Best Pathfinder 2e Generators for GMs in 2026

Most roundups of the best Pathfinder 2e generators for GMs are really D&D 5e roundups with the word Pathfinder swapped in. That distinction matters more than it sounds, because PF2e prep has a different shape: encounters run off a fixed XP budget rather than a fuzzy difficulty feel, the Remaster changed the rules text under half the tools you'll find on page one, and a good chunk of the free generators still floating around the top of Google were built for 1st Edition and never updated.

I run PF2e alongside 5e, and the tooling gap between the two is real. So this is the list I actually use, split by the job you're trying to finish before Thursday, with prices, free tiers and the specific places each one falls over. I've been honest about where CharGen (my own tool) helps and where it doesn't yet.

What makes Pathfinder 2e prep different

Two things change how you should pick tools.

The first is the maths. PF2e encounter building is a budget, not a vibe. GM Core page 75 sets a fixed XP budget per threat band for a party of four: 40 or less for trivial, 60 for low, 80 for moderate, 120 for severe, and 160 for extreme. Each character above or below four shifts the budget by a set adjustment, 20 XP per character at low and moderate, 30 at severe, 40 at extreme. That's unusually mechanical for a TTRPG, and it means a generator either respects the budget or it's producing decoration. A "random encounter" that hands you four creatures with no XP total attached is not doing the hard part.

The second is the licence. Paizo moved off the OGL after Wizards tried to deauthorise it in January 2023, and published Player Core and GM Core in November 2023 under the new Open RPG Creative (ORC) licence, with Monster Core following in March 2024 and Player Core 2 in July. The Remaster stripped out alignment and a handful of OGL-tied creatures and spells. Practically, that means any tool last updated before late 2023 is giving you pre-Remaster terminology, and plenty of them are.

Right, so with that in mind.

The best Pathfinder 2e generators for GMs, compared

Archives of Nethys: the free reference everything else is measured against

Start here. Archives of Nethys is the free rules database for PF2e, maintained under a partnership with Paizo, and it is the reason PF2e GMs get away with owning fewer books than 5e GMs. Every monster, every spell, every encounter table, searchable, no account.

It isn't a generator, and I'm including it anyway because half the "generators" you'll find are just worse interfaces on top of this data. If a tool's monster picker doesn't match what Nethys says, trust Nethys. Use it for the encounter budget table, then use the generators below to fill in everything the budget doesn't tell you: who these people are, what they want, and what they're carrying.

Pathbuilder 2e: the statblock builder PF2e actually has

Pathbuilder 2e, from Redrazors Ltd, is the closest thing PF2e has to a universally recommended character builder. It's free to download on Android and iOS, with a premium upgrade at roughly $5 on Android and $7 on iOS that removes ads and adds cloud saves. It's still actively maintained: version 288 shipped on 16 July 2026.

Worth mentioning though, the web and Android versions are separate purchases. Buying premium on your phone does not carry over to the website, which catches people out constantly.

For GMs the trick is to use it for NPCs, not just PCs. Building a recurring villain in Pathbuilder gives you a legal, level-appropriate statblock in about five minutes, which is faster than hand-rolling one and considerably more accurate than asking a general-purpose chatbot to invent PF2e maths. It won't do art, and it won't do the flavour.

Foundry VTT and the PF2e system: the automation everyone tells you about

Foundry VTT is a $50 USD one-time purchase, a perpetual licence including future updates, which works out around £38.63 plus tax at current rates. No subscription. The Pathfinder 2e system module on top of it is free, built by the PF2e Volunteer Development Team, endorsed by Foundry Gaming LLC and running under an official partnership with Paizo.

That combination is genuinely the strongest PF2e automation available, and it's why so many PF2e tables run on Foundry rather than Roll20. Conditions, degrees of success and the three-action economy are all handled for you.

