DnD campaign names
A campaign title is a sentence, not a word. This page runs five sentence shapes 2,000 times each and counts how many different titles each one actually produces. Two of the five run out on the first page of your notebook, and the reason is not the writing: it is the size of the bank behind the shape.
What this page is counting. One run, 10,000 titles, seed 20261022, 2,000 per shape. Places are names the site's town generator produced (1,500 draws across all 19 culture tables); houses are the 1,216 names built from the clan tables; the frame words are 12 objects, 12 events and 8 adjectives that travel with the script. Distinct means a different full title string; repeat share is one minus distinct over 2,000; a fifty-name shortlist is 50 titles from one seed, averaged over 200 seeds. Every figure below is counted from that run, nothing is estimated.
Campaign names from the run
- The Sigil of Fenford
- The Relic of Sandtide
- The Banner of Harrowmire
- The Ledger of Thornveil
- The Chalice of Windworks
- The Oath of Northsalt
- The Crown of Kirkbank
- Eastfell: The Salt War
- Harrowpeak: The Hollow Plague
- Fairpeak: The Empty Summer
- Yewrun: The Grey Fog
- Woldhollow: The Long Winter
- The Grey Fog
- The Salt War
- The Long Winter
- The Debt of House Stormclaw
- The Chalice of House Ironheart
- The Heir of House Thornfell
- The Crown of House Silkclaw
- The Vault of House Nightweaver
- The Drowned Chalice
- The Gilded Throne
- The Iron Throne
- The Bitter Relic
Two shapes run out immediately
The event-alone shape (The Long Winter, The Salt War) has twelve possible titles in the whole bank, and 2,000 draws returned all twelve: 12 distinct, 0.6%, 1,988 repeats. The adjective-object shape (The Ashen Crown, The Hollow Vault) has 96 possible and returned 96 out of 2,000, 4.8%. The three shapes that put a place or a house in the title returned 1,858 distinct of 2,000 (object + place), 1,864 (place + event) and 1,848 (object + house): between 92.4% and 93.2%, a repeat every fourteen titles rather than every second one.
The five shapes, counted
| Shape | Drawn | Distinct | Repeat | In a 50-title list |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Object + place | 2,000 | 1,858 | 7.1% | 49.9 of 50 |
| Place + event | 2,000 | 1,864 | 6.8% | 49.9 of 50 |
| Event alone | 2,000 | 12 | 99.4% | 11.8 of 50 |
| Object + house | 2,000 | 1,848 | 7.6% | 49.9 of 50 |
| Adjective + object | 2,000 | 96 | 95.2% | 39.0 of 50 |
The last column is the one to read if you are picking rather than writing: it is the average number of different titles you get when you ask for fifty. For the event shape that is 11.8 of 50, so about 38 of the slots are titles already on your list. The other four shapes average 49.9, 49.9, 49.9 and 39.0 of 50.
Length is not what limits you
A title had to pass four rules to count as usable: at most five words, at most 34 characters, no word used twice, and no two words sharing a four-letter stem (which is what rules out The Iron Crown of Ironford). Of the 10,000 titles only 28 failed: 9,972 passed, 99.7%. Titles built this way are short by construction, so the limit on a campaign list is never how long the names are. It is whether the shape behind them has room for a second, third and fourth campaign.
The place slot repeats first, and -hollow is why
The 4,000 place-anchored titles used 1,228 distinct place names out of a 1,500-draw pool. The five most reused were Woldhollow (17), Moorhollow (14), Thornhollow (14), Sandhollow (13), Millhollow (13), and every one of them ends in -hollow. That is not a quirk of this seed: 8 of the 19 culture tables list -hollow as a settlement suffix, more than any other ending, and the town generator only de-duplicates inside one culture. The same village name can therefore come out of the elf table and the goblin table, which is why 1,500 place draws produced only 1,299 different strings.
At the table this matters when two campaigns sit in the same region: their titles will feel like one campaign even when the objects differ. Keep one -hollow per region, and give the second campaign a suffix the first region does not use — -delving and -hold for dwarves, -eyrie and -perch for bird-folk, -works and -foundry for constructs.
House titles run longest, and seven house names are broken
The house shape averaged 28.1 characters against 21.9 for object + place and 15 for event alone, so it is the one shape that starts to read as a title card rather than a label. It also inherits the clan tables' joints: 7 of the 1,216 clan combinations repeat their own stem or run three letters together — Tusktusk, Scalescale (in two culture tables), Thornthorn, Peakpeak, Snagnag, Plateplate, Mossspring. Inside a campaign title that reads as The Oath of House Scalescale.
Choosing a shape
- One campaign, one title: any shape works, and the event shape is the strongest of the five — The Long Winter says what the campaign is about in three words. It just cannot fill a list.
- A list to pick from at session zero: use place + event. The place ties the title to your map and the event word tells the table what happens, and it produced 1,864 distinct titles in 2,000 draws.
- Naming a faction's war rather than a region's: object + house, with the object as the stake — The Debt of House Stormclaw — but check the house name against the seven broken joints first.
- Sandbox: put the place in the title and nothing else. The Crown of Greyfen survives a campaign that wanders; The Salt War does not survive the war ending in session four.
Questions this page answers
How many campaign names can a bank like this produce?
It depends on the shape, and the shapes differ by two orders of magnitude. With 12 events the event-alone shape has 12 possible titles and the run returned exactly those 12 from 2,000 draws. With 8 adjectives and 12 objects, the adjective-object shape has 96 and returned 96. The place-anchored shape returned 1,858 distinct titles from 2,000 draws and the house shape 1,848, because a place or a house name is a new word each time where an event word is not.
Place name or event: which should carry the campaign title?
Place, if you ever need a second title. A place-anchored title kept producing new strings (92.9% of 2,000 draws were different) while an event title stops at twelve. The event is better as the second half: 1,864 of 2,000 place-plus-event titles were distinct, and the event word tells the table what happens, which a place alone never does.
Why do so many of these titles end in -hollow?
8 of the 19 culture tables in the town generator list -hollow as a settlement suffix, more than any other ending, and the generator only de-duplicates inside one culture: 1,500 place draws produced 1,299 different strings. In the run the five most reused places were Woldhollow (17), Moorhollow (14), Thornhollow (14), Sandhollow (13), Millhollow (13).
Reproduce this page
var s=document.createElement('script'); s.src='/assets/campaign-stats.js'; document.body.appendChild(s);The script builds the place pool from the live town generator, composes 10,000 titles with seed 20261022 and prints the same table. Places and clans come from the site's own tables; the five sentence shapes and their 32 frame words are in the script, so the bank is inspectable rather than implied.
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