No, you don't have to, Aces.. But it'd help a lot. I tend to think a great deal about the people when I make places up, it helps me to visualise them better.

Pyro, I like the charsheet. Names are sort of a tricky issue, because some regions of our map only became united in recent years, and most if not all of of the small town villages that littler the map and save cartographers the pain of leaving blank spaces have their own naming traditions. But this is eastern. The most western names allowed are Cyrillic, or russian. Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Polynesian names are just fine, however.