A City Made of Wrong-Sounding Names
Revachol is a city on the wrong side of history — and its names sound exactly like that. "Harry Du Bois" is a French colonial surname attached to a man who can barely hold himself together. "Kim Kitsuragi" sounds Japanese but exists in a world with no Japan. "Cuno" is just Cuno. Nobody in Revachol has a name that lands cleanly, and that's the whole point.
ZA/UM built Disco Elysium's naming conventions from the actual linguistic sediment of their home city of Tallinn, Estonia — Baltic vowel patterns underneath a French colonial veneer, with Eastern European working-class names buried under both. The result is a naming palette that feels geographically impossible and emotionally precise at the same time. You can't quite place where these people come from. That ambiguity is doing a lot of work.
For tabletop campaigns, fan fiction, or your own homebrew set in Revachol's shadow, understanding what makes these names tick will get you much further than just picking something that sounds vaguely gritty.
How Faction Shapes a Name
Political alignment is the deepest cut in Disco Elysium — it determines how characters dress, what they believe, and what they call themselves. Names follow the same logic.
French given names or plain Western names, paired with Baltic-inflected surnames. Institutional but worn.
- Jean Vicquemare
- Judit Minot
- Mack Torson
- René Callot
Internationalist Eastern European — names that could belong to a translated pamphlet. Sometimes an alias.
- Vasile Drencu
- Nadia Koss
- Alexei Vorel
- Marta Selin
Anglo-American, slightly too clean. The kind of name on a business permit or a donor plaque.
- Oliver Grant
- Sylvia Hartwell
- Winston Cade
- Cassidy Merne
Fascists in Disco Elysium go the other direction — traditional "native" names with harsh consonant clusters, asserting an identity through phonetics. Klaas, Villem, Raigo. Unaligned civilians get the most interesting treatment: plain names that almost disappear, like Lilienne or Roy or Ioana, until someone attaches a descriptor to them and suddenly they're "Lilienne the Net Picker" — a person again.
Descriptor Names: When Nicknames Become Identity
Disco Elysium's most memorable characters blur the line between name and function. This isn't an accident.
The pattern: when a character's role defines them more than their background does, their function becomes their identifier. It's a naming shorthand the game uses to signal that someone has given themselves over entirely to what they do — or had that happen to them involuntarily.
Building Names That Sound Right
The mistake most people make when trying to write in the Disco Elysium style is reaching for something that sounds obviously noir or obviously Eastern European. Both are wrong. The names in Revachol don't announce themselves.
- Mix French surnames with plain given names
- Let working-class characters have simple one-syllable names
- Attach a descriptor to civilians who need flavor
- Use real Baltic or Eastern European name roots
- Let the name feel slightly out of place in your own world
- Use overtly noir clichés — "Jack Shade," "Victor Black"
- Make every name exotic or unpronounceable
- Give criminals elaborate full names they'd never use
- Stack too many consonants trying to sound harsh
- Forget that most people in Revachol are just tired
The best Disco Elysium names pass what you might call the "hostel guest" test. Could this person show up in the Whirling-in-Rags, order something cheap, and not seem out of place? The world is full of ordinary people with slightly off-register names. That ordinariness is the texture.
If you're building out a whole political faction for a tabletop setting, our cyberpunk name generator covers adjacent territory — different aesthetic, but the same instinct for names that belong to a broken world with a political memory.
Common Questions
What makes Disco Elysium names different from generic noir names?
Noir names are usually Anglo-American and deliberately stylized — Raymond Chandler names, hard-boiled and a little theatrical. Disco Elysium names are the opposite: geographically ambiguous, rooted in real linguistic traditions (Baltic, French, Eastern European), and deliberately mundane. "Harry Du Bois" sounds like a real person. "Jack Hardcastle" sounds like a genre. The realism is what makes the surreal elements land.
Can I use these names for a non-Disco Elysium tabletop setting?
Absolutely. The naming logic translates to any setting with political factions, urban decay, and a layered colonial history. The French-over-Baltic structure works for any city built on someone else's ruins. The descriptor-name convention — "the Deserter," "Lilienne the Net Picker" — works anywhere you want characters whose function defines them more than their backstory does.
Why do so many Disco Elysium characters have just one name?
Working-class anonymity, mostly. In a city where the revolution failed and the colonial administration left, surnames often belong to institutions — the police, the church, the union. People who've opted out of those institutions, or who were never part of them, often just go by one name. Cuno doesn't have a surname because Cuno doesn't have a faction. That's not an oversight — it's characterization through naming.