Players will talk to anybody. They will spend forty minutes on the ostler you invented to explain where the horses went, and the ostler will be in your notes for two years. The hard part of that is never the name — it is having, on demand, a person with something they want and something they are not saying.
So that is what this rolls. Ten fields, none of them a number, all of them playable the moment you read them out.
Want plus secret is the whole engine
An NPC with a want is a scene. An NPC without one is scenery, and your players can tell within two exchanges — they will ask a question, get an answer, and drift, because there is nothing pulling at them.
A want gives the person a reason to be in the conversation. A secret gives them a reason to steer it. Put the two together and you get behaviour for free: somebody who wants a letter delivered unread and is already being paid by somebody else to have this conversation does not need a personality written for them, because you already know what they will do when the party asks the obvious follow-up question.
None of the secrets here are monsters. That is a rule rather than a preference: the moment an NPC's secret is a creature, the NPC stops being a person and becomes a delivery mechanism for a plot. Every secret on this page is something a human being could plausibly be hiding in a village of four hundred, which is what makes it hurt when it comes out.
No stat block, on purpose
A stat block would tie this tool to one game, and one edition of that game, and halve who it is useful to. It also answers the least interesting question about a person.
The “if it turns ugly” field does the work a stat block was doing without naming a single number. It tells you what this person does when violence starts — goes through the window and knows the alleys; screams, loudly, because that is the actual weapon; surrenders instantly and starts negotiating before anyone has drawn. Any system can run that, and it produces better scenes than an armour class, because it tells you how the fight ENDS rather than how long it takes.
Playing one without doing an accent
Two fields are there for the moment you have to actually open your mouth: a habit and a way of speaking. Both are chosen to be reproducible three sessions later without notes.
A habit is a thing they do — counts things under their breath, will not begin talking until everyone is sitting down, touches iron when a name is mentioned. It is the cheapest characterisation there is and the only one you will remember. A voice here is a rhythm rather than a dialect: short sentences and long pauses; fast, warm and impossible to interrupt; the flat delivery of somebody reciting a price list. Rhythm survives a table of six people talking over each other, and it does not collapse into a caricature by the third session the way an accent does.
If you take nothing else from a rolled card, take those two and the want. That is a playable person in about eleven words.
The three-question test
Before you spend an NPC, check that you can answer three things about them without looking down: what do they want, what would make them leave the room, and who would they warn first if it all went wrong. If the card gives you all three, the person will survive contact with your players. If it does not, reroll one field rather than the whole card — usually the want.
And keep the ones that land. The “useful because they” field exists so that a good NPC has a reason to be visited twice: somebody who can get you past the gate after curfew, once, is a standing offer and a standing decision about when to spend it.
Where the names come from
The given names and family names here are drawn from exactly the same word stock as this site's lord and lady name generator and house name generator — the same pools, not similar ones. Roll a noble house in one tab and a farrier in another and they sound like they live forty miles apart rather than in two different fictional universes, which is the thing that is genuinely hard about populating a world.
Three more, rolled when this page was built
Baked into the HTML by the same engine the button runs, so there is something to read without JavaScript — and so you can skim several at once rather than clicking through them.
Norvane Ironhand
- Trade
- a beekeeper, and therefore the wealthiest person on this street
- First thing you notice
- a limp on the left that disappears entirely when they are angry
- A habit
- touches wood, iron or their own throat when a name is mentioned
- How they talk
- formal and slightly old-fashioned, like somebody who learned to talk from letters
- What they want
- to get a letter into the hands of somebody three days' ride away, unread
- What they are hiding
- they sold the information that got someone killed, and did not know what it was for
- How they treat you
- wary, and polite about it — they will help once, and watch what you do with it
- Useful because they
- can read the old script on the marker stones, roughly, badly, but enough
- If it turns ugly
- surrenders instantly and starts negotiating before anyone has drawn
Dunmar Ulvveth
- Trade
- the village midwife, and by extension the village's memory
- First thing you notice
- a soldier's posture and a clerk's spectacles
- A habit
- goes very still before saying anything true
- How they talk
- careful, formal, and word-perfect in a second language
- What they want
- to get a letter into the hands of somebody three days' ride away, unread
- What they are hiding
- the debt is theirs, not their late father's, and everyone has the story backwards
- How they treat you
- transactional from the first word; every sentence has a price attached
- Useful because they
- can put a name to the maker's mark on anything you show them
- If it turns ugly
- will not start it and will absolutely finish it — this is a working body, not a soft one
Tobren the Grim
- Trade
- a farrier with forearms like fence posts and an unexpected stammer
- First thing you notice
- an ill-fitting good coat, plainly inherited
- A habit
- eats while talking and talks while eating, without pause
- How they talk
- fast, warm, and impossible to interrupt
- What they want
- to make one payment, this month, and keep the roof
- What they are hiding
- they have already agreed to betray you if the price gets high enough, and it has not
- How they treat you
- distracted, because something worse is happening to them today
- Useful because they
- knows the ford that is passable when the bridge is watched
- If it turns ugly
- carries a knife for work and would use it badly, once, and then regret it forever
Can I use these NPCs?
Yes — for anything, including commercial work, with no permission and no credit required. Short strings like a name or a two-word motto are not the kind of thing anyone can own, and the crest you compose is your composition, not ours. Take it to a novel, a tabletop campaign, a stream overlay, a band, a boat, a business card.
We ask for exactly nothing in return: no account, no email, no sign-up, no watermark. Nothing you type or click here is sent anywhere — every one of these tools runs entirely inside your own browser, so there is no server that could keep your design even if it wanted to. If you want to tell somebody where it came from, a link back is kind, but it is not a condition.
The rest of the table kit
tavern & inn · quest hook · settlement · character backstory · campaign weather — all free, all instant, all of them working with the network switched off. The tabletop index lists the lot, and the wider tools workshop adds a coat of arms forge and five name generators for houses, castles, lords, mottoes and dragons.