A.E. Osworth // Writer

He’s huge and buff and athletic but he’s also a huge nerd and fucking loves it and gets super into it, staring at Matt as he waves wonderful worlds with his words like a wide-eyed kid

He’s all cool and suave some times but then melts giving his tiny wife heart-eyes and avoids her rage and blushes like a mess when she flirts with him from across the room

He’ll super chill talking about how when he first contacted Laura it was to ask her help getting a VO gig without trying to play it cool or any semblance of hurt ego

He’s not ‘too cool’ to care about fictional romance, instead you can see hours upon hours of him shipping Vex and Percy, clutching his soda can when they get together, dancing around whenever they have a romantic milestone

Some dude-bro comes over in a panel and asks if it wasn’t kinda awkward watching his wife play-pretend having a romantic relationship with one of his friends and Travis ‘Fuck Fragile Masculinity’ Willingham is like “it was wonderful! I got to see my wife flirt with Taliesin and it was amazing!! I shipped it! I had to look up the term but I shipped it like FedEx!!” without a single qualm. 

The game Dungeons and Dragons has all sorts of lists of spells and abilities you can use for gameplay. I trained an algorithm called a recurrent neural network to generate more spells - like Barking Sphere, Hold Mouse, and Gland Growth. Then, with a larger set of spells in my training dataset, I trained a better neural net that generated even more - like Song of the Dave, Summon Ass, and Shield of Farts.

It turns out that in addition to spellbooks, Dungeons and Dragons also has monster manuals - books full of the names and descriptions of creatures that adventurers can encounter. Colin Fredricks, who created the RPG Sufficiently Advanced, was kind enough to send me the names of 2,205 creatures from the 2nd edition monster manual. 

As I had hoped, the neural network generated creatures that would probably be pretty awesome.

Owlborn Cat, Stone Vampire Bear Kick Spirit Hatfright Purple Bird Slug, Spectral Wolf, Chromatic Golem, Rain Human, Crystal Hound, Plant Fish, Astro- Wolfworm Ogre, Space Dog, Goblin Serpent Shark Mommy, Greater Giant, Dunebat Cloud of Chaos

It also generated some creatures that you should probably run from until you figure out what they are. (Though Dome Animal might simply be a cool turtle)

Brain, Fire Horse (Spider, Brain Undead Lake Man, Fire Walfablang Fraithwarp, Giant Fish, Sun of Lycanthrope, Wereladoo Pat, Great, Space Shadowstaffer Spectral Woof Greepy Jabberwont Animal, Dome Dwarf, Giant Burglestar Pigaloth Beeple, Desert Wendless Woll Memeball Marraganralleraith

There were 118 dragons in the original dataset, so of course the neural net liked generating new dragons. Some perhaps better-conceived than others.

Dragon, Death Seep Dragon, Purple Fang Dragon, Curple Lard Dragon, Dead Big Dragon Will O’Dragon

And it generated new unicorns!

Unicorn, Fumble Unicorn, Bat Unicorn, Black Willow Unicorn, Sith Sheet

These might be possible misses, though.

Man-Can Barber Beet Skull Feast, Stone Peg, Brown Kurt Durp Snake Golf Vampire, Putter

Enter your email here and I’ll send you a few more creatures that wouldn’t fit in the main post. Including the legendary Bung Dragon!

I’m crowdsourcing a couple more D&D-related datasets - see below!

Also, I thought it would be fun to generate D&D character names for a future project. If you go to this form (no email required), you can enter your character’s name, race, and class. Once I have enough of these, I’ll give them to the neural network and see what happens. Edit: wow, over 10,000 responses so far! (Check them out at this link) Keep them coming!

I’m also collecting character backstories! Submit as many as you like. https://goo.gl/forms/ReInNw0Tz0mwzTLO2 I will post some generated character bios as soon as I can figure out a strategy that works better than this: