Generate This

The Loretrix of @LochNestFarm. Random generators, data sets, and cool reblogs about worldbuilding and game design.

[theloretrix]

@theloretrix is a sideblog I made because I really, really like populating data sets. (Also, I did some genre-studies work during my English master's degree. It really didn't help with my obsession with lists.)

So here you will find random generators! I curate the data from a mix of publicly available and private library sources.  No AI* and no data scraping influences their creation.

Click the Pretty Pictures to Go to Themes:

Also fandom-specific generators: House Flipper, The Hunger Games, The Magnus Archives.

Credit for the use of these data sets is not required, but is very much appreciated!  If you find them particularly useful, here’s the tip jar.

My generators are intended for constructing randomized names and descriptions for gaming purposes. However, the lists may be used for any purpose except libelous, racist, sexist, transphobic, or hate speech.

Yes, I'm available for hire if you want to commission your own generator, get an existing one translated into your app's code, or suchlike! My DMs are open; here's my LinkedIn and here's my farm's Linktree.

*I object to intellectual property theft, water waste, and non-optional "features," not to AI per se; the technology has a number of important and exciting uses far beyond the trendy "generative" chatbots -- in fact, I've worked as an AI trainer/environment builder. However, it is certainly true that current-generation AI outputs are very "same-y."

[theloretrix]

The Magnus Archives Statement Fic Prompt Generator!

Everything should be plausibly dated and -- if you ask yourself who this person is, why they have a supernatural statement about xyz, and why they're giving it on the statement date provided -- give you enough material to work with for a piece of fanfic!

If you run into anything not working, an inverted digit that makes a year not make sense, etc., please let me know. This was a big, complicated job to put together!

[barabones]

Started a new ttrpg this week called CY_BORG and ended up rolling a weird punk goth who's obsessed with vapes. So of course I have him a vape shaped like a gun.

When he's not running from debt collectors, he spends most of his day playing video games or streaming his vape reviews. Fun roommate who leaves an olfactory footprint where ever he goes.

[barabones]

BTW what initially started out as a funny D20 chart for weird vape flavors quickly spiraled into a whole booklet of wacky names, flavor profiles, and effects. Now YOU can have a character suck down random smokes like Post Nut Clarity and Toe Bean Baby!

666HOOTER - d666 Vape Gun For CY_BORG by Z. Mann Zilla

Over 200 flavors!

[theloretrix]

The Bard's Song Title Maker, or Folk Song Generator, for all your bardic and folk song needs. Get your title here!

[theloretrix]

Here is the long-promised

Magnus Archives Entity Avatar Maker!

Designed for ttrpgs and fic prompts, it gives a first and last name and a basic story starter. There are at least 10 base stories (up to 35 in some cases!) for each of Smirke's 14, many with additional variations in their specifics.

A random statement generator is also in the works; tell me if you want to be tagged in it when it's posted.

Content warnings for generalized human suffering (nothing vivid, and all the dogs and cats who appear are in their element, moisturized, thriving, etc.), slightly gratuitous use of the "And it drove them MAAAAD!" trope, and probably a couple of "too soon, dude" elements. I just ... I can't plausibly tag everything in over 250 story bases. Please tell me if there's something you need not to encounter and I'll screen it for you.

If you'd care to use that header for something, you can grab it here, along with collages for the other Fears. If you would care to support The Loretrix, they're on Redbubble.

Let me stipulate: Most of the names are not subtle. Source notes under the cut.

Primary sources for names include basic etymology coincidences and some onomatopoeia ("Clara" for the Ceaseless Watcher because it's like "clairvoyant," "Fisk" for the Desolation because it sounds like a match striking), as well as Wikipedia wanders on various related topics. There are some serial killers' names in the Desolation and historical generals' names in the Slaughter, and references to most of Europe's famous labyrinths are used as Spiral surnames alongside major Surrealist authors and artists.

