Creating NPCs
Most of your NPCs will be mooks. They don’t need traits or attributes. You can name them on the fly and give them some characteristic features, but “Third Goblin on the left” and “Fred, the ruddy peasant with the limp” may not occupy more than a single challenge box for the players to overcome.
However, your Lieutenants and Boss NPCs should get some abilities. As GM, you don’t have to stick to the list of character traits. It’d be too time consuming to pour through the entire traits catalog for every NPC you want to build. Instead, you can quickly invent a few abilities as keywords to trigger your memory later. Let’s try an example.
For a combat challenge: the lich is “invulnerable to weapons”, “comes back 1 hour after death”, and “has a soul draining gaze.” Or just:
Lich: Invulnerable, Resurrects, Root+Drain
For an interaction challenge, perhaps: the high priest is “fanatical”, “believes in miracles”, also “a self-doubting masochist.” Or just:
High Priest: delusional, zealot, guilty conscience
If you prefer, and you have the time, feel free to go through the catalog of traits and assign a few to your Boss NPCs. You might have to tweak the mechanics a bit because NPCs never roll dice, but at least they’ll give you some inspiration.
Lieutenants should be worth at least 3 challenge boxes. Bosses could be anywhere from 5 to 20 challenge boxes.
A few of your NPCs will become Iconic. These are recurring characters, typically very powerful and in charge of some faction, with the ability to alter the geopolitical landscape.
Creating Factions
During your Session 0 Worldbuilding session, identