Every generator will give you a tavern name. A name is about thirty seconds of the problem. The other twenty minutes — who is behind the bar, what is in the cup, what it costs, who is in the corner, and what is about to come through the door — is the part you are actually improvising while five people watch you, and it is the part this rolls for you.
One click gives you an inn you can run without editing: eleven fields, a painted sign, and a link you can send to the rest of the table. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is stored, and there is no account.
What comes out, and why these fields
The order is the order you will use them in at a table. You read the name, look up, describe the room, say what is in the cup — and only then, once the players have settled, do you need to know who is in the corner and what is walking in.
- The room, in one sensory detail rather than five. Smell wherever possible: it is the sense fiction uses least and memory uses most.
- On tap and from the kitchen. Nobody remembers a tavern's furniture; everybody remembers being served something described as “cloudy”. The food is deliberately humble — a menu of roast swan is a fantasy of an inn rather than an inn.
- What it costs, with a number, because “some coppers” is a ruling you will have to make anyway and making it now is free.
- Already drinking — two patrons that combine, so neither one demands the room's attention.
- The rumour going round. Every one of these implies a place to go or a person to find. A rumour that is only colour is a sentence the table forgets before the drinks arrive.
- Walking in the door. Present tense, imminent. This is the field that turns a location into a scene, and it is why a rolled tavern can carry a whole session.
The sign over the door, and why it is heraldry
Real inn signs are heraldic, and not by coincidence. Most people could not read, so a house was known by a painted board: a beast, a tool, a colour. Half of them were somebody's badge — a lord's crest hung up by a tenant, a guild's mark, two badges combined when two houses merged, which is exactly how you end up with names shaped like the Bear and the Ragged Staff. That pairing is the single strongest tell that a made-up inn name sounds real, so it is one of the seven name patterns here.
So the sign this tool paints is drawn with genuine armory: a field, a division, a charge, in the eight tinctures of real heraldry. It is not a lookalike palette either — the drawing code is the strategy game's own heraldry module, inlined into this page word for word at build time, the same one behind the coat of arms forge. Below the board is the blazon: the sign described the way a herald would record it.
Two download buttons, and the difference matters. PNG is the one for a handout, a Discord post or a virtual tabletop token. SVG is the same board as maths rather than pixels — sharp at any size, from a favicon to something printed for the table. Both are produced inside your browser from the shapes you are looking at; no server renders anything and nothing you make is sent anywhere.
What things cost, so you can rule fast
Prices are where improvisation stalls, because any number you invent will contradict the number you invented last session. The fix is not accuracy, it is a spine: fix one price and derive everything from it. A night on the common floor should cost roughly a day of unskilled labour. Once that is true, the rest of the world falls into place and stays there.
A working price list. Twelve copper to the silver, twenty silver to the gold.| What | Cost | Which is to say |
|---|
| A loaf | 1 copper | the smallest coin anyone bothers to count |
| A jug of ale | 2 copper | what the room is drinking |
| A hot meal | 2–3 copper | pottage and bread, not a feast |
| A night on the common floor | 3–6 copper | warm, crowded, and the normal way to travel |
| A private room | 1 silver | about a day's wage for a skilled trade |
| A day's unskilled labour | 4 copper | the spine the whole table hangs from |
| A day's skilled trade | 1 silver | mason, smith, wright |
| Stabling and feed, one horse | 3 copper a night | and the ostler expects a copper of his own |
| A pony | 8 silver | two months of unskilled work |
| A riding horse | 4 gold | a life's savings for most of this village |
| A warhorse | 40 gold | why knights are a social class and not a job |
A warhorse at forty gold is the row that does the most work. It says, without a paragraph of exposition, why a mounted knight is a social class rather than a job, why a lost horse is a catastrophe worth a session, and why the party's stabling bill is a real decision. Use whatever coin names your system prefers; the ratios are what you are actually borrowing.
The link is the tavern
Every inn here is a pure function of one number, and that number lives in the address bar. Copy the link and whoever opens it gets your tavern — the same keeper, the same rumour, the same sign — rather than a fresh roll. That is what makes this shareable with a co-GM or pasteable into a campaign document that still works in a year. The copy and download buttons give you the same card as plain text, so it drops into notes without formatting to clean up.
Three more, rolled when this page was built
Generated by the same engine the button runs, and baked into the HTML so there is something here with JavaScript switched off.
The Nameless Adder
- The sign
- Per fess argent and tenné, an eagle displayed purpure.
- The keeper
- Bracca, who is furious about something that happened forty years ago
- The room
- a gallery above, reached by a ladder, where six mattresses lie side by side
- On tap
- spiced wine kept hot on the hearth from dusk until it runs out
- From the kitchen
- yesterday's bread soaked in today's broth, which is how the poor eat here
- What it costs
- 7 copper a night, doubled during the fair, and the fair is next week
- Already drinking
- a horse dealer who wants to talk to you specifically; and a scribe copying letters for the illiterate at a penny a page
- The rumour going round
- somebody has been paying good silver for old maps of the valley, in cash, no questions
- Walking in the door
- the ale has run out and the next barrel is four days away
The Fiddle and Bell
- The sign
- Argent, a mount or.
- The keeper
- Ulvar Harmont, who remembers every face and pretends to remember none
- The room
- the smell of wet wool, spilled beer and yesterday's onions, in that order
- On tap
- cloudy cider that tastes of the orchard it came out of, and of the barrel
- From the kitchen
- a pease pudding the keeper is unreasonably proud of
- What it costs
- a bed in the common room 3 copper, a private room five times that, ale two copper a jug
- Already drinking
- two carters arguing about a bridge toll, loudly, for the ninth night running; and an old soldier telling a war story that gets shorter every year
- The rumour going round
- somebody is buying up debts across the whole hundred, quietly, at full price
- Walking in the door
- the fire has caught the thatch at the gable end and nobody has noticed yet
The Old Candle
- The sign
- Per bend azure and purpure, a mullet gules.
- The keeper
- Dunmar Vaelcombe, who won the place at dice and has never once looked comfortable in it
- The room
- windows of oiled cloth rather than glass, so the light is the colour of weak tea
- On tap
- a black beer thick enough to chew, brewed in the cellar
- From the kitchen
- a pease pudding the keeper is unreasonably proud of
- What it costs
- one silver for a room, 8 copper for the floor by the fire, and the floor is warmer
- Already drinking
- a traveller with too much luggage and no visible reason to be here; and a tax clerk eating alone and being ignored with great precision
- The rumour going round
- the lord's steward rode out three nights running and came back muddy to the waist
- Walking in the door
- the roof has begun to leak directly over the only free table
Can I use this tavern?
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
npc · 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.