Imperial Fists - Character Name Generator
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The Imperial Fists have always been one of my favourite Space Marine chapters, almost certainly because they were the poster boys of Epic 40,000 back when I was first getting into the Games Workshop hobby. There’s something about vast legions of grimy yellow tanks flanked by Thunderhawk gunships that will always appeal to me. My love for them is based almost entirely on aesthetics and nostalgia.
I’d never really delved deeper into what makes an Imperial Fists space marine until it came time to start working on this character name generator, and the experience was eye-opening in ways that I hadn’t anticipated. For starters, beyond their well known talent for siege warfare, the culture of the chapter isn’t as clearly drawn or colourfully presented as the Norse influences of the Space Wolves or the baroque vampiric influences of the Blood Angels. This made it very challenging to come up with creative descriptors and allusions for Imperial Fists characters, with no pool of clear cultural or creative influences to draw on. Their primarch, Rogal Dorn, has his roots in a culture that parallels the Inuit and other Arctic peoples, but this really isn’t part of the chapter’s theme in the same way that Roman culture is for the Ultramarines, or Mongol culture is for the White Scars. So I was out of luck on that front.
When it came to the specific components of the character names, I had almost the opposite problem, with multiple real world cultures represented in the roster of preexisting Imperial Fists characters names. This includes names that are clearly based on Greek, Roman, Spanish, Russian, German, Chinese and perhaps even others that I didn’t pick up on. When you’re building a name generator that breaks names down into their component syllables before recombining them at random, each of those components really needs to belong to the same linguistic tradition for the results to seem natural and plausible. This is essentially impossible with the Imperial Fists. I’ve done my best to retain as many of these disparate cultural naming conventions as possible whilst, sadly, cutting out many of their more esoteric features in order to ensure a more cohesive whole.
To cut a long story short, the creative influences behind the Imperial Fists are a maddening and incoherent hodge-podge, and with hindsight they were probably the worst possible candidate for my very first space marine character name generator! On the plus side, I’m convinced that no other chapter should give me anywhere near this much trouble - it’s all downhill from here!
This name generator is perfect for narrative play in the 41st millennium, whether you're naming your heroes in Warhammer 40,000 or each and every squad member in Kill Team. I hope you like it!
If you use the generator and enjoy it, I’d love it if you’d leave a comment below - let me know what names you’ve come up with! And as always, feel free to share and copy it as you see fit.
