Enter your character's race and class. Add the background from your sheet, a name and a few traits, the campaign, and anything the story must include. Hemmingway writes a backstory of 200 to 300 words to hand to your Dungeon Master, then three hooks: a person from the character's past, some unfinished business and a secret.
Your sheet comes first. What you enter stays as written. It does not bring in published settings, gods or famous characters unless you name them, so it works for a homebrew world. If you do name a published setting, check the details against your own books, because it can get lore wrong.
What makes a backstory good at the table
- Keep it level one. A new character has not killed a dragon or lost a throne. The adventure ahead should be the biggest thing that has happened to them.
- Hand the DM something to pull. A sister who vanished, a debt, a name they stopped using. A backstory with no loose ends cannot come back in play.
- Explain the class. Say how the wizard paid for their training, why the cleric chose this god, what the warlock agreed to.
- Give them a reason to join a party. The loner who trusts nobody is hard on the rest of the table. Needing money or protection is enough.
An example
Asked for a half-orc cleric with the soldier background who is blunt, prays badly, owes a debt to a temple and needs a reason to travel with strangers, a backstory that opens along these lines is what to expect:
She was a soldier first and a cleric by accident. After her last battle a temple took her in and mended her, and nobody mentioned the cost until she could stand.
She is blunt, and her prayers have never sounded right. The temple wants it paid in service on the road, so she goes where the work is, with whoever is heading that way.
Hooks: the priest who holds her debt. The company she left behind. What she did in that last battle.
Other games
For Pathfinder or another tabletop game, name the system in the campaign field. For a character in a novel or a script, use the character backstory generator. Dungeon Masters can get a villain's plan and a few locations from the plot generator. To play the character in a chat, see the best AI for roleplay.
Common questions
Is the D&D backstory generator free?
Yes. Hemmingway has a free trial with no card needed, and this tool opens it with your answers filled in. You sign up once, and the backstory is written in the chat.
Does it work for any race and class?
Yes. Type what is on your sheet, homebrew options included. It writes the story and does not check the rules.
How long should a D&D backstory be?
A page at most, so your DM reads all of it. Three hooks they can use are worth more than three pages they cannot.
Will it sound like AI?
It is built not to. Hemmingway-1, the model behind it, came first on sounding like a person in our own blind test, Human-Likeness. It still helps to read it aloud and change any word you would not use.