Best DnD name generators 2023

No character is complete without the perfect DnD name. You may have your ability scores, feats, skills, and spells detailed, and you may have a novel-length backstory, but you’re stuck on that one final detail – what to call your character. Suddenly, you’re staring at a blank spot on the character sheet, gripped with the cold sweat of analysis paralysis as your sight narrows down on that last empty box that still needs to be filled. You clearly need a DnD name generator, stat.

The good news is, there’s help for poor, lost souls such as yourself. We’ve sorted through the chaff and come up with ten excellent Dungeons and Dragons name generators to get the creative juices flowing. Some are designed for specific DnD races, while others are great whatever DnD classes and DnD backgrounds you’re going for.

To start off, let’s give a little explanation for how we’ve graded these name generators. Each entry is judged on three categories, marked on a one to five scale: quality, controls, and extras. For each generator, we’ve also established whether it was specifically designed to produce D&D names, or not.

Quality measures how usable, on average, the generated results are, along with whether the generator produces a decent number of them with each click. Controls grades how well the user can finetune the outcome – for instance with filters for things like gender, race, or culture. Extras are weighted less heavily than the first two categories, but include things like how good the UI is, if the program also generates supplementary information, and if it’s on a site with other, related generators that could also be useful for D&D.

With all of that out of the way, let’s get started with our favourite generators for some of the most popular and hard-to-name playable races.

Elf name generator DnD

Formerly hosted on the website of the same name, but preserved and usable here, courtesy of the Wayback Machine, Elf Names Generators does exactly what it says on the tin. It generates a sizeable list of appropriately elvish-sounding names at a touch. This generator has variants for pretty much every major archetype of DnD Elf you can think of – D&D names, DnD Half-Elf names, dark Elf names, even Elf names inspired by World of Warcraft.

DnD Dwarf name generator

Following the traditional ‘first name, noun-verber’ school of DnD Dwarf naming, Candlekeep.com is spot-on at creating D&D Dwarf names. In keeping with JRR Tolkien’s influence on early D&D, it also produces Dwarves-only ‘secret names’ that are generated alongside each entry. It comes with a font pack for the Dwarven ‘Dethek’ alphabet from the Forgotten Realms DnD setting to use as well.

There are a fair number of repeats if you hammer the generate button, and as a standalone program developed for desktop, it isn’t usable on mobile. However, despite its limitations, this Dwarf name generator excels in its niche.

DnD Gnome name generator

DnD Gnome names are in a weird spot in that you want them to be fanciful, and maybe a little irreverent, but not completely over the top. To that end, the highlight of Namegenerator.co is the Gnome last name generator.

Its entries range from the relatively grounded – names like ‘Blueshack’ or ‘Jaspercliff’ – all the way up to more whimsical Gnome names like ‘Puddlesquat’ or ‘Sugardrop’. With the option to generate up to 30 names at once, it’s easy to pick out the exact tone you want to set for your character.

DnD Dragonborn names generator

This DnD Dragonborn name generator consistently spits out pleasant, usable Dragonborn names for D&D – our only complaint is that it does so one at a time. Prefaced by a description of the Dragonborn race, and equipped with a ‘copy to clipboard’ button which is very much appreciated, it’s easy enough to click through a number of names and assemble a slick array to choose from for your upcoming Dragonborn character.

DnD Tiefling name generator

While it sometimes takes a few tries to generate something that sounds good, Fantasy Name Generators’ DnD Tiefling name generator takes the prize home for two reasons: First, the fact that it is very faithful to the vibe of D&D Tiefling names. Second, the fact that ‘Virtue Names’, or descriptive words that Tieflings sometimes take on as a name to reflect a strong aspect of their identity, are packed in alongside the more traditional fare.

Those are the best race-specific generators – hopefully they’ll have you covered. But what if you want to play a human, or just anything beside the five listed above? What if you just want generic fantasy names? Or what if you want your names to be based on real-world cultures or antiquity or both? Luckily, there are a wealth of options. We’ll switch gears and show you a variety of different generators so you can pick the best one for your needs. Read on for our top five general-purpose D&D name generators.

The best general DnD name generators are:

• The Story Shack
• Rinkworks.com
• Fantasy Name Generators
• Behind the Name
• Donjon

The Story Shack

The Story Shack has a list of name generators for a huge variety of different races (and even classes), but where it truly stands out is its array of quality of life features. You can easily refresh the generated lists, and copy all of the entries to a text file, which isn’t unusual, but Story Shack also lets you hit ‘like’ on names from the list and save them for later. This absolutely outstanding feature allows the user to cycle through generated lists quickly and painlessly, and then review their favourites at the end of a session.

Rinkworks.com

Rinkworks.com is a generator that produces somewhat middling results on the surface. The reason for that, however, is because the program is not pulling from a pool of names, but generating them based on complex rules from a huge library of vowels and consonants.

This makes Rinkworks the best generator for those looking to create names with a particular sound or feel, but only if you’re willing to take the time to learn the inputs, which can be daunting for the layman. Programmers and other computer-literate types will find this generator to be a powerful tool.

Fantasy Name Generators

Yes, in addition to being the best Tiefling name generator, Fantasy Name Generators is also one of the best general purpose name generators for D&D. The reason is a combination of quality in results and the sheer variety of options. There are generators for many, many races here, from the headliners to the comically obscure. Most of them also have a gender switch option, too, though some of the less popular races are one-and-done.

Behind the Name

While it’s not specifically made for D&D, Behind the Name produces very, very good names. It only loses that fifth point in quality for the fact that it takes some tuning to get what you want out of it, and, painfully, it only produces one name at a time. The good news is, the tuning is both extremely granular and very, very approachable.

With a series of simple clicks, you can set Behind the Name to generate names by culture or combination of cultures, adjust femininity and masculinity or add ‘whimsy’, and you can even set it to avoid rare names or diminutives (things like ‘Bob’ from ‘Robert’, for example). You can also select multiple categories at once and force the generator to give its best guess for the name of a Bulgarian, Celtic, fairy wrestler.

Donjon

Donjon is a generator rife with D&D creatures, races, and archetypes. All the big hitters are here, sorted into basic, intuitive lists. Each one of these name generators creates a nice clean list of usable results that sound like they belong in D&D.

Donjon especially stands out for including quasi-historical names and non-European historic names for fantasy, which is a major blind spot in many generators. As a bonus, the rest of the site is bursting to the seams with generators for anything else you could need for D&D.

Source: Wargamer