#I actually got out my old volume of Canaanite mythology to fact check at least some of this so we weren't just relying on my memory

[outeremissary]

✨ How did you come up with the OC’s name? For Balthazar (Seriously curious because I love that name and have had a stuffed animal named it for years)

Siren, I fear you (and Cassy, who asked as well) are about to get far more than you may have anticipated for this and it will be very silly. Balthazar is probably second only to Carmen (who is a much older character) in terms of convoluted meta histories that get long winded answers.

[prompt list]

✨- How did you come up with the OC’s name?

Okay, so there's a bit of necessary background here. Balthazar is loosely derived from a character conceptualized in 2016 who never had a real, settled name (mostly a series of titles; at this point the most consistent have been Herald and Three-Horned Devil). The project this character was made for was mostly to entertain me and keep me sane during the first year of university. At some point in the front half of 2017 I began learning 5e. A part of the process for this was getting a feel for the scope of characters and limits of character creation by making a bunch of character sheets with different concepts. To expedite this process, I used OCs from stagnant or abandoned projects as the basis for concepts; Caina and Balthazar were pulled from the same one (although it's possible that Balthazar actually had a 3.5 sheet first- he was a recurring character in my 3.5 campaign and I don't remember if he was introduced in spring or fall).

So Balthazar at this point did not have a name, and I needed to make a "traditional fantasy" name appropriate for what was then a half-elf sheet. The class, sorcerer, had already been determined, as had the first of several concepts for the adapted version of the Herald. My goal was to make a name with an occult sound to suit this ambitious Vecna cultist and to honor the Herald's whole evil god thing. And my other, more specific goal? To work in at least one demon name to amuse myself. I hate coming up with names so I have a bad habit of the joke name that sticks.

Anyway. I started with the demon names. The first and most obvious point to me was Ba'al. I was familiar with Ba'al as god king and god of storms from the Ba'al cycle and some related Urgaritic texts, but as I recall Ba'al was a title meaning "lord" attached to a number of regional deities (some variants of that Ba'al). In Jewish and Christian texts Ba'al appears as a false god and force of emnity. Ba'al also provides the root of "Beelzebub," and eventually becomes absorbed into the roster of demons in many traditions (I'm most aware of medieval Christian here) before washing back up in horror flicks as a stock name for a demonic force. The aspect of transformation was appropriate, I felt: a messy polytheistic deity who was also now known as a menacing demon. This worked well for the Herald. I was especially attracted to the "false god" aspect. So I wanted a name that could incorporate that name and ideally might naturally produce something functionally like Ba'al as a nickname. I chose Balthazar. It was a real name, which felt especially grounded, and it had an archaic sound due to having fallen out of style in the region I live in long, long ago, which gave it a certain mysterious flair.

From how that story went you may already have guessed about Lucienne. And you would be correct. That famous angel Lucifer was the over the top element used to round things out- partly because it's very easy to find other derivations from lux. It's also true that Lucian was a given name I'd considered for the character before discarding for being too trite (although Lucian Balen would become a recurring tongue in cheek alias for NPC Balthazar cameos in oneshots). I decided to push for a French sound because in my mind - and don't ask why, I have no fucking idea - French was an especially alchemical sounding language. Now some of you reading this may know some things about French, and may perhaps speak it yourselves. If this is you, you've probably caught the thing I wouldn't realize until two or three years too late, which is that Lucienne is not a French sounding name. It is an actual French given name of the feminine gender, the feminine equivalent of Lucien and the French version of Lucia. Whoops. At that point I was in too deep to change it and I just pretend I do not see it. Maybe it's endearing in a quirky JRPG way. French doesn't exist in most fantasy settings anyway despite the prevalence of Latin out there. It's fine. At this point the in story origin of the name is that he made it up himself anyway, so who knows. Maybe that 12 Int just produced the same mistake as me.