Random DnD Character Generator

Who these characters are

This does not build you a character. It hands you one that already exists, somebody who has been walking around the game's worlds for years or decades, and who somebody once rolled dice for.

A few of the names in here:

• Drizzt Do'Urden
• Bruenor Battlehammer
• Artemis Entreri
• Jarlaxle Baenre
• Catti-brie
• Heward
• Keoghtom
• Zaknafein Do'Urden

Some of those names you will know from novels. Some of them you have said out loud at a table without ever wondering who they were, because their names are attached to things you use. That second group is the more interesting one, and it is where this page is going.

How to use it

1. Press Generate for a name, and again if you want another.
2. Raise the quantity to pull a handful, which is useful when you are populating a tavern, a rival adventuring party, or a list of people who owe your character money.
3. Type into Contains to search the names.
4. Copy to keep them.

Where the names come from

Named characters from across the game's fiction and its published settings, gathered and checked by hand. The tool picks from that pool in your browser.

Somebody's player character became a spell

Open a Player's Handbook and look at the spell list. Bigby's Hand. Leomund's Tiny Hut. Mordenkainen's Faithful Hound. Otiluke's Resilient Sphere. Rary's Telepathic Bond. Melf's Acid Arrow. Tasha's Hideous Laughter. Look in the magic items and you will find Heward's Handy Haversack and Keoghtom's Ointment.

Every one of those names belonged to somebody at a table in Wisconsin in the early 1970s.

They were not invented as lore. They were characters in Gary Gygax's home game, in the world he was building piece by piece and calling Greyhawk. Mordenkainen was Gygax's own character. Bigby began as an evil non-player wizard, was defeated by Mordenkainen, charmed into service, and eventually talked out of being evil. Otto started the same way, lost a fight to Tenser and Robilar, and ended up belonging to Rob Kuntz. Leomund was Len Lakofka, who later wrote a column in Dragon magazine called Leomund's Tiny Hut.

When the Advanced rules were published in 1978, those private names went out to the world attached to spells, and hundreds of thousands of strangers began casting them without any idea whose friends they were.

Tenser, Drawmij and Medium Rary

Three of them are worth telling properly, because they are jokes that escaped.

Tenser was created in the autumn of 1972 by Gygax's son Ernie, to play the first level of Castle Greyhawk. Tenser is an anagram of Ernest. Fifty years on, the first spell most wizards learn to be smug about is Tenser's Floating Disk, and almost nobody who casts it knows they are saying a teenager's name backwards through a shuffle.

Drawmij is simpler. Read it backwards. Jim Ward played a wizard in the game, and the story goes that his character once left a crucial item back at the inn at exactly the wrong moment. Ward argued that any wizard of sufficient power would surely be able to call his most important possessions to hand when he needed them. Gygax agreed. That argument is now a spell called Drawmij's Instant Summons, and it is in the game because a player lost an item and made a good case.

Rary is the best one. Rary was a wizard made by Brian Blume, who played the character only until he reached third level and then retired him, having achieved his single goal in life, which was to be able to describe his character as Medium Rary.

That pun is now permanently attached to two spells, and to a major villain, because Rary later betrayed the Circle of Eight and got himself known forever after as Rary the Traitor. A dad joke became a war criminal.

The other road into the game: the novels

The rest of the names here arrived differently, and Drizzt Do'Urden is the obvious one.

Drizzt was never anybody's player character. He was written, in a novel, and he became so popular that the world adjusted itself around him. A dark elf who refused the cruelty of his own people, walking around with two scimitars and a magical panther, was so beloved that an entire generation of players began asking whether they could play a good drow, which had until then been roughly like asking to play a nice dragon.

Bruenor, Catti-brie, Wulfgar and Regis came with him. Artemis Entreri came as his shadow. Jarlaxle came as the mercenary who steals every scene he is in.

So the game's population arrived from two directions. From below, out of somebody's actual Thursday night. And from above, out of a novel that a lot of people read. Both routes end in the same place: a name that thousands of strangers use as though the person were real.

Why a made-up person outlives the table

Most characters die with the campaign. Somebody moves city, somebody has a baby, the group stops meeting, and the barbarian who once killed a hill giant with a chandelier exists nowhere except in three people's memory, imperfectly.

The ones on this page survived because they were written down and then handed to somebody else. That is the whole mechanism. Gygax attached his friends' names to spells, and the spells were printed, and printing is a kind of immortality. Salvatore wrote Drizzt into a novel and the novel sold.

There is something worth taking from this if you play. The character you are running right now is exactly as real as Mordenkainen was in 1973, which is to say not at all, and completely. The only difference is that somebody wrote Mordenkainen down.

So write yours down. Not the statistics. The moment your rogue refused to steal something. The thing your cleric said to the dying guard. In fifty years nobody will care what your armour class was.

Questions people ask

Are these characters canon?

Some are, some are canon in a setting nobody uses any more, and some have been quietly rewritten across editions until very little of the original survives except the name. Canon in a game with fifty years of published material is less a fact than a running argument.

Can I use one of these in my own game?

At your own table, obviously, and people have been doing exactly that since the beginning. Dropping a famous name into a campaign as a rumour, a patron or a corpse is one of the oldest moves in the game.

Why do only wizards get spells named after them?

Because the naming convention came out of a fiction where wizards researched and published their own spells, the way a scientist publishes a paper. Nobody named a cleric spell after a cleric, since those were supposedly gifts from a god, and gods are not credited in the literature.

Who was Tasha?

By the game's own account, a little girl who wrote to Gary Gygax in crayon and suggested a spell involving laughter. He made the spell and used her name. She has since been folded into the fiction as an alias of one of the game's great villains, which is a strange fate for a piece of fan mail.

References

1. Greyhawk, on the origins of Bigby, Otto, Rary, Drawmij and the Circle of Eight. Great Library of Greyhawk. https://greyhawkonline.com/greyhawkwiki/Greyhawk
2. Scroll for Initiative (2022). Mordenkainen, Tasha, and Fizban: the great wizards of D&D history. https://scrollforinitiative.com/2022/05/31/mordenkainen-tasha-and-fizban-the-great-wizards-of-dd-history/