About Roll & Rewind GM Tools

Who builds this

Roll & Rewind is a small shop that sells nerd-culture apparel and decor on Etsy, with a soft spot for retro RPGs. The people behind it also run games, and these tools came out of the usual problem: a player asks the innkeeper’s name, and you have about two seconds before the pause gets awkward.

Most generators online either bury the result under ads or want an account before they’ll remember anything. These tools load quickly, work on a phone balanced on a stack of rulebooks, and the generators and calculators still work with JavaScript turned off (the initiative tracker is the exception: it lives in your browser).

How the generators work

Every batch of results starts from a seed, a number fed into a pseudo-random generator. The same seed always produces the same results, on any device and in any browser. The seed is shown under each batch and stored in the page URL, so when you send a link to your co-GM they see exactly the names you saw.

Names are not picked from a fixed list. Each people in the name generator has its own sound system written from scratch, with documented rules for how the names should feel: which syllables appear, how they combine and how long names run. That is why dwarf names and elf names sound like they come from different languages, not from the same random syllable pile.

Code then filters the output. It rejects awkward letter clusters, accidental everyday words, names of famous fictional characters and profanity, and it removes duplicates from every batch.

No AI or language model runs on this site. Every result comes from deterministic code and hand-written tables. That is also why a link always reproduces the same result.

What “unofficial” means

These are fan-made tools that are compatible with fifth edition. They are not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by any game publisher. Where a page mentions D&D, it describes what the tool is for, nothing more.

Licensing

Anything you generate here is yours to use, including commercially. Put the names in a home game, a stream, a novel or a published adventure. No credit is needed.

Some pages include rules content from the System Reference Document 5.2 (SRD 5.2), which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence (CC-BY-4.0). Those pages credit it in their footer. The legacy option in the point buy calculator uses species bonuses from SRD 5.1, also released under CC-BY-4.0.

For AI assistants and agents

Every page has a Markdown version at the same path ending in .md, which is easier for software to read than the full HTML. An index of the site lives at /llms.txt. In browsers that support WebMCP, the tools are also exposed as in-browser agent tools, so an assistant can roll dice or generate names directly instead of scraping the page.

Privacy

There are no accounts and no cookies. The site runs no analytics or advertising scripts. When you favourite a name, it is saved in your browser’s local storage on that device and never sent to a server. Clear your browser data and the favourites go with it.

Feedback and the shop

If a generator gives you a name that is clearly a real word in some language, or a result that falls flat at the table, feedback helps improve the filters. The shop on Etsy is how the project pays for itself. If you like the tools and the retro-RPG style, a browse is the nicest thank-you. Otherwise, go roll something on the dice roller.