Harry Potter Character Picker
Who does the map find?
Who is on the map?
Tap a name to put them in the castle (up to 20 — all of them fit at once).
Pick who is on the map, then open it. Ink runs down the corridors, a pair of footprints scurries the castle with a name-tag chasing after them, and whoever the tag catches is yours — with a line on what they are actually like.
- Fanfic and roleplay
- Group cosplay
- Rewatch arguments
A random Harry Potter character, found rather than chosen
The Harry Potter Character Picker chooses one of twenty wizarding-world characters at random — but instead of spinning a wheel at a list, it opens a parchment floor plan of the castle and goes looking. Ink runs down the corridors, footprints scurry from room to room, and a small name-tag chases along behind until it catches somebody. Whoever it catches is yours.
How it works
Tap the characters you want in play. All twenty fit at once.
Open the map and the corridors draw themselves in, one line at a time.
They turn square corners along real corridors, leaving prints that dry and fade.
It settles over one chamber and writes out the full name in ink.
The twenty characters, and what each one is like
Every result comes with a line of description, because "you got Neville" is a name and "underestimated for years, including by himself" is a starting point. This is the full roster, along with the object that stands in for each of them on the map.
| Character | On the map | In one line |
|---|---|---|
| Harry Potter | Round spectacles | The one who ends up carrying it. Reluctant, stubborn, far better in a crisis than out of one. |
| Hermione | A stack of books | Prepared for everything, including the thing nobody else thought of. |
| Ron Weasley | A chess rook | The friend who stays — and braver than he gives himself credit for. |
| Dumbledore | A stone basin | Plays a much longer game than anyone around him, and keeps most of it to himself. |
| Snape | A potion vial | Impossible to read and easy to misjudge. Every motive is older than it looks. |
| Voldemort | A rearing snake | All ambition and no ties, and terrified of one very ordinary thing. |
| Hagrid | A great iron key | Enormous heart, hopeless at secrets, certain to adopt something that bites. |
| Draco Malfoy | A bag of gold | Raised into a part he is not sure he wants, working that out in public. |
| Luna Lovegood | A crescent moon | Unbothered by what the room thinks, and kind in a way that catches you off guard. |
| Neville | A potted plant | Underestimated for years, including by himself — and still standing at the end. |
| Ginny Weasley | A broomstick | Sharp, quick, not remotely fragile. Youngest of many and none the softer for it. |
| Sirius Black | A paw print | Loyal to the point of recklessness. Loves hard and holds a grudge harder. |
| Lupin | A full moon | Gentle, tired, and quietly the most decent adult in the room. |
| Bellatrix | A dagger | Devotion turned all the way up until it stopped being devotion. |
| Dobby | A sock | Free and delighted about it. Will do something enormous for a small kindness. |
| Cedric Diggory | A trophy cup | Decent even when it costs him. Wins fairly or does not care to win. |
| Cho Chang | A quill feather | Talented and grieving at once, which nobody handles gracefully. |
| McGonagall | A sitting cat | Strict because she cares, which is the only kind of strict worth anything. |
| Mad-Eye Moody | A wide open eye | Paranoid, and right often enough that people stop arguing. |
| Tonks | A hand mirror | Clumsy, cheerful, completely unshakeable the moment it matters. |
Why the artwork has no faces
Every drawing on this page is original, and that rules out the obvious approach. Drawing recognisable versions of these characters means copying a likeness that belongs to somebody else, so the map does not do it. Each character is a plain object instead — the sort of thing that would be lying in their room.
It turned out to be the better design anyway. A row of twenty tiny faces reads as twenty tiny faces; a sock, a chess rook and a great iron key read instantly and differently from one another, and they sit properly on an inked floor plan in a way that portrait art never would. The object is the clue and the tag does the naming, so nothing is ever ambiguous.
Ways people use it
Writing and roleplay
Roll first, write second. Being handed a character you would not have picked is the whole value — it pushes you out of the two or three you always default to, and the one-line description gives you an angle to start from rather than a blank page.
Group cosplay and parties
Run it once per person with the same list. Nobody has to negotiate for the popular ones and nobody feels talked into a leftover, because the map picked and not the loudest person in the group chat.
Rewatches and readalongs
Draw a character each and watch a film tracking only them. It is a surprisingly good way to notice how much is going on at the edges of scenes you have seen a dozen times.
Settling an argument
Who narrates the next chapter, who gets the good costume, who has to be the villain. Nobody chose it, so nobody has to defend it afterwards.
Why a map and not a wheel
A wheel answers "which of these". A map answers "where is somebody" — and those are genuinely different questions. Searching a castle for a person has a shape that a spinning dial does not: the footprints set off down one corridor, turn a corner you were not expecting, double back past two chambers and then slow to a stop somewhere else entirely.
The randomness is identical to a wheel — one uniform pick, made before anything moves. What changes is that you spend the run following something rather than waiting for a dial to stop, and the near-misses are actual near-misses: the prints ran straight past that chamber and kept going.
Students, staff and villains on one map
The roster deliberately mixes the school years, the teachers and the people trying to kill everyone. Splitting them out sounds tidier but produces a much worse tool: a picker of only students loses the results that are actually interesting to write, and half the pleasure of a random draw is the collision between a first-year and someone thirty years older with a great deal more to answer for.
If you want only the staff, switch the students off before you run it — the map is happy with any subset. If you want the reverse, switch off Dumbledore, Snape, McGonagall, Lupin and Moody, and you have a picker of the students and the outsiders.
A shortlist beats the full castle. Twenty characters means each one comes up about one run in twenty, which is fine for a surprise and poor for a decision. If you are choosing something you have to live with, cut the map down to the five or six you would genuinely be pleased to be handed and run it on those.
Reading a result you did not want
The re-roll instinct is worth resisting for a moment, because the result you flinch at is usually the informative one. Getting Draco when you wanted Luna tells you something about which story you were hoping for, and that is a more useful thing to know than the name itself.
If you would genuinely not enjoy a character, the honest fix is to switch them off before the run rather than to re-roll after it. A picker you keep overruling is not picking anything.
A fair pick, every time
The winning chamber is drawn with your browser's cryptographic random generator before the footprints take a step, and the route is then built to end there. Characters are shuffled into different chambers on every run, and the footprints are routed to each chamber's exact centre along the corridors with no limit on how far they can travel — so no room, no row and no corner of the map is luckier than another. The animation is theatre; the decision was already made fairly.
More wizarding pickers
After something other than a person? Try these:
- Not sorted yet? Put on the Hogwarts House Picker.
- Find out which wand chooses you at the HP Wand Picker.
- Need something to cast? Try the HP Spell Picker.
- Somewhere to set the scene: the HP Location Picker.
- Want more? Browse all random pickers.