Pastimes
If you’ve ever sat down behind a GM screen, you’ve probably put some work into your stable of NPCs. All those bar tenders, pick pockets, courtesans, and queens don’t just fall out of the sky. You’ve got to breathe life into them. What are their personalities like? Do they have funny accents or verbal ticks? Interesting mannerisms? Important quests to hand out or murders to be questioned about? What were they doing before the players showed up? We try to answer all these questions for one simple reason: When the PCs do show up, we want them to think that the NPCs are interesting.
Consider The Silmarillion. Tolkien never meant to publish that massive mess of notes. The world’s most famous elvish phone directory was designed to add a sense of depth to Middle Earth. The legends weren’t the point; the existence of the legends was the point. There was more going on in The Lord of the Rings than the present story, and all those little details sprinkled throughout created that sense of a world larger than one adventure.
We’re not writing novels of course. We’re trying to run compelling games. That’s an opportunity though. It means that we can do the “Silmarillion trick” twice. We get to delve into the past and design the present.
Here’s what I’m getting at. If you want a world with a little added depth, a good strategy is to give NPCs their own lives beyond the PCs. They might get married or inherit a fortune. They might get drafted into the army, thrown into prison for tax evasion, or elected Lord Mayor. Sure you can have them convert to a paladin’s religion after hearing his sermon or file for bankruptcy after getting robbed by a rogue. That sort of thing is great for giving PCs a sense of importance within the world. If you’re going for verisimilitude though, Father Prudish’s drug habit can do the trick nicely. It takes a bit of work to pull it off, especially when it’s not “the main storyline.” Dynamic NPCs are unexpected though. They’re intriguing. And I think that makes them worth the extra effort.
So here’s the question of the day then. When have you invented an NPC with an agenda beyond their relationship to the PCs? What was it? Were they memorable, or did the PCs not even notice that so-and-so was off leading their own life? Let’s hear it in the comments!
EARN BONUS LOOT! Check out the The Handbook of Heroes Patreon. We’ve got a sketch feed full of Laurel’s original concept art. We’ve got early access to comics. There’s physical schwag, personalized art, and a monthly vote to see which class gets featured in the comic next. And perhaps my personal favorite, we’ve been hard at work bringing a bimonthly NSFW Handbook of Erotic Fantasy comic to the world! So come one come all. Hurry while supplies of hot elf chicks lasts!
I think 2 of my favorite NPCs we have made are Hugh Man, my all time favorite, and after that David Bowie, based on a mixture of actual david bowie and abridged abridged naruto’s kakashi, aka david bowie, as shown here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1WevhYQcFzc . David Bowie was in our high level pathfinder campaign where he was one of the ancient defenders of the planet, being one of the various protectors to seal the super powered up demon lord we fought for the final boss. He was still alive in the current times, ruling his own kingdoms as a 20th level bard, but we never directly interacted with him, though the stories we heard about him as the campaign progressed were nonetheless wonderful. Hugh Man is a war forged who first appeared before I even started playing with my current group over 6 years ago, and has since been a part of every pathfinder campaign as well as our most recent 5e campaign, regardless of how poorly he actually fits in the setting. No matter what you tell him, he refuses to accept that he is anything but a human, regardless of the fact that he’s clearly a machine, being able to do stuff such as record voices he hears and play them back, cook food inside his own body oven, and have his own alarm system. He owns a restaurant simply called RESTAURANT, which serves only 4 things, DRINK, an incredibly strong alcoholic beverage, Turkey legs, with a seemingly infinite amount being produced from his chest oven, with no one understanding how, as no magic is detected, a something named in around 30 digits written in hexadecimal that cannot actually be seen by mortals, being beyond out comprehensions, and thus appearing as simply a blind spot in our vision in which nothing is observable, and water. His restaurant just pops up at random in whatever setting we’re in decades prior in a previously abandoned building, and is typically bigger on the inside. Due to all this, and the fact that he often appears near wizard colleges, he is often heavily studied, though no one has been able to learn much, not that he cares, after all, he is clearly a human with nothing interesting about himself besides being a nice man with a fine restaurant. Overall, I love Hugh Man, and I hope nothing bad ever happens too him, as in his obliviousness and desire to be helpful and kind to others, even if he’s not always that good with it, he’s kinda just adorable.
On the off chance that you aren’t familiar: https://www.reddit.com/r/totallynotrobots/
While I new something like this simply had to exist, I didn’t know about that specifically:).
Well Acolyte and Priest can use the Cure Poison feature of Lesser restoration to get themselves sober.
Casting while high involves the wild magic chart. It is not recommended.
Acolyte’s eyes aren’t red, she seems sober. She sobers Priest, Priest sobers Tavern Wench, and we just assume Quest Giver is high all the time since he always has a pipe and we never see his eyes.
“The quests come to me in like… a groovy vision, man.”
…You want us to capture Grungs and Myconids, don’t you?
(Grungs are poison-dart frog people. Every time a new player encountered them they tried to lick them. This was treated as a comparable social faux-pas to trying to lick anyone else.)(Myconids are mushroom people.
I know you already used the “Identical Twin Sister” excuse, but I can also imagine that Priest resurrected Barmaid because she still owed him money from the pizza last week.
Priest is very cheap.
Is pizza more expensive than diamonds, or is he just that petty?
The diamonds come out of his temple’s government-provided funding. That pizza was HIS gp, thank you very much.
