Random Box 🎲

10 min readUpdated 2026-09-30

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For when you can't decide, and for when a story needs a spoonful of chance. The Random Box in the right sidebar holds four tabs — Character · Place · Dice · Wheel — and every one of them rolls instantly, with no AI. 🎰

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Opening it 🔭

Hit the Random Box icon in the right sidebar nav, or type random box in the command palette (⌘P).
The tabs at the top switch between Character · Place · Dice · Wheel. Your settings and any dice or wheels you build are saved on this device (nothing is written into your vault).
Any result can be dropped into the note you're looking at with [Insert at cursor]. On screens where no document is visible (the dashboard, for instance) it won't insert, and it tells you why.

① Character — a whole person at once 🎭

Pick a world, gender, age band and name style, and out comes a name plus epithet, role, appearance, verbal tic, keepsake, MBTI, Enneagram, sore spot and small secret. Random stat distribution (radar chart, state columns) lives in this tab too.

📖 The full walkthrough is in 18-2 Character Codex & References under "When you can't think of a character" — it carries straight on into getting that character into your codex.

Switch to a monster — [Person | Monster] 👻

Tap Monster in the [Person | Monster] switch at the top of the Character tab and you get a creature instead of a person. It arrived for Halloween, but it's there all year. Typing monster in the command palette (⌘P) opens it too.

Just pick a tradition — Korean folklore · Japanese yokai · Chinese myth · Western folklore · Fantasy · Sci-fi, or Any. It starts on Any — in a gate or a dungeon, anything can come crawling out, whatever the story's genre.
Names are built from a modifier + an archetype — Name-Stealing Gumiho · Kelpie of the Mist Fen · Century-Old Dokkaebi · Kappa, Master of the Mist Fen.
Rows that come with it: Archetype · Folklore · Danger · Haunt · When it comes · Looks · Habits · Weakness & warding · Story seed.
Only the Folklore row is real 📜 — one line on how that archetype is actually told, with a source link (for fantasy and sci-fi it reads In the genre). Every other row describes one creature born of that archetype, for your story. We keep the two apart so that "facts" invented by novels and films — vampires burning in sunlight, say — never pose as folklore.
Danger isn't rolled — its five steps (Harmless · Mischievous · Risky · Dangerous · Catastrophic) are set by the archetype and the modifier ("Starving" nudges it up a step). So you won't get "world-ending dragon · Harmless". The ↳ on the Folklore and Danger rows marks this.
Reroll 🎲 Name to keep the archetype and swap the modifier; reroll 🎲 Archetype to change the creature, with its folklore and danger following along (a modifier that still fits is kept).
[Create as note] saves it as type: monster, and it gathers in the Monsters tab of the codex. monster_origin, monster_base and danger are written too, so a table (.base) can collect them and sort by danger.
Monsters owned by particular works (trademarked creatures) and beings that are still worshipped today are left out. The scares stop at chilling — nothing gory.

② Place — one village, one dungeon 🗺️

The counterpart to Character. Choose a world (modern · fantasy · wuxia · sci-fi) and a kind (village/town · building/shop · facility/base · natural terrain · ruins/dungeon · district/street), and a location appears at once.

Names are built from parts — Pinebrook Village, Ashford, Fallen Plum Valley, Aurora-7 Station — each world and kind following real place-naming conventions.
- Modern names use native Korean place elements, fantasy draws on Old English and Old Norse place-name elements (Blackburn, Ashton, Hazelhurst, Mossmere, Crowthwaite, Longchester…), wuxia uses scenic stems, and sci-fi borrows real star names (Altair, Sirius, Vega, Fomalhaut, Triton…).
- The parts were greatly expanded from maps and toponymy references — across the 24 combinations (4 worlds × 6 kinds) the pool of possible names grew from about 4,100 to over 14,000, and the other lines (scale, atmosphere, rumour, danger…) more than doubled. Roll several in a row and you will rarely see the same sentence twice.
On the Korean screen, a "what the name means" line follows — 무영곡 ↳ 무영(그림자 없음) + 곡(골짜기) (shadowless + valley). It's computed from the parts the name was built from, so re-rolling the name changes it too (the same ↳ marker as birthday → star sign). English names already say what they mean (Shadowless Valley), so English results skip this line.
Besides the name you get scale · atmosphere · a landmark · who's there · smells and sounds · a rumour · a danger — just enough to start a scene.
Don't like a line? Re-roll only that line with 🎲.
Use [Insert at cursor] to drop it into a note, or [Create as new note] to save it — it's tagged type: background, so it shows up in the codex's Background tab right away.

🧙 Tip: To go deeper on worldbuilding, pair this with the Structure tab ▸ Worldbuilding sheets in 16-12 Writing Helper — roll the name and first impression here, then flesh it out on the sheet.

