Party Names

This is just something that occurs to me - something that should be easy, but for some reason is not. Adventuring bands, when they work together for a while, or when they have pretensions of importance, or when people get the fear of them, or they do great deeds - should get names. Mercenary companies used to have names - The White Company; The Varangian Guards or the Swiss Guards; down to the Flying Tigers or Blackwater - they still do have cool names. Gangs too - Crips and Bloods and The Firm, the Winter Hill Gang, Cosa Nostra, ISIS. Fiction of course does this nicely - Robin Hood and his Merry Men... the Order of the Phoenix.. the Second Sons... The thieves guild of Waynesburg comes off kind of bland. I came up with a bunch of gang names for Waynesburg, somewhere along the line - street gangs, rivals to the guild, these were: The Green Boys, the Yellowjackets, The Crimson Daggers, the Blood and Guts...

Adventuring associations should do something like that too - either naturally, because they have been going it awhile, or, probably, because someone wants to give himself airs. It's something to think about. Like a ship's name - you need your NPCs and outlaw bands to have some kind of identity. A lot of this, I think, is what ends up creating a sense of continuity in a setting - the interrelated groups, some official, some outsiders, everything in between.

Though for some reason it's hard to do, for me. I think it tends to come in bunches - you wrestle and struggle, then a flood of names come, just like that. Like when I was kid, and made up band names - sometimes it was hard - then sometimes you come up with 20 in a study hall. Anyway - it's a little detail I want to try to work into the game more - into the campaigns. Along with things like pirate ships - villages and village leaders - NPC parties as such - lords and their lands - guilds and their names - and so on.