About this familiar name generator
A familiar is a spellcaster's bonded companion (a cat, an owl, a raven, an imp, a pseudodragon), a small creature that is also a second pair of eyes, a scout, and sometimes the only thing a lonely mage talks to. The name is half the bond, and a good one says something about the familiar and the master both. This familiar name generator gives you the creature, the spellcaster it serves, and the bond between them.
It rotates across nine traditions. You'll get a wizard's Find Familiar — cat, owl, raven, bat, rat, toad, hawk, or spider; a warlock's Pact of the Chain imp, pseudodragon, quasit, or sprite; a sorcerer's draconic-bloodline pseudodragon; a necromancer's skeletal rat; an Eberron warforged's mechanical companion; a Greensinger druid's beast; a witch's traditional black cat; a Spelljammer space-familiar; and a planar familiar out of Sigil. Each result names the familiar, says who it is bonded to, and gives you a small hook the pair are caught up in.
Where the familiar comes from
The familiar is not a D&D invention; it is one of the oldest pieces of witch-lore in Europe. In the English and Scottish witch trials of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a witch was widely believed to keep a 'familiar spirit', a small animal — a cat or a toad or a ferret or a mouse — given to her by the Devil to run her errands and do her harm, and fed in return on a drop of her blood drawn from a hidden 'witch's mark'. The animals were ordinary; what made them sinister was the bond. Witch-hunters took the belief literally: the notorious Matthew Hopkins, England's self-styled Witchfinder General, recorded the familiars named in his 1640s prosecutions, and the names are wonderful and strange, Pyewacket and Vinegar Tom and Grizzel Greedigut and Sack-and-Sugar and Holt among them.
That folklore is the taproot of the modern familiar, and you can still feel it in the names. A familiar's name is a pet-name with something uncanny folded into it, exactly the register Hopkins's frightened witnesses reached for. D&D cleaned the idea up, since the Find Familiar spell makes the bond a tool rather than a damnation, but the shape survived: a small creature, closer to its caster than any pet, that knows its master's secrets and runs its master's errands. The generator names in that old tradition, half affection and half spell, which is why a witch's cat called Nox and a Red Wizard's pseudodragon called Vrelthax both sound right.
What kinds of familiar names you'll see
The wizard and witch familiars get warm, domestic names — the cat by the fire, the owl on the shelf. The warlock and necromancer familiars get stranger, sharper ones, fit for an imp or a skeletal rat. The names lean on the creature and on the master: a respectable mage names their cat one way, a Red Wizard names their pseudodragon another.
Why the bond matters
A familiar name with nothing behind it is just a pet's name. The thing that makes a familiar playable is the bond (who it serves, what it does for them, and what it knows), because a witch's cat that has watched its master's secrets for fifty years is a different creature from a freshly summoned sprite, and the table can use the difference. Each result builds the familiar out of those parts: the creature and its traits, the spellcaster it is bonded to, the story of the bonding, and the trouble the pair are in.
How to use it at the table or on the page
Take what you need. Keep the whole entry for a familiar that matters to an NPC mage, or lift the name and bond your own character's companion to it. The hooks stay bounded and tied to the master (a witch's cat that knows both its master's faces, a Red Wizard's pseudodragon watching a phylactery rite, an owl carrying a scholar's stolen thesis), so they slot under a larger story. The schema reuses the same fields as every generator here: backstory is the bonding and the master, personality is the creature's traits and how the pair work together, and the plot hook is the present trouble.
What you get
Every roll returns a familiar name, a pronunciation note, an etymology that names the creature and the tradition, a backstory (how it was bonded, to which spellcaster, what kind of creature it is), a paragraph on the familiar itself (its traits, how it works with its master), and a current situation a GM or writer can use tonight. Most online familiar generators stop at a cute name. This one gives you a companion with a master, a bond, and a secret or two.