If there's a person's name attached to a human disease, it's probably in there under the Spiral for hallucinatory conditions or the Flesh for physiological issues.

The Buried got the names of a lot of prisons.

The Desolation and the Slaughter both got a lot of serial killers and historical generals as surnames (except the cannibals, who mostly went to the Flesh).

Surnames in the Spiral's list include most of Europe's famous labyrinths and a number of noted Surrealists.

Any questions, just ask! (And yes, I think I could turn this into a set of d12 tables, but ... well, I also have to do work to pay my bills, so that would depend on interest.)

[bucketofdeltav]

So my beta reader for the Big Fics is an astrophysicist, right. Who is currently also writing a hard sci-fi novel about the exploration of Phobos (more power to them, I cannot with the physics required for that, best I can do is soft sci-fi/fantasy and that reminds me I should finish that story).

Anyway I was bitching about how hard it is to come up with feasible planets in Star Wars because sometimes you need a new planet from scratch and sometimes you need to know more about a planet than the 'has jungles, is probably a moon technically' than Wookieepedia will give you, and they're like 'oh yeah I can do something about that'.

So they've written (in Matlab but they swear it will run as a .exe as well and I may be conscripted to embed it as a web tool at some point) a star system generator.

You input what you know about the planet (ecosystem, population, sun colour, does it have liquid water, does it have a moon or moons, is it a moon or moons, temperature averages, atmosphere, you get me) and it will give you the... everything else about the star system, in obedience to real-universe physics. And if you input nothing you get a randomly generated star system.

And I’m like oh I know people who will be into this with a vengeance, and they're not on Tumblr, so this is me seeing who exactly would be keen on, and I cannot stress this enough, a real-physics comprehensive star system generator.

It's still in the debugging phase (last error fixed: every planet wants to have a population of exactly 5000 regardless of other factors, turned out to be a missing equals sign somewhere), but I'm psyched for this and trying to gauge interest for how high a priority 'make this an accessible web tool' needs to be.

[star-system-generator]

Reblogging to drag this project over here, this is killing my notes on main so I'm giving it its own URL. Follow over here for updates on the star system generator and only the star system generator, and not on my Star Wars bullshit.

Will go through and tag interested parties when things calm down below 100 notes an hour.

[theloretrix]

PSA: If you are following me, this is probably the sort of stuff you're into also.

[theloretrix]

Random Newspaper Title Generators ... in EIGHT Different Genres!

This generator gives a title for a newspaper your OC can read ... or your walking sim can have lying around ... or your murder board articles can be cut out from. Try it out!

(Did you know it's really hard to find lists of world newspapers all in one place? I managed, obviously, but it's the kind of thing you'd half-expect there to be one Wikipedia page for.)

But perhaps you have a more specific setting for which you need a character to read a newspaper! In that case: read on.

Here's a specifically American version!

A nautical or piratical community paper!

A magical newspaper for brandishing at a colleague at the Sorcerous University, or pasting over a cracked window in a witch's cottage!

A paper for your hero(in)es to cringe at the articles about their own exploits in fantasy settings!

The newspaper lying around your Gothic manor house, or left in your medium's parlor at the seance!

The paper lying casually on a coffee table during the slice-of-life opener for your sci-fi drama!

The last remaining printing press after the apocalypse!

Enjoy -- links and reblogs are appreciated -- and as always, I'm available for hire to translate these generators into your format -- or your generator idea into this format!

[theloretrix]

Random Epitaph Generator

Come read a tombstone ... see if it starts you on a quest, a short story, or a sketch idea.

[theloretrix]

Updated May 2026 with an even larger name set, more interesting capitalization behavior, and the possibility of getting nun tombstones!

[prokopetz]

Something indie tabletop RPG authors have got to accept is that random dice tables of Weird Shit cannot be brief. A haunted doll that looks like the party leader's mother as a child is creepy in isolation, but when it comes up four times in one session because the table it's on only has like twelve entries it's a running gag.

