About this Generator

In 2016 I came up with the idea of an NPC generator for my D&D adventures which would allow me to create and roleplay a character on the spot. Say, for instance, that a player suddenly decided to visit a shop for which I had no information prepared: I could create a shopkeeper in a matter of seconds and bargain with the player in a way that would reflect the shopkeeper's traits.

By reading Chris Perkins' Dungeon Master Experience articles I knew that, to define and roleplay a character, I only needed a name, a couple of adjectives and maybe a description of the way he or she talked; so I quickly created an excel spreadsheet which would fill up a dozen of rows with random names and traits... and I suddenly realized how casual combinations of those words would sometimes create awesome, silly or simply memorable characters. The power of Random is incredible.

I expanded the spreadsheet as much as I could, by adding a background, D&D classes and races, and informations I extracted from other websites... but at the same time I tried to keep the characters simple enough to allow me to roleplay them after a few glances at their traits. You can find the "final" version of that spreadsheet here.

During that time my D&D adventures and campaigns began to rely more and more on this generator and some friends even asked me to send them the spreadsheet so that they could use it for their own adventures; if this tool could be so useful, I really had to create an online version for all the other dungeon masters out there.

I hope you're going to find this website as useful as it is for me, and that you're going to have some fun with it in your roleplaying games.

-Ismaele

Credits

Some of the parts that compose this generator come from (or are inspired by) other online generators and websites. I listed all I could remember here:

• d20pfsrd for informations related to the game Pathfinder and the hundreds of hours I spent there to create my characters;
• Fantasy Name Generators for their infinite source of memorable names;
• SeventhSanctum for their idea of a character background composed of "profession" + "description". Some of the descriptions of Crowdshuffler come directly from their background generators ;
• Roleplaying Tips for their list of 1000+ NPC Traits. That list is the backbone of this generator and it couldn't exist without it;
• Special thanks go to Chris Perkins who sparked this idea through his Dungeon Master Experience articles.

If you have any questions, suggestions or insults please feel free to email them to me.

What's New

• [1.1 2020/08/30]: Class value moved next to Profession, inside the background line, to reduce confusion between the two. Class options changed accordingly.
• [1.0 2020/08/25]: Crowdshuffler is now live!