Having trouble coming up with a cool but not too cool name for your character? Or maybe you haven't 'fleshed' them out enough to know food they'd eat for breakfast in the great hall?

Look no further!

Name sites:
Behind the Name - Etymology, meanings behind names
Medieval Names Archive - Good list of names from certain time periods
Kate Monk's Onomastikon - Names all over the world, if a 404 page comes up just click the link under 'available documents'

Getting to know your character better:
Character Profile - Scroll down for the questionnaire
Creating fictional characters - a few things to think about and consider

I'm aware there are several other threads like this floating about, however I didn't really fancy bringing anything back from the dead at this time, and I definitely think these are the best links to use! Enjoy.

I feel the need to butt in here and say that you shouldn't fill out that entire list of questions before you put your character in the game. Sometimes my initial thoughts about my characters are proven very wrong, but I only know that by playing. Personally, I think that the following is the most important to know before you take a character in-game:

Where they're from(country, maybe region if it's large, whether they lived in a rural, suburb, or city area)
Accent
Blood status
Basic appearance(Hair/eye color, short/tall, chubby/scrawny/somewhere in between, etc)
General personality(how they react upon meeting people, any quirks or prejudices that jump out at you)

I've found that everything else comes most easily through RP, just tossing my character in the situation and seeing what they think about it, rather than trying to think of all possibilities beforehand and holding my character to them. Something else I do is I keep the character in my mind as I go about my daily life(I do this for established characters too). I might be reading a book, and in my head I ask Karen what she thinks about it. Or I'm eating some food, and I ask Sam if he likes it. Or I walk through an oily puddle in the parking lot and Lily freaks the hell out with no prompting from me(she really hates the hole I currently have in my shoe, I try to keep her in the back of my mind as much as possible these days). You get the idea. I find that it helps me figure out little weird things about my characters, like if they're vegetarian, mind being around smokers, and so on.

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Karen Bonoa - Ravenclaw Alumni
Madeline Ingleman - 2nd Year Hufflepuff
Niven McLaren - 1st Year Slytherin
Sam McKinnon - 6th Year Ravenclaw

Jabari Nwosu * Joshua Tannerman * Lenora Hollings * Lillian Stewart * Maria Bonoa

Oh I definitely agree! The more you RP the more you think about your character and find things out about them (how they react in situations etc), and even your character might change their views on things through RP. However I find that questionnaires and so on can help you get a head start or even make you think of things to add to future RP!

You'd need to know their family background beforehand too, parents, brothers and sisters etc. Although I suppose the parents are only important if they don't have the two parent family and dad ran off with the maid or something lol.

Hey, isn't Sam second year now?

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Anastasia McLaren - 4th year Slytherin
Anna Daljera - 3rd year Gryffindor
Shizuka Matsuri - 2nd year Ravenclaw