Dnd Name Generator

The most famous names in D&D belong to the players

Say the name Tenser out loud. It sounds like an archmage. Ancient, a little severe, the sort of person who has a tower.

It is an anagram of Ernest.

In the autumn of 1972, Gary Gygax built a castle and a dungeon underneath it so he could test some rules he was working on. The first two players were his own children, Ernie and Elise. Ernie rolled up a wizard and called him Tenser. Between them the two kids killed the first monsters anybody has ever killed in this game and found the first treasure, a chest of three thousand copper coins that turned out to be too heavy to carry home.

Tenser is still in the rulebooks. So are the others, and once you know, you cannot unsee it.

Drawmij is Jim Ward, one of the players, spelled backwards. Melf, the elf archmage, was Luke Gygax's character, and the name is simply Male Elf. Vecna, the dread lich, is an anagram of Vance, for the author Jack Vance. Mordenkainen was Gary's own character. Even the drow city in one of the old modules was assembled out of the first letters of his children's names.

None of this was meant to last. These were in-jokes at a kitchen table in Wisconsin. They are now carved into a game played by millions of people who have no idea whose kid they are talking about.

How a character turns into a spell

Here is the mechanism, and it is the reason D&D feels like a world rather than a rulebook.

A wizard invents something. The spell keeps his name. Centuries later some other wizard learns it, and the name comes along, because that is how credit works.

So when you cast Tenser's floating disc, you have not met Tenser. You will probably never meet Tenser. But you know he existed, that he was clever, and that whatever he made was good enough to outlive him. A whole person is implied by a possessive apostrophe.

That is an enormous amount of worldbuilding for one word, and it costs nothing.

It also tells you what a good character name is for. It is not there to sound impressive on the sheet. It is there to sound right in somebody else's mouth, twenty sessions later, attached to something you did.

The names Gygax got to keep

There is a strange coda to all this.

When Gygax was pushed out of the company he had co-founded, in 1985, he lost the rights to most of the characters he had created. The archmages, the villains, the names that had become spells.

Except the ones that were anagrams of his own name.

Those he kept, because they were, in the end, him. The joke he had been playing on his friends for a decade turned out to be the only piece of the world he could carry out of the building.

Which is a good argument for hiding yourself in a name.

A name that gets said out loud every week

Almost every naming guide forgets the thing that makes a tabletop name different from a name in a novel. Nobody reads your character's name. They say it, for hours, in a room, for years.

Which changes the rules entirely.

It has to survive the table shortening it. Nobody will use three syllables when two will do. Whatever the second syllable is, that is your real name. Choose it on purpose.

It has to be sayable by the friend who is bad at names. Every group has one. He will call your character something adjacent for the entire campaign, and everyone will adopt his version. If your name has an unusual cluster in the middle, you are handing him the pen.

It should not be a joke you have to keep telling. A pun is funny in session one, tolerated in session four, and quietly renamed by session nine.

It should sound like something, not describe something. Grimblade the Vengeful is a character sheet. Tenser is a person.

The strongest test is the oldest one. Would somebody name a spell after this? Not because it sounds grand, but because it sounds like a person who might have made something.

Naming across the ancestries

This game is unusual in that the rulebook actually prescribes naming conventions. Each ancestry has a sound, and the sound is not decoration. It is how a table knows, before any explanation, what has walked into the tavern.

The soft flowing names belong to the elves, and there is real linguistic science behind why they feel that way. The blunt compounds belong to the dwarves, and their second names are earned rather than inherited. The single hard syllables belong to the orcs. The improbable, faintly ridiculous ones belong to the gnomes, for reasons somebody has actually measured.

Pick the sound before you pick the name, and the name will fit.

Where the names come from

The names come from a list our team researched and checked by hand, and one is drawn at random each time. Everything happens on your own device, and nothing you type is sent anywhere.

Questions people ask about D&D names

Is Tenser really an anagram?

Yes. Tenser was played by Ernie Gygax, Gary's son, and the name is Ernest rearranged. He was one of the first two player characters in the history of the game.

What about Drawmij?

Read it backwards. Jim Ward was one of the players at Gygax's table, and he went on to write a good deal of the game himself. His character is still in the spell lists.

What makes a good character name?

One that other people can say. It gets spoken across a table for months, so it needs a strong first syllable, no awkward cluster in the middle, and no joke that has to be re-explained. If you can imagine somebody in a hundred years attaching it to a spell, you have it.

Should I name my character after a pun?

The game itself was built on puns and in-jokes, so there is precedent. The difference is that Melf and Vecna sound like names first and jokes second. If your pun stops sounding like a name the instant somebody gets it, it will not survive the campaign.

How do I make the name fit my character's ancestry?

Listen to the sounds rather than reading the lore. The ancestries in this game are separated by phonetics before anything else, and a name that sits in the wrong sound will feel wrong at the table even when nobody can say why.

References

1. Tenser. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenser
2. The Origins of Some D&D Names. EN World. https://www.enworld.org/threads/the-origins-of-some-d-d-names.673066/
3. The Real Life Origins of Famous NPCs. Bell of Lost Souls. https://www.belloflostsouls.net/2023/06/dd-the-real-life-origins-of-famous-npcs.html