Research scientist Janelle Shane, whose wonderful neural networks we’ve covered before, has turned her experiments from guinea pig names to D&D spells – and the results are just as entertaining.

She first ran a dataset of 365 examples, and the results weren’t particularly useful or amusing. However, one of her readers – Jo Scott – helped her out by compiling all 1,300 spells from the 4th edition. “Using the new dataset,” Shane explained, “I was able to train a much better-performing neural network. It simply had many more examples of spells to work with; that is, more examples of the words and letter combinations that appear in D&D spells, and thus was able to deduce better rules about how to create them.”

“Even this more-sophisticated neural network is not without some oddities,” Shane continues. “For example, you’ll notice in the results below that it seems to have a particular fondness for bears. And it has invented the name ‘Dave’ which is now, for some reason, its favorite.”

I leave you now with just a few of the wonderful Dungeons & Dragons spells generated by the latest neural network. For the full list of results, including all the Daves, check out Shane’s Lewis & Quark blog.

Crackling claus

Tidal treket

Wall of Storm

Grasping Mane

Tweel Strike

Trickstrak empester

Phantasmal assault

Bund Wind

Dance of Sack

Poxsare

Dumination

Storm of the gifling

Chorus of the dave

Song of the doom goom

Death’s Death’s Proud Bear

Shield of Farts

Ward of Snade the Pood Beast

Summon Storm Bear

Divine Boom

Song of blord

Spirit Boating

Treeking of Star

Primal Prayer Bear

War Cape

Gate Sail

Chilled arrow

Charm of the cods

Curse Clam

Cursing wink

Conjure Mare

Healing of Bat

Mordenkainen’s lucubrabibiboricic angion

Tag yourselves, I’m Curse Clam.

Next up, Shane hopes to use her neural network to generate Dungeons & Dragons character names. You can help her with this new project by entering your D&D character’s name, race, and class via this form. As with the spells, the more data she has on hand, the better the results will be – so let’s help her out!

(Via Lewis and Quark; image via Wizards of the Coast, LLC)

Want more stories like this? Become a subscriber and support the site!

—The Mary Sue has a strict comment policy that forbids, but is not limited to, personal insults toward anyone, hate speech, and trolling.—

Have a tip we should know? tips@themarysue.com