What is this nonsense, NPC don’t have anything not even remotely identical to a life, if not for the heroes and the villains they would’n even exist.
My novelization says otherwise. 😛
In my group we have this rule: “Unless otherwise stated by the GM, each and every NPC must be considered to have a 0-Heart Grace”. We have this rule since we played Graceful Wicked Masques, and we use it in every game we play. It really help ruin the life of the NPC without remorse knowing that in fact they don’t really exist. Do you want to take this meta-metaphysical joy from our pcs 🙁
Funny you should mention “Graceful Wicked Masques.” I believe Laurel has some art in that one.
And yes, the life of an NPC is truly thankless, even if it isn’t truly a “life.”
Well, that is the rule we have and we follow it. Even in games where you don’t have graces, or Fair Folk’s people. Take my word D&D is a complete different game of exalted when you ignore the Graces Rules…
Mainly because D&D is a complete different game of exalted and it doesn’t gave Graces Rules for a start.
Writing about GWM can you tell me which specific art piece Laurel make. I have read the book up side down, it’s my favorite Exalted 2E book, but i really want to know which ones of the art pieces are his work.
I’ve only got a couple illustrations in there, but they’re on pages 52, 92 and 171. I also did some of the artifacts, but they’re kind of scattered around. I, uh, am not super proud of these? I’m happy that I got to do work for my favorite property, but I wasn’t exactly the best artist at the time.
Thanks Laurel, that questions have haunted me for so long. Be happy you could work in something you like that much, and for the art, well. Be an artist is like be a parent, the first works are awful but with time you learn from your mistakes and get better on it until one day you finish your work and you can say with earned proud “I did a really good job with this one”. Be happy and have a good week i will keeping looking forward for your work here in the Handbook of Heroes 🙂
This is relevant:
http://www.giantitp.com/comics/images/oots0122.gif
Simpsons did it! And also Rich Berlew!
I personally do not recommend Father Prudish’s drug addiction. The last and only time I tried it, the PCs threw the NPC in jail almost instantly. Since then, I’ve tried to make my NPC’s habits a bit more above the law.
Illegal habits are the province of criminal nuns.
Hmmm. I’m not sure if this counts or not. In the 5e game I’m running I know the agendas of all the main NPCs. The PCs can help or hinder them without really knowing it in a lot of cases and probably will do one or the other (though in some cases the most likely result is that they won’t do either directly).
Given the situations so far though, the only NPCs they’ve really run into are high positioned people with such agendas or low tier people who are just soldiers or shopkeepers or the like with little interaction with the PCs (in fact most I didn’t even bother naming). Not really much in the way of anyone of “middling” importance.
And of course in character the game hasn’t been going on all that long so I haven’t had opportunity to have “nameless” NPCs reoccur so I haven’t fleshed any of them out as characters.
I may be wrong here, but my intuition is that the agendas of high-tier people have a direct impact on storylines that affect the PCs. “Lady Weatherbottom is a wealthy patron of the arts, which the PCs can leverage by doing XYZ.” I’m imagining stuff more like, “Lady Weatherbottom is a wealthy patron of the arts, but only because she is a secret admirer of a certain famous troubadour.”
i try to do this for most npc. given it dosent always succeeds but it gives things like old man’s yuan chinese restaurant, settled in a metropolis, out-done by the competition by an owner who just wants to share his country’s culinary knowldge. The players went there unknowingly just to celebrate an achievement in a cozy corner and came back later to news of bankrupcy and tried to bail the old man.
Nice! Had you set that up as a hook, or did they just spontaneously decide to make his troubles their own?
More meta, but a player in my D&D games worked as a lounge singer in the bar I DMed Mage: the Ascension for another group at. Since we were like the only people there towards the end of the night, I talked her into slipping songs about things my Mage players were going do but hadn’t done yet at the end of her sets as part of the setup for a plot. Worth it, but you have no idea how relieved I was when they picked up the thread and I didn’t have to write any more swing prophecies.
That might be the single coolest thing I’ve ever heard. I would completely lose my shit if my GM did that!
“Wait, is she…? Holy crap! Where’s my pen? Somebody get me a cocktail napkin! What exactly was that line? Encore! Please for the love of God, encore!”
Ran an Eberron game where the Players were running around investigating a cell of Emerald Claw in the town of Sharn planning to try and drop another tower. It started with a lady who had been “removed from active duty” in the Sharn City Watch pointing them in the direction of a known Emerald Claw agent named “Tania”, them following the agent to several meetings and thus finding more agents in the city, a few pokes into the undercity, and finally an attack on the Emerald Claw hideout in that one section of Sharn filled with Karnnathi. They were lead to the hideout by the original agent, and only after clearing the area and defeating the priest of the blood of Vol and finding a dead wizard who was stabbed in the back did their mage remark, “We never found Tania.”
A search outside did reveal the clothes Tania was wearing, a bloody dagger, and a small fox cut out of “Brelish Blue” cloth; prompting the comment of “I feel there is an entire web of intrigue here that we are simply too forward to catch.”
There had been multiple skill rolls and other hints throughout the quest to insinuate that “Tania” had been letting them follow her to the meetings and basically acting to reveal the Emerald Claw cell in Sharn. The reveal was that “Tania” had been replaced by a Changeling loyal to Breland months ago, and the changeling had been dropping hints to the City Guard while investigating how deep the Cell went on her own. She had effectively been wanting “Muscle”, which the city guard provided by way of adventurers.