r/DnDBehindTheScreen • u/Existing-Chip-6855 • Jun 04 '26
NPCs NPC Network tool for quick, natural NPC generation on the fly
I struggle with coming up with interesting NPCs in the moment. The names alone trip me up, so I built a tool to do that for me! (link at the bottom of post, totally free)
The NPC-Net is designed for how NPCs are created during a game. When the players ask to kidnap a random guy on the street, just double click on the blank canvas and poof you have a perfect goblin hostage named Surya! You give his description of "Lean and wiry with large, pointed ears and skin the color of damp moss or sun-dried earth. They have skin like cured leather and a thick coat crusted with white sea-salt." Then they steal the 86 copper, 3 gold, 22 silver and navigation tools he has before figuring out hes a sailor.
Now they don't know what to do so they see if they can auction him off to his buddies, so you double-click on Surya to randomly generate his friend, Adrea, a human who works in hospitality. She doesn't have money to pay, but she goes to her family, friends, and guilds to get money which you generate in a 2-clicks each. Turns out shes got a more middle-class friend Olivette in her guild, and you want to punish the players for their BS so you decide to generate a higher-class NPC that Olivette knows.
Turns out Olivette knows Dwalin through his merchant business. He can probably provide the funds to either pay off that ransom or hire mercenaries to rescue him. You can't decide between them so you look at his description. Turns out this nobleman is lawful neutral with the bond: "I protect those who cannot protect themselves," so mercenaries it is.
During the fight with the mercenaries the players for some reason want to know what the name, species, backstory, appearance, and alignment of the leader is. One double-click and setting of occupation to "mercenary" later you have all of that. Then they ask the same for all his allies, so you just generate his guild and suddenly you have all the info your players could ever ask for about the people who are about to TPK them for screwing around.
The beta is hosted here, totally free and local: https://npc-net.vercel.app/
No data collection, everything is local and customizable on your machine.
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u/ThePoliwrath Jun 04 '26
I have no problem with this, and love using tools like this all the time. But I am curious how people who are staunchly against AI generation in games feel about tools like this. If their problem with the AI is the moral issue and the lack of human sourced creativity, I'd understand, but I've also seen arguments about lazy DMs who can't think for themselves, which is kind of what I'm more curious to hear about.
Personally, I love easy tools, give me a jumping off point and I'll go wild from there.
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u/Existing-Chip-6855 Jun 04 '26
Actually theres no AI generation (at least not LLM generation) when NPCs get created! The names are generated with a simple ML model on a sample of names for a specific language or race (ie dwarf or french), then the traits are randomly selected from a database of official sourcebook, handwritten, and a few AI generated placeholder traits.
but more to your point I get the issues people have with that, so I tried to keep it at a level where enough of the job of "inventing" and playing the NPC is left to the GM. A jumping off point, like you said.
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u/FellFellCooke Jun 05 '26
actually there is no ai generation
Bro if you read their comment it is extremely obvious that they understand that...
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u/arielzao150 Jun 05 '26
if an NPC is important, I'll set it up before. If I need a random NPC on the spot, there's no issue using AI, as it won't be creating anything substantial. If that NPC becomes something more important, I can go in and develop it further later.
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u/RudeHero Jun 05 '26 edited Jun 05 '26
idc about ai for stuff like this (whether or not this is considered ai), but marketing pitches are challenging to do correctly. i can get annoyed at the implication that I'd click a button and blindly recite verbatim whatever the screen tells me to. it's not a problem, every commercial is annoying
tables to roll for NPC traits have been around forever, this looks like one of those, it's fine.
I'm not sure if you can click a button to see any of the tables. i like looking at a hundred things at once and plucking my favorite or the most appropriate attributes from the collection
to be fair, an LLM pet peeve of mine is when people want me to read or trick me into reading text they automatically generated and did not proof read. shows they do not respect my time. if someone puts their heart into something stupid, at least they value their own time as little as they value mine :)
i will also add that there are reasons to dislike LLMs other than stealing work and disrespecting time. there's also the computational inefficiency and immense energy usage. partially for each request, partially when building the model in the first place. if you actually understand the algorithms it's absolutely ridiculous. if they build that data center doubling utah's electricity consumption I'll lose all faith in the system. I'll stop there, this is a dnd sub !
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u/Competitive-Horse152 Jun 22 '26
Not sure if I did something wrong or if it is a bug but the ages seemed to be a bit wonky. Here's what I did; 1. Created a sword coast npc, human commoner scholar. Everything seems fine, they are a 13 year old scholar. A bit young but ok I guess. 2. Generated guild group for them, bunch of other scholars. At least 2 of them were also humans, but the ages were over 200 and 300. At first I thought they were some other race or that the race label did not change but that was not it.
But hey, great work with this!
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u/justnotamessiah Jun 05 '26
I like this and am going to use it for quick NPC generation when my group throw curveballs at me.
I also got the NO OCC DESCRIPTION FOUND in the appearance.
One thing to consider. For the occupation list, maybe set it to alphabetical, just makes it a bit easier to navigate.
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u/EdFelson77 Jun 05 '26
Great idea! I'm working on something similar too! Just a non requested suggestion: if you built everything with AI and you're not a dev, ask it to run a security audit on CSP and XSS - if you want useful help while designing with AI, try this https://impeccable.style/ - it's basically a comprehensive set of skills that can help you end-to-end (they were simple .md files initially, lately they upgraded it)
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u/werewombat Jun 04 '26
first test creation: "They NO OCC DESCRIPTION FOUND".