Deschain is the surname of Roland, the main character in Stephen King's Dark Tower series.

Alban, I found that on some name website, and really liked the sound of it. It means "White", which I wanted to use because of all the references to white in the Serenwilde, The Alabaster Road, elfen skin, and I think some leaves are white.

Aoife (EE-fah or EE-feh) is from Irish mythology, though in my head I've always (somewhat deliberately) mangled the pronunciation and pronounced it A-oh-feh.

Admittedly, I came across the name about 5, maybe 6 years ago when I was still free-form roleplaying, and wanted something pretty. Some babynamer site or other claimed it meant "beautiful, radiant".

It's stuck through multiple free-form incarnations and now Lusternia!

I enjoy Greek mythology so that is where I came across the name. Ainia means ‘swiftness’ I kind of liked that! And, since people keep asking me if I am that ‘Ainia’ from that ‘other realm’ I guess it is not all that original!!

I tried for a while to make something that sounded feline but meant nothing. I still don't remember the name I came up with because after a few days I changed it and then forgot about it. Ended up with a name that just had some of the same phonemes as the old one, but a more lyrical sound. It never occurred to me that people would pronounce the Y like in "sky", or I would have spelled it differently.

Well when I first started playing eons ago, I had read a book by Elizabeth Moon "The deeds of Paksennarion" and fell in love with the main character a female paladin and on my first MUD used that....then I moved on and changed it to Sennaria which I use in a lot of different places.....even irl as a nickname.
had two other characters on Achaea that started with a "g" came here and dug Sarie out of my transforming name.

I thought of this name while I was idling around the house one day. It's one of the most original, inspiring and uniquely concocted names i have ever had. It came as a shock to me that no one had ever thought of a name like this before. I suppose that's what creativity is for!

Iola is just a name I picked that looked pretty. It means 'violet stormcloud', or other similarly translated meanings. Sometimes it just means 'violet', I think.

I picked it before I knew Ialie was going to be Iola's mother :>

I thought of it off the top of my head, wanted something that sounded like "Aurora".

It turns out my name is also a town in Denver: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auraria,_Denver

I bashed random keys on the keyboard then played with the combinations until I got this name. True story.

I've found a good way to get "authentic" fantasy names is to use or pick an appropriate real world influence and mix up real names from there until you find a combination you like. I use it for Zelda fics all the time. For Lanath, I wanted something Middle Eastern-esque- don't know if that worked with the final product- so I went into a baby name site and just went through the origin search function until I got a handful of names that would be good for mixing. Hungarian names are really, really good for a fantasy name that doesn't feel forced.

I think I got the "La" portion off Leilah and several names akin to it, which all have a similiar meaning. "Dark-haired beauty" or "dark beauty", which fits for Lanath- she's got dark hair and certainly thinks she's beautiful. Unfortunately, I don't quite remember where "-nath" came from, but I think I messed around with the vowel from whatever name I originally took it off from. It was originally planned as "Lanathe" ("nathe" pronounced like "Nathan"), since Lanath was conceived as a diva and I figured the "e" made it a little more feminine, but the first character-making process failed, since Nexus was extremely laggy that day, and so "Lanath" (rhymes with wrath) was born instead.

I never steal names from media, always making one up. Then, to make sure, I google them to check if the name doesn't appear in some random movie/book/anime/game I didn't play, but some people might have.
However, as an exception to this, names that are broad and popular are spared to live even though Google lists thousands of links - like Bob, Richard or... well, Cuber.

EDIT: Clarifying edits.

Jack as both a character and a name was taken from Jack of Blades from Fable and Jack Skellington from the Nightmare Before Christmas. As for my other characters, Kymir and Eilar are (I hope) original names while Iblis is the name given to the Islamic devil.

Naming a Nihilist character after the devil. Kinda scraping the bottom of the barrel with that one, I guess.

I was searching about for Elvish sounding names for something I could play with when I stumbled upon this generator that would take your name and convert it into a fantasy creature's name, separated into male and female. My name turned up Linwe on the female, and the male one was Arminas, which is Linwe's son. (Not that most know his first name)

I bashed my fingers on the keyboard, and it shows.

It's the name of my Lusternian, as well as my WoW character.. though there is a guy in my guild there who keeps insisting on pronouncing it "wim-brinn".

I thought of what came to mind when I thought of Magnagora (I fully intended a Nihilist which I have always been) and decided that ideally you want a name your foes remember, so I thought based on what our combat meant to others and contagion came to mind.

Hence I started with the root word, Malaria, based on the disease.

Malaria sounded female, and I wanted a male version so I changed it to Malarious.

Simba was named because its just what I called him at one point IG, and it stuck, now I always call em Simba

FUN FACT: Simba's true name is SEEEEEEEMMMMMMBBBBBAAA 1S 7E 6M 5B 3A or 'Simba' for short.

Doman = My real name through a Certain Final Fantasy Language

I created the name Everiine for a D&D campaign I was supposed to play that never got off the ground. So I migrated the name over to Lusternia when I started playing. I Googled it, and the only hits were references to me . I wanted a name that sounded somewhat elfen, since the original D&D character was half-elfen.

Though if I knew that so many people would think he was a girl, I might have given Everiine a different name.

Krin was the name of a thief in legend of the dragoon

The root word "oak".

More to come.