The honest caveat: it's a game night tool, not a prep-speed tool. Foundry will run your encounter beautifully and will not tell you what the shopkeeper's name is or hand you a portrait for her. That's the gap the rest of this list fills.

donjon: free, fast, and quietly still 1st Edition in places

donjon is a classic for a reason. Free, no signup, and its Pathfinder section covers a random dungeon generator, a random encounter generator, a random magic shop generator, a treasure generator and a power attack calculator. For "I need a dungeon layout in ninety seconds", it's still hard to beat.

Here's the thing though, and nobody seems to say it out loud: a lot of that Pathfinder content is 1st Edition. The treasure and magic shop generators draw on Ultimate Equipment, a PF1e book. The output is usable as inspiration, but if you paste it into a PF2e game unchecked, your item names, prices and rarities will be subtly wrong. I use donjon for structure, layout and prompts, then re-price anything that matters against Nethys.

I Loot the Body: NPCs in one click

The PF2e NPC generator at I Loot the Body does one thing: it assembles a random NPC from databases of traits and presents the results in the order a GM actually needs them at the table. It's free and it's PF2e-native.

It's text-only and deliberately shallow, which is fine. This is the tool for the guard on the gate, not the recurring antagonist.

CharGen: portraits, tokens, shops and hazards for PF2e

CharGen is mine, so take the enthusiasm with the appropriate pinch of salt. It's system-agnostic by design, which is exactly why it works for PF2e: the generators produce the fiction, the art and the assets, and you set the system.

Concretely, for a PF2e table:

• The shop generator states it "primarily supports D&D 5E and Pathfinder, but it can be used with any fantasy RPG system", and returns a shopkeeper with personality and level, a themed inventory scaled to party level, gold prices, shop quirks, shopfront art and adventure hooks tied to local rumours.
• The hazard generator is the one piece built for Pathfinder 2E first, with fields for Hazard Level, Complexity, Environment, Disable Requirement and Game System. I wrote up how I actually use it in this piece on PF2e traps.
• The token maker is explicitly system-agnostic and lists D&D 5e, Pathfinder 1e and 2e, Call of Cthulhu, Cyberpunk RED and Shadowrun.
• The rest of the generator set covers NPCs, monsters, settlements, taverns, dungeons, factions, loot, magic items and spellbooks.

Where it doesn't help yet, and I'd rather say this than have you find out after signing up: the character sheet builder is D&D-only right now. CharGen's own builder FAQ says it "supports classic D&D 5e plus a 2024 / 5.5e profile based on current SRD 5.2 data. Pathfinder 2e is planned for a future update." So for PF2e statblocks, use Pathbuilder. For everything around the statblock, this is where I work.

Loot and shops: the part PF2e tools handle worst

Loot is where the 1e residue bites hardest. PF2e reorganised item rarity and pricing in the Remaster, so a free generator that hasn't been touched since 2022 will hand you an item list that reads plausibly and prices badly.

My working method is boring and it works. Generate the shop for the fiction, then price it against Nethys.

Last session I needed a smuggler's supply shop in a river port. CharGen's shop generator gave me Hessa Vorn, a half-orc quartermaster who takes payment in favours rather than coin, an inventory heavy on rope, alchemical fire and forged writs, and a hook about a crate she refuses to open. That's ten seconds of work and it's the part I'd otherwise stall on. The prices I then adjusted by hand, because PF2e item pricing is tight enough that a generator getting it approximately right is worse than useless.

For pure treasure by level, donjon's treasure generator is still quicker than doing it manually, with the same caveat about checking the item names against Remaster terminology.

Tokens: the one job where system doesn't matter at all

A circular PNG doesn't care which ruleset you play. This is the least system-dependent part of prep and, oddly, the part GMs waste the most time on, cropping portraits in an image editor at eleven at night.

CharGen's token maker exports transparent PNGs at 1024 by 1024 pixels, transparent outside the mask, and documents the handoff for each platform: upload to the Art Library in Roll20 then drag onto a map or sheet, add to Assets in Foundry VTT and assign the PNG to an actor, import through the Image Manager in Fantasy Grounds, or drop the PNG straight into the token tool in Owlbear Rodeo. The same file works in D&D Beyond, MapTool and TaleSpire.

