It is the custom of the SCA College of Arms to create and publish Letters of Misintent on April 1, rather than the more usual Letters of Intent, full of shenanigans of some type or another. Much of the time these are filled with pop culture references made documentable to SCA period by means primarily of the FamilySearch records and the fact that late 16th-century English surnames were often found used as given names as well, but there are occasionally other types of shenanigans, though those are generally funnier to heralds than to layfolk. This is the second year I've been the East Kingdom's submissions herald and therefore nominally in charge of deciding on a theme (or lack thereof) for the April 1 letter, creating it, and publishing it. Last year, everything was Very Too Much and I didn't get around to it; this year, I was determined not to let it pass me by, as I'm stepping down this summer and I wanted to have at least one with my name on it. Behold, the East'
One of the best resources for consulting heralds is Appendix A of SENA , as that provides lists of name patterns that do not require further documentation, sorted by language group. If you're not particularly familiar with a given language (and even if you are!), it's a fantastic resource to help you construct historically-plausible names using a structure that's been previously documented to period, without needing to reinvent the wheel every time. Things like "late period English names can use double bynames" or "French descriptive/occupational bynames may use the article le, la, l', les or un/une or omit it." Not every language is represented, but it's a fantastic starting point and one that I point every new consulting herald towards. The Czech table, so far, has been empty, with merely the note "Czech: All patterns in Czech must be documented. Academy of Saint Gabriel report 3244 ( http://www.s-gabriel.org/3244.txt ) gives some leads fo