The information in this is pretty good, but the PDF quality is quite bad. Some pages were obviously scans with the table slightly crooked.

The quality is also too bad for OCR to work properly, so if you were planning on doing any kind of search or wanting to transpose the tables into a spreadsheet, it's not going to work.

Great content, not so great PDF. Pages 2–24 seem to be image scans (no OCR), while pages 25–31 seem to be retyped.

Bought a hard copy of this YEARS ago. Loved it. Rather than give your NPC's the "generic" Russian, German, Polish, Japanese names, it gave me the ability to create authentic sounding names... even for my own characters. Beats "Jack the Samurai" or "Otto, the Nazi thug," or "Dmitri, the Russian spy..." Here's a treasure trove of actual names. And what a list!!!

I lost my original copy, and couldn't remember the title. No matter how I searched, for some reason, this one never came up.

Finally found it. Bought it.

This is great for any GM who has a mental block on names.

It's also great for players who want to give their characters that extra punch of an authentic name.

EASILY worth the price tag.

Can't comment on the quality of other lists, but when it comes to the Russian one, about a fifth of the list is filled with Lithuanian names, with some Latvian, Georgian and Armenian mixed in. Also, as with the Polish list, surnames come in mixed lists of feminine and masculine endings.

The name lists are good. However, the PDF itself is poor quality. Some of the pages are text, but most are images that appear to be scanned. The image pages are slightly tilted and greyed out, and it is not possible to select the names (since there is no embedded text).

Very useful list, 100s of names across many different cultures. Since buying all my woes around naming npcs (both on the fly and during prep) are gone. The only stumbling block might be if you want fantasy names for fantasy races, you'll have to pick a real world set of names that match your expectations of how those names should sound (not a big deal though once you've explored the book).

In short, well worth the money to never struggle to name an npc again (including when people ask you for names on the spot).

It's a comprehensive list, that's for sure. But the quality of the PDF is absolutely awful. It looks like a poorly scanned pirate copy of the book: the text is hard to read, there's no OCR, the pages are crooked, and there's no bookmarks. The "4th Edition Bonus Material" at the end was obviously tacked on later and is an acceptable PDF quality, but it's so narrow-focused on "pulp/noir" names that it makes it rather useless for anything else.

Honestly, I'd recommend against buying the digital version of this book, unless they come out with a "5th Edition" that doesn't look like something I would've illegally downloaded from a torrent site.

It's not much to look at, but this has been an indispensable gaming and writing aid for me since I bought a copy when it first premiered at Gen Con. I've used it at five jobs (I work in the computer game industry as a writer) and characters from dozens of campaigns have had names drawn from these pages.

A 31-page PDF of male and female names and surnames from many different real-world cultures, plus pulp/noir names and nicknames, pulp villain names, and location names for real and imaginary towns and cities. This is a perfect tool for those times when you need a convincing name for an NPC on the fly, or can't think of a good name for your new PC. Get this PDF and print a copy for your campaign binder, and another to keep behind the screen for on-the-fly character names, Otherwise, you may end up stuck with a bunch of NPCs named "Bob."

I had a copy of this list for at least a decade and my original has finally decayed into tatters from all the use it has been. This is the best and easiest to use name guide I've ever seen. A must have for GM's everywhere playing any system. FIVE STARS!

Very functional list of names. Nothing fancy but when I need a name, I don't care about the art involved with it.