[prokopetz]

As a very general rule, a table of Oddly Specific Shit that's expected to be used more than once per session needs at least 20 entries total per roll beyond the first. There's a reason the d100 table is popular beyond pleasing symmetry; it's just the right size to be rolled on half a dozen times per session without constantly kicking out incongruous duplicates.

[mdsherry]

Here's a table of the number of table entries required to reach a given probability of no repeats after a certain number of rolls. E.g. if you're going to be rolling on a table five times, a table with 17 entries will give slightly better than even odds (52.3%) of not yielding a repeated entry, while a table with 16 entries will not (47.0%). Rolling a half-dozen times on a table with 100 entries will give slightly better than an 85% chance of no repeats. Rolling twice more, and the probability drops to 75%.

The "20 entries per extra roll" rule of thumb undersells the size of table needed past half a dozen rolls or so: for a dozen rolls, you'd need a table with over 400 entries for the same 85% probability of avoiding a repeat. (The number of entries needed seems to grow superquadratically, but empirically the exponent is something like 2.0025: e.g. for an 85% chance, the number of entries approaches 3.024 * rolls²·⁰⁰²⁵ as rolls increases > 150.)

The flip side, though, is that as the number of rolls increases, the acceptability of a single repeat does as well. Using the rule-of-thumb, a 220 entry table still gives a 70+% chance of no repeats after a dozen rolls, and maybe that's fine.

[prokopetz]

Yeah, the "twenty entries per roll beyond the first" guideline doesn't really scale if the expected number of rolls on the same Oddly Specific Shit table in a single session exceeds ten. You're quite right that it's often less of a concern at that scale, though; a small number of duplicate results among a large number of rolls is potentially interesting, but a large number of duplicates among a small number of rolls is rarely anything other than comical – see @healthylevelsofmagicthegathering's anecdote in the tags about playing a Lord of the Rings inspired game with a twelve-entry random encounter table and bumping into Gandalf three separate times in the course of the same journey!

[prokopetz]

There are two unrelated metroidvanias based on the classic Little Nemo comics coming out this year, which feels like kind of an obvious cut – of course you'd adapt Little Nemo as a metroidvania, if you were going to adapt it as anything – but it got me thinking: what would be the least suitable public domain media to give the metroidvania treatment?

[prokopetz]

I feel like a lot of folks in the note are interpreting "worst" to mean "most difficult to justify the protagonist actually going anywhere or doing anything", but that just militates against video game adaptations in general, not against metroidvanias in particular. We can do a lot worse.

[ashweather]

I think it's easy to think of metroidvanias and conceptualize combat as a core feature, but I really think that aspect is mostly aesthetic. Shooting aliens with guns could just as easily be delivering newspapers to neighbors. No, the core features of a metroidvania in my view are 1) a complex location 2) wherein exploration is necessary to progress, and 3) that exploration is gated behind character upgrades and/or abilities (often new movement options).

It was helpful to me to reframe the question a bit: "If adapted to a video game, which public domain media would be most poorly served by making it a metroidvania specifically, as opposed to some other genre or mechanical conceit?" If we can easily think of a way to adapt the media into a video game that would be worse than a metroidvania (soulslike, isometric tactics game, rhythm game) then we go back to the drawing board. So we should figure out what features of a media property run counter to the core features of a metroidvania. We want a piece of media that:

1) Takes place in a single simple location, small selection of simple locations, or a location defined by its relative featurelessness (and it is furthermore difficult to abstract some other element of the property into a complex location, e.g. the "mindscape" of a complex character).

2) Does not feature exploration of environments, either for practical or thematic reasons. Ideally, we want the process of exploring and discovering the details of one's surroundings to be actively antithetical to the work's themes, plot, or characters.

