Random Game Of Thrones House Generator

What this list is

These are the noble houses of a fantasy world, each with its own animal, its own colours, and its own motto. It looks like invention, and the specific houses are, but the system they belong to is real. Every one of these houses is built according to the actual rules of medieval heraldry, a genuine and surprisingly strict discipline, and this page is about that.

Press Generate and it hands you one. A few from the list:

• House Stark
• House Lannister
• House Targaryen
• House Greyjoy
• House Martell
• House Bolton
• House Mormont
• House Frey

Each of these comes with a beast and a phrase: a wolf, a lion, a dragon, a kraken, and words like Winter is Coming or Fire and Blood. Those are not random flourishes. They follow rules that real families followed for centuries, and the author knew those rules well enough to bend them on purpose.

Drawing a house

1. Press Generate for one house.
2. Ask for a few to build a set of factions for a story or a game.
3. Type into Contains to search by name.
4. Copy to keep them.

Where these come from

Noble houses of the saga, gathered and checked by hand, from the great houses to the minor bannermen. The tool picks from that pool in your browser.

The heraldry is not invented

It is easy to assume the author dreamed up the whole idea of families with animal symbols and colours. He did not. Heraldry is a real system, developed in medieval Europe, and it was a serious matter, not decoration.

It existed for a practical reason. On a battlefield, a knight is encased head to foot in armour, his face hidden, indistinguishable from every other armoured man. Heraldry solved that: a bold, simple design on the shield and surcoat, in strong contrasting colours, so that from a distance, in the chaos of a fight, you could tell friend from enemy and know which lord was which. The designs had to read instantly at a glance, which is why real heraldry favours a single strong animal or shape in a couple of bold colours, exactly like the wolf, the lion and the dragon of this saga.

And it had rules, genuinely strict ones. The most famous is a rule about colours: broadly, you may not place certain colours directly on certain others, because the point is contrast and some combinations would not stand out at a distance. The author knew this rule. The wolf of the northern house is grey on white, which would technically break it, and there is a real heraldic exception for depicting an animal in its natural colour, which is precisely the exception the design relies on. That is not the work of someone decorating a fantasy. That is someone who studied the actual discipline closely enough to use its fine print.

The houses in this list, then, are invented families dressed in a real system. The families are fiction; the heraldry is history, followed carefully, which is another reason the world feels so solid: its symbols obey rules that real symbols obeyed for five hundred years.

A house's words are its whole character

Beyond the animal and the colours, each house has a motto, called its words, and this is where the author does something genuinely artful. A house's words are a compressed statement of its entire character, and reading them tells you what kind of people you are dealing with.

Most of the words are boasts or threats, which is historically accurate: real mottoes were often proud declarations of a family's strength or virtue. So one house roars that theirs is the fury, all blunt force and quick temper. Another declares fire and blood, the words of conquerors who took a continent with dragons. A third, a proud seafaring people who live by raiding rather than farming, flatly announces that they do not sow, meaning they take rather than grow. In each case the words are the family's self-image in a handful of syllables, and they match how those families behave.

There is a subtlety worth noticing. One great house has an official motto that is a standard proud boast, and a second, unofficial saying that everyone actually uses, which promises that the family always pays its debts. The unofficial one is far more revealing, because it sounds like a statement of honour and is in fact a threat: cross us and we will repay it. That a family is known by its menacing unofficial words rather than its formal proud ones tells you exactly what that family is, and the author lets the characters themselves point this out.

The words work the way real mottoes worked, as a family's public face, but the author uses them the way a novelist uses everything, to reveal character in miniature. Three or four words per house, and you know their nature.

The one house whose words are a warning

Among all these boasts and threats, one house stands apart, and the difference is the whole point of it.

The northern house does not boast. Its words are not a claim of strength or a threat to enemies. They are a warning, and not even a warning aimed at rivals: Winter is Coming. It is a statement about the world, not about the family. It says that hardship is always approaching, that comfort is temporary, that you must stay watchful and prepared because the cold will return whether you are ready or not.

Within the story, a character reflects on exactly this, noticing how strange it is that where every other house boasts of glory and honour, these northerners chose an ominous reminder instead, and how it marks them as a different, graver kind of people, almost like another country. The words tell you everything about the north: hard, plain, unshowy, shaped by a harsh land, concerned less with pride than with survival.

This is fine writing, because the motto is doing several things at once. It characterises the family. It sets a mood for the whole saga, since the approaching winter is also a literal threat that hangs over the entire story. And it quietly makes the point that the wisest house is the one that boasts least, that spends its words not on its own glory but on a sober truth about the world. In a story full of families shouting about their strength, the one that simply warns of the coming cold turns out to be the one worth listening to.

Why the language of heraldry is French

Here is a detail that surprises people, and it is real, not invented. The technical language of heraldry, the specialised vocabulary used to describe these designs precisely, exists mainly in French. To formally describe a coat of arms, in the real discipline, you use French terms.

The reason is history. Heraldry developed and was codified in medieval Europe at a time when French was the language of the nobility across much of the continent, including, after the Norman conquest, the ruling class of England. The knights and lords who used heraldry, and the officials who regulated it, spoke French, so the vocabulary of the system grew up in French and stayed there, long after the nobility had switched to speaking other languages. A discipline freezes the language it was born in, the way a science keeps its Latin.

This is the kind of thing the author of this saga knew, and it is part of why the world's heraldry feels authentic rather than approximate. The designs are described and constructed with an awareness of how the real system actually works, down to details most readers will never consciously register. A shield in this world is not just a picture of an animal. It is an object built according to a genuine centuries-old craft, with its own strict grammar, its own rules of contrast, and its own frozen French vocabulary.

That is the deepest reason these houses feel real. They are not families with logos. They are families with coats of arms, in the full historical sense, obeying a system that governed real families for half a millennium, invented afresh but according to the true rules.

Questions people ask

Is the heraldry in this world based on real rules?

Yes, closely. Real medieval heraldry had strict conventions, including rules about which colours could sit against which, and the author followed them, even using genuine exceptions like depicting an animal in its natural colour. The families are invented; the system dressing them is historical.

What are house words?

They are a family's motto, a compressed statement of its character, usually a boast or a threat in the real historical manner. The author uses them to reveal each house's nature in a few syllables, so the words tell you what kind of people a house are before you meet them.

Why are the northern house's words different?

Because they are a warning rather than a boast, which sets that house apart as a graver, plainer people concerned with survival over glory. It also sets the mood for the whole saga, since the coming winter is a literal threat, making the quietest motto arguably the most important.

Is the heraldry vocabulary really French?

Yes. The technical language for describing coats of arms is largely French, because heraldry was codified when French was the language of the European nobility. The vocabulary stayed French even after the nobility changed languages, the way a discipline keeps the tongue it was born in.

References

1. Wiki of Westeros, House words, on mottoes as boasts or threats and the northern house's warning as the exception. https://gameofthrones.fandom.com/wiki/House_words
2. Wiki of Westeros, Heraldry, on the real medieval rules of tincture, the natural-colour exception, and the French terminology. https://gameofthrones.fandom.com/wiki/Heraldry