If you run PF2e on Foundry, this is the highest-value ten minutes in your whole prep: batch your recurring NPCs into tokens once, assign them to actors, and never think about it again.

Encounters and dungeons

For layout, donjon's dungeon generator is fast and free and produces a map you can actually read. For the encounter contents, go back to the XP budget. Pick your threat band, take the budget from GM Core page 75, then choose creatures from Nethys until you've spent it.

Where a generator earns its keep is the middle layer: the reason these creatures are in this room, what they were doing before the party kicked the door in, and what they'll do when it goes badly for them. CharGen's dungeon generator and monster generator are good at that layer and will not do your XP maths, and I'd be suspicious of any tool that claimed to do both well.

A 40-minute Pathfinder 2e prep loop

This is the sequence I run on a Wednesday night.

Minutes 0 to 10, the encounter. Decide the threat band, pull the XP budget, pick creatures on Nethys until it's spent. Write the budget total in your notes so you can adjust mid-session if the party arrives with three players instead of five.

Minutes 10 to 20, the people. Generate the two or three NPCs who might get a name this week. One click each. Give them a want and a lie, which is the only NPC prep that consistently survives contact with players.

Minutes 20 to 30, the stuff. Shop or hoard, generated for fiction, priced against Nethys. Don't generate loot you don't expect them to reach.

Minutes 30 to 40, the assets. Portraits for the named NPCs, tokens for anything that might end up on a map. Batch it, export, drop into Foundry.

What I've cut from that loop over the years is statblock authoring. If a creature exists in Monster Core, use it and reskin the description. Building bespoke PF2e statblocks is the single biggest time sink available to a GM and it almost never shows up at the table.

FAQ

What is the best free Pathfinder 2e generator for GMs?

Archives of Nethys for rules, monsters and encounter budgets, and it's completely free with no account. For random dungeons and treasure, donjon is free and needs no signup, though much of its Pathfinder content is 1st Edition-era. For NPCs, I Loot the Body's PF2e NPC generator is free and PF2e-native.

Is there a Pathfinder 2e character generator that's actually accurate?

Pathbuilder 2e is the one PF2e players and GMs consistently recommend. The base app is free on Android and iOS, with a premium upgrade at roughly $5 to $7 depending on platform. Note that the web version and Android version are separate purchases.

Does CharGen support Pathfinder 2e?

Partly, and it's worth being precise. The token maker, shop generator, NPC, monster, loot, dungeon and settlement generators are system-agnostic and work for PF2e, and the hazard generator is built for Pathfinder 2E first. The character sheet builder is not: CharGen's own FAQ states it supports D&D 5e plus a 2024 profile on SRD 5.2 data, with Pathfinder 2e planned for a future update. Use Pathbuilder for PF2e statblocks.

How much does a full Pathfinder 2e toolkit cost in 2026?

You can run PF2e for nothing using Archives of Nethys, donjon and the free tiers. A typical paid setup is Foundry VTT at $50 USD one-time plus the free PF2e system module, Pathbuilder premium at around $5 to $7, and an art and asset tool if you want portraits and tokens. CharGen starts free, with 25 gold at signup and 10 gold per daily login, and paid plans at £8, £16 and £32 a month.

Do Pathfinder 1e generators still work for 2e?

For layout, names and inspiration, yes. For rules content, no. The Remaster, published under the ORC licence from November 2023, changed item pricing, rarity and terminology and removed alignment. Anything drawing on Ultimate Equipment or other 1e sources needs re-checking against Nethys before it hits the table.

What I'd actually pick

If you're starting from nothing: Archives of Nethys and Pathbuilder, both effectively free, and you have a working PF2e prep setup by tonight. Add Foundry and its free PF2e system when you're tired of running combat by hand.

The thing those four won't give you is a face for the quartermaster and a token to put on the map, and that's the gap worth paying to close. Make a token from any portrait, export the 1024px PNG, drop it into Foundry, and see whether it saves you the ten minutes it saves me.