Fantasy Tavern Name Generator

How the Fantasy Tavern / Inn Name Generator works

Fantasy tavern name generator: how the names are built

The tavern is the most-named building in fantasy because it is where every adventure starts, and its name follows a formula that goes back to real medieval inn signs. Before most people could read, an inn was known by its painted sign, so inn names are pictures: a beast, an object, or two things together. This page builds names in that tradition and gives you five flavours of it.

Classic sign is the formula everyone knows: The Prancing Something, The Something and Anvil, The Three Something. It fits any village or town. Named for the keeper gives the plainer kind of tavern that is just called after whoever runs it (Marta's, Old Bram's Cellar, Widow Kell and Daughters), which is how most real drinking houses were known and makes a good change from the sign formula. Dockside uses a vocabulary of rot, salt and wreckage for the harbour dive where the smugglers drink. Coaching inn gives the roadside establishments, with the horses, post horns and milestones of the highway, for the stop between towns. Upmarket produces the gilded hostelries where the nobles stay, named for swans, peacocks and chalices rather than boars and flagons.

The lists are original; the formula is public property and the specific combinations are random, so nothing here is lifted from a published setting. The beasts and objects include a few fantasy creatures (wyverns, basilisks, gnomes) so that a batch reads as fantasy rather than as a real pub crawl, but most of the elements are the ordinary ones, because a tavern called The Drunken Goat is more believable than one called The Astral Chimera.

Use the count field to generate a whole town's worth at once. A settlement with one classic sign, one keeper's tavern and one dive already has a social map: the respectable inn, the local, and the place the party will end up in anyway.

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