Cologne, Germany, Earth ;) - All Rights Reserved
#
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- This program is free software (as in "free beer").
  (Maybe it'll be open source later as well, we'll see.)
- It's available for Windows and Linux.
- It can create simple text or XML Output (see lib/namegen/namegen.dtd), so it
  can be used by other tools or scripts to create names on-the-fly.
- The official homepage is "http://igor.rock-clan.de/d20tools/".
- Use "namegen -h" for a list of all options.
- As a start, I've added the syllables for most races from the "Dungen Masters
  Guide I" (these are not exactly the same tables as in the book, since my
  algorithm differs, but the results should be close enough to the ones in the
  book).
- Furthermore I've added some self-made syllable files.
- You can create your own syllable files (have fun, it sounds much easier than
  it really is to get them right...).
- If you are trying to create your own syllable files, the "-d" switch will be
  extremly useful to understand the syntax of the syllable files.

Very short explanation:
"!" - starts the race line (if more than one are present, the last one is used)
"#" - starts a comment line
"^" - starts a first name rule line ("^40:134" means: if w% is 40 or less, use
      a random syllable from list 1, 2 and 3 (without space in between)
"$" - starts a last name rule line ("^40:134" means: if w% is 40 or less, use
      a random syllable from list 1, 2 and 3 (without space in between)
"1"-"9" - starts a syllable list entry. The number specifies the list number.
Don't use uppercase unless you know what you're doing! The algorithm changes 
each character after a non-alphanumeric character (and, of course, the first
one) automatically to upper-case. You can even add a whole list of first or
last names instead of syllables to create names like "Jesus-Maria", 
which would look as rule like this: "^50:1-1" - take 2 names from the first
list separated by a hyphen. A list entry for list 1 would be e.g. "1maria".

Remark: If your syllable file includes a line like "^human", the XML output
for race (which comes handy if you have different tribes with different name
schemes, but same race) will use that race name.
If you have any more questions, feel free to write me an email (but don't
expect an answer next day, I'm a really busy man). If you have any suggestions
how to improve this tool (or have any good ideas for additional features), 
just ask - maybe I'll implement them.

If you use the "-r" options, you can specify the race list file to search for
that search with "-l" as well (the default is "racelist.lst", see that file for
syntax). This has the big advantage, that you can specify more than one source
file for the same race. namegen will choose one of them to create all names in
that run, so if you want to have different names in the same run, you'll have
to call namegen more often (but with the same parameters). Remark: this may
change in future versions, so namegen will use all available files to create
names, e.g. for different tribes.

Finally: If you find any bugs, please tell me!

Having said that, I wish you much fun with this tool!

Keep on adventuring,
Stefan Giesen
mail: igor@rock-clan.de