Random DnD Race Generator

What is in this list

A hand-checked pool of playable ancestries, species, and lineages drawn from across the current rules and the books that came before them, including the subraces and the strange ones that only exist in a single setting.

A few examples:

• Mountain Dwarf
• Duergar (Gray Dwarf)
• High Elf
• Tiefling
• Kender
• Dhampir
• Hexblood
• Reborn

Some of those are older than the game by a thousand years. Some were invented in the last few years. And in 2024, the game stopped calling any of them a race.

Drawing one

1. Press Generate and take what you get.
2. Ask for a few if you want to fill a city street rather than make a character.
3. Type into Contains to search, which is useful for pulling all the elves or all the dwarves at once.
4. Copy to keep them.

How the list was built

Playable ancestries gathered by hand from across the game's published material, current and legacy. The tool picks from that pool in your browser.

Almost all of them were borrowed from somewhere

Very little on this list was invented from nothing, and tracing where each one came from is more interesting than the game's own lore about them.

The duergar, the grey dwarves who live underground and hate the sun, come out of Norse and northern English folklore, where a duergar was simply a dwarf, and not a nice one. The drow come from Scottish and Orcadian folk belief, where a trow or drow was a small, malevolent underground creature. Both were sitting in old dictionaries of folklore, waiting.

The gnome was more or less invented in the sixteenth century by Paracelsus, the Swiss alchemist, as the earth-dwelling elemental in a scheme with sylphs for air and undines for water. He appears to have made the word up.

Then there are the ones native to the game itself. The kender belong to Dragonlance and to nowhere else, small people with no sense of fear and no concept of ownership, and generations of players have wanted to strangle one. The tiefling, the dhampir, the hexblood and the reborn are the game turning its own monsters into people you can play, which is a thing it has done more and more as the years have gone on.

The long shadow of one novelist

The reason fantasy has elves and dwarves and halflings standing next to each other in a tavern, rather than any of the thousand other arrangements folklore would allow, is largely one man.

Before Tolkien, an elf in the English tradition was as likely to be a tiny thing on a mushroom as a tall archer. He made them ancient, grave and doomed. He made dwarves a proud industrial people with a lost homeland. He put a small, comfortable, unheroic person at the centre and made the story about him.

Dungeons & Dragons took the whole arrangement, dropped it into a wargame, and gave it dice. And because the game became the way most people meet fantasy, the arrangement became the furniture. Nearly every fantasy video game you have ever played is standing in that shadow, usually without knowing whose it is.

It is worth noticing how contingent that is. There is no reason a fantasy world must contain exactly these peoples. It contains them because a philologist at Oxford liked working out how their languages would have sounded.

The year the game stopped calling them races

In the 2024 revision of the rules, the word race was retired. What you are born as is now called a species, and the rules for it changed at the same time.

The publisher gave two reasons, and they are worth keeping apart, because people tend to argue about one while meaning the other.

The first is about the word. Race, applied to a dwarf and a human as though they were varieties of the same creature, is doing something quite different from what the word does in the real world, and it carries a freight nobody wanted at the table. Species, they argued, describes the situation more accurately: these are genuinely different kinds of creature, not variations on a theme.

The second reason is a design argument, and it has nothing to do with the first. For fifty years, your ancestry gave you bonuses to your abilities. An elf was more dexterous. A half-orc was stronger. In practice this meant players chose their ancestry to suit the class they wanted to play, or accepted a permanent penalty for playing the character they actually wanted. Tables filled up with goliath barbarians and elf rogues, not because anybody found that interesting, but because the arithmetic pushed them there.

So the bonuses were moved. In the current rules, the boost to your abilities comes from your background, from the life your character has lived, rather than from the body they were born in.

What changed underneath the word

Take the design change on its own for a moment, because it is a genuinely interesting piece of game design regardless of what you think about the vocabulary.

The old rule said, in mechanical terms, that being born an elf made you nimble. Not that elves train, or that elven culture prizes archery, but that the fact of your birth adjusted a number on your sheet. That is a strong claim for a game to make, and it made it quietly, in a table of plus twos, for half a century.

The new rule says something different. Your body still gives you things: dwarves still see in the dark, dragonborn still breathe fire, and nobody has taken away the wings. But how quick, clever or forceful you are now comes from what you did with your life. A dwarf raised as a scholar and a dwarf raised as a soldier are different people, and the rules will now say so.

The half-elf and the half-orc disappeared as separate entries in the same revision. Mixed ancestry did not disappear from the fiction, but you now pick which set of traits you inherited and describe the rest, which some players found freeing and others found like being asked to choose a parent.

Not everybody welcomed any of this. Players who had spent decades with the old assumptions felt an elf without a dexterity bonus was not quite an elf, and said so. Others had been asking for the change for years. Both camps are still arguing about it, and the argument is genuinely about what a fantasy game is claiming when it tells you what your birth makes you good at.

Playing against what the book says you are

Whatever the tool hands you, the interesting character is rarely the one the entry describes.

The published text of every ancestry is a description of the average member, written by somebody in the world with opinions. Dwarves are stubborn. Elves are aloof. Halflings are cheerful. These are stereotypes in the strict sense: broadly held beliefs about a group, useful for a paragraph, and useless for a person.

So take the draw and then ask a better question. Not what are dwarves like, but what is this dwarf like, and what does he think of what people expect from dwarves. A drow who is tired of being asked whether she is one of the good ones is a character. A drow who is one of the good ones is a paragraph.

The good news is that the rules have quietly moved to support exactly this, by taking your talents out of your blood and putting them into your history.

Questions people ask

Is race the same thing as species now?

Mechanically, yes. The current rules use species, older books use race, and they refer to the same slot on the character sheet. Any table can use whichever word it prefers, and most tables have not entirely stopped saying race out of habit.

Can I still play a race from an older book?

Yes. The material is not deleted. You take your ability boosts from your background under the current rules, and everything else works as printed.

Does any species work with any class now?

That was the point of the change. Nothing stops you from playing a halfling barbarian or a goliath wizard, and neither one is now paying a numerical penalty for it.

What is a subrace?

A variety within an ancestry: hill dwarf against mountain dwarf, high elf against wood elf. The current rules still have these, though they are handled more consistently than they once were, and some of them now amount to a choice of a few spells.

References

1. D&D Beyond (2024). The 10 Species in the 2024 Player's Handbook, on the move of ability score adjustments to backgrounds. https://www.dndbeyond.com/posts/1783-the-10-species-in-the-2024-players-handbook
2. Dungeon Mister (2024). Race And Species Changes In D&D 2024. https://dungeonmister.com/guides/race-and-species-changes-in-dnd-2024/