After creating the character, we thought we might want to contextualise it into our game. Note, I said "it" and not "him/her", the character is a creation, an elemental golem.... thing... therefore we agreed upon the character being genderless. We have how the character was brought into being in the story being written by Zak (blog link below*), but we needed a name for the character.
Our main theme for the game is the environment and setting, which is based on Tibet. With this in mind I got to researching Tibet and their language. Unfortunately, I found that Tibet uses many smaller languages, so looking into Tibetan history, I found that at one point, they had a large connection with the language Sanskrit, the primary language of Hinduism and scholarly language of Buddhism.
Then we looked at what the characters goal is. Throughout our game, it's the characters goal to recover 'wyrms', and bring life and balance back to the ancient empire that created him. My original thoughts were to look along the lines of hunter or predator, as these are what I thought the character was doing. Then I realised that not only are these themes too aggressive for this character, but they aren't really doing either, and the main theme of this character is balance. That is when I found the name Dharma. Dharma is sanskrit for which for Hinduism, signifies behaviors and actions in accordance with the natural order, and in Buddhism, means "cosmic law and order". Essentially, Dharma creates balance, making things how they are supposed to be.
And so our protagonist had their name, Dharma.
* (Zak's blog)
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