③ Dice — load them up, roll them together 🎲

Tap d4 · d6 · d8 · d10 · d% · d12 · d20 to add them, then [Roll] throws the whole handful at once.
Dice tray: added dice drop onto the green tray. Dice you haven't rolled yet look faded and don't count toward the total.
How long you hold [Roll] sets the strength — a short press rolls gently; hold longer (the button fills up and the dice rattle) for a hard roll that sweeps the tray. Same as the wheel's [Spin].
Tap the same die again and the count goes up (3d20); mix different kinds freely (2d6 + d20 + d4). A chosen die's chip opens up right where it is into − d6 ② ＋, so you add and remove from the same spot (at 0 it turns back into a plain chip; up to 20 dice at a time). With two or more chosen, [Clear] at the end of the row empties them all.
Custom dice: press ＋ to make anything from 2 to 1000 sides; it stays as a chip (you can name it). ✕ removes it.
Story dice: add [Story] at the end of the chip row and you roll dice that show a picture (emoji) instead of a number — a writing prompt: spin a short story out of the pictures, in any order. About three is a good handful; mixed with number dice, only the numbers go into the total. Results name each picture, like 🦉 Owl, 🗝️ Key, 🌧️ Rain, and [Insert result] adds them that way.
Tap a single die and only that one re-rolls. For when you rolled a handful and dislike just one of them.
- While any die is still unrolled the total honestly stays –, and it appears once every die has been rolled (an unrolled value is never folded into the total).
Grab and throw: grab a die, drag it and flick to throw — a soft throw rolls a little, a hard one bounces off the walls and rolls a lot. Only the die you threw gets a new value; dice it bumps into keep their values (they just move). Move a die slowly to just reposition it without rolling.
Sound effects 🔊 — dice "clack" when they hit and rattle as they roll (faster and louder the harder you throw); the wheel "ticks" each time a slice edge passes the pointer (a rattle when fast, tick… tick when slowing). Use the speaker button next to [Insert result] to turn sound on or off.
Every die is a real 3D solid — from d4 to d20, ivory dice catch the light as they tumble, and the numbers tilt with their faces. When a die stops, the face it landed on looks at you.
Results appear only after they stop. While they tumble, the answer never leaks into the total or the recent list.
Recent results read as one line — d6(4)+d6(5)+d20(18)=27 — showing which die rolled what.
[Insert result] puts in the whole expression: 2d6 + d20 = 27 (4 · 5 · 18).

④ Wheel — spin to pick one 🎡

The first time you open it there's an example wheel, "What's for lunch?" — just press [Spin]. The first item has a ratio of 2, so its slice is twice as big. Don't need it? Remove it with the × on its name chip; a deleted example won't come back.
Keep several wheels and add items one at a time with ＋. Paste multiple lines and they all go in at once. Rename in place — no dialog pops up.
Every item can have its own share ⚖️ — a bigger number comes up proportionally more often (1 vs 3 means the 3 is three times as likely). The actual probability (%) shows right beside it and the slice is exactly that wide. No need to make them add up to 100; just use 1, 2, 3.
- Even a tiny share reads as <0.1% rather than 0% (writing 0 would be a lie). Slices are never widened artificially either — what you see is the probability.
- The coloured dot in front of each row tells you which slice it is. Rows with no name yet don't go on the wheel.

Spin hard, or spin it by hand 💪

[Spin] gets stronger the longer you hold it. A quick tap turns a lap or two and stops; hold it down and it powers through twelve. The button fills like a gauge while you hold, topping out at 1.5 seconds to tell you "no harder than this". Drag off the button and release to cancel.
You can also grab the wheel and spin it by hand. It tracks your finger (or mouse) 1:1 while you drag, and flick it and it spins as hard as you threw it — spin it backwards and it goes backwards. Move it slowly and let go and it doesn't spin at all; it just sits in its new position.
Strength only decides how it spins — the winner is always drawn by slice width. Holding longer doesn't get you a better result.
The pointer catches on the slice edges — flicking back and forth as each one passes. Fast, it rattles; slow, it clicks… and clicks… and stops.
A clear "that's the one!" when it stops — the pointer gives one snap, the winning slice pops out and glows while the rest dim a little, and a small burst of confetti comes off the pointer tip. The winner appears under the wheel with its slice colour (with Reduce Motion on you get the highlight without the animation).
The wheel has an ivory rim and centre cap in calm colours. Neighbouring slices (including the last and the first) are always different colours, and the label colour adapts to each slice. The winner pill also shows the chance, so even a slice too thin for its label can be read.
It stops somewhere inside a slice, not dead centre (and never right on a boundary — you have to be able to see which slice won).
[Insert result] puts in just the item that won.

Good to know 💡

Everything is saved on this device only — custom dice, wheels and your last settings live on the device, not in the vault (they don't follow you to another machine).
If you have Reduce Motion on at the system level, you get the result immediately with no tumbling (and the wheel skips the gauge and its hint entirely — a gauge that fills while the result stays the same would be a lie).
Asking the AI draws from the same pools 🤖 — "make me a wuxia swordswoman" pulls from the app's character pool. → 18-2 Character Codex & References
Inside a web novel, notes land where they belong 📂 — if you press [Create as note] while writing one of the work's episodes, a character goes to Lore/Character, a place to Lore/Place and a monster to Lore/World, so the work's dashboard picks it up right away. If that folder doesn't exist, the note is made next to the current one as before. → Project View
🔮 Today's tarot isn't in the Random Box — it's a dashboard card (pull it out from Edit ▸ Hidden cards). → Dashboard

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