The Trivia of Names

This is self-indulgent trivia, but I think there's at least a couple friends who might also find it amusing.

Recently (in February or March?) I joined Nick's new game in the city-state of Orm, much to my pleasure. We who are participating were obliged to roll up new characters, to be native neophytes of the world under its dying sun. This was a great opportunity for me, something I've been wanting to do for a while--my other B/X characters are almost all mixed up with one another for various reasons, and it would be nice to have a fresh start separate from their interests.

I was hung up on the name. Almost all of my human characters have Greek-inspired names (Eleutheria, Ismene, Nebridius, Eleithiya, Aspasia, etc). There are a couple oddballs here or there: Jimmy Neckbeard (a halfling who claims dwarfish ancecstry), Laurantha (an Elf shamelessly named after Dragonlance's Lauranthelas), Goldilocks (an NPC orphan that one of my characters adopted, and I thence rolled into a character), Xev (semi-deceased, shamelessly ripped from one of my favorite sci-fi TV shows, Lexx).

So what could I do that's new?

Well, nothing new that I looked at hooked me; my smattering of basic Arabic left me uninspired, and it was the main source I was toying with. I haven't gotten much traction out of my thin German for fantasy names, and despite the seeming-medieval setting of assumed-D&D, I prefer the weirder bits of Classical and older pagan history for my characters and inspiration.

So alright, I think, why not re-tread old ground? I named my first B/X character Xanthos, explicitly out of the Iliad. He's still my main character; if I'm naming a new "main" character, why not do that again?

Technically, my inspiration for Xanthos was that that was the name of one of Achilleus' horses, the one that speaks to him (if I'm remembering right); but I also knew that the name was shared with one of the rivers that bordered the fields where the Achaeans and Trojans joined battle.

So, why not name this new character after the other river? Perfect! Same source-material, but a sideways justification. (I also considered using just any old name from the Iliad, like Meriones or Idomeneus--and specifically them, because I once had a wild-haired dream of writing a play using them, which was a bad idea, but I like those characters in particular--but I decided it would be better to use place names, so that I could win my own glory! rather than competing with literal heroes)

My memory was that there were two rivers on the plain of battle before Troy. The plain was sometimes called Scamander because of one of the rivers that bordered it; if Xanthos was one of the rivers, I reasoned, then Scamander was the other one. Hence the new character's name: Scamandros!

Alas, I clearly haven't reread the Iliad any time recently. Xanthos and Scamander are the same river, known to mortals as Scamander, and to the gods as Xanthos. The other river that I was thinking of that bordered the plain was the Simoieis ...

So now I've got two characters running around in different games both named after the same river, by different names. I won't lie that I briefly thought that they must be the same soul, transmigrated via the fantasy of D&D to occupy both bodies in wildly different places; eh, but better they're just two souls coincidentally co-named. After all, I was looking to branch out to begin with!