3) Either features a single protagonist who is physically and emotionally stagnant throughout the work or an ensemble cast of characters that it would be difficult to give distinct abilities to. (Or, I suppose, doesn't feature an identifiable protagonist (or set of protagonists) in the first place, though this is less common.)

Now, finding public domain works that actually fit that description is more difficult. Moby Dick, maybe?

[prokopetz]

#“a dracula metroidvania might be weird” - me seconds before remembering what franchise the “vania” comes from (via @jamie101)

Weirdly enough, the "-vania" in "metroidvania" trips over this thread's "public domain" criterion. The Castlevania franchise is specifically a non-copyright-infringing knockoff of the Universal Horror cinematic universe (the original one from the 1930s, not the failed 2010s reboot), and the first Universal Horror film in which Dracula appears doesn't enter the public domain until next year.

[theloretrix]

so, when does Twelve Angry Men enter the public domain ... ?

[diserbillyti]

Been playing a lot of "psychological horror" games lately, and man

nonschizophrenics will simply never understand that "what if it was all in the person's head?" will never be scarier than a monster that actually fucking exists.

oooh what if you're crazy :o what if you hallucinate a goobly gobbler? well mate you fucking deal with it. rent's due monday. but an actual real goobly gobbler coming for my gnuts? that's different.

[diserbillyti]

[theloretrix]

The Obscure Crime Generator

I think this is my wife's favorite generator I've ever done.

Credit where due: I mined the Scarfolk blog for a lot of my starting constructions. The result is necessarily somewhat more American-flavored, but shares the deadpan "if we can't mock the world's slide into fascism, what are we even doing here?" tone of humor.

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Survival/crafting game where you crash land on a planet or whatever and you start having to forage and built your shelter etc., but just as you start to get established some weird aliens show up. They are not there for you; they ignore you and start building a settlement. Getting food in this environment is very difficult for you but if you exhibit the right behaviours around the aliens then some of them will throw you scraps. Others will try to grab and either pet or hurt you for fun. Yet others will chase you away or try to kill you as a nuisance. Their body language is not close enough to human to intuit which reaction is likely without a lot of experimentation and study on your part.

You CAN go off by yourself and try to scrape a living off the land, building stuff out of sticks and risking injury in foraging or hunting wildlife. But it's a lot more productive to learn how to beg scraps from the growing civilisation and figure out how to break into their garbage cans.

[eatcopperwire]

[theloretrix]

Just came here to say that i absolutely adore the sheer creativity on display in your entity avatar maker, these ideas are so fun and I will DEFINITELY be taking inspiration from them when running the TMA roleplaying game! Keep up the good work!

Thank you!!! I am really glad you're finding it useful. (The asker is referring to this generator, which is not quite finished -- there are only a couple of possible stories for some of the Entities -- but it will supply a suitably symbolic name if you're not of the "plagiarize your birth certificate and marriage license" school of character naming, like some writers we could mention.)

[theloretrix]

House Flipper 2 Generators

I have the standard ADHD "immune to podcast unless engaged in a hand activity" build, so I've been playing House Flipper 2 while I binged the entirety of The Magnus Archives. (For me flailing about this, see my mainblog.) My character sheet also includes "if too many options, must Go In Circles," however, so I made these little ... utilities.

Random HF2 Color

Random HF2 Full Palette

House Flipper 2 Challenge Generator

Community-Builder Challenge Generator

While this set uses the color system from House Flipper 2, the latter pair can be used for the original House Flipper or any other renovation game.

For a really specific challenge, go bottom to top and you end up with something like "okay, I'm making a senior center that's decorated for Valentine's day, with the interior in Rich Yellow 4, driftwood and bronze and the exterior in Drab Violet 5."

You may also find the Random Visual Style Masher-Upper useful.

[theloretrix]

Art and design prompts for every visual medium! I would love to see a bullet journal spread or an AU fanart for literally every one of these. Please comment/reblog if you use one so I can see!

The Random Visual Style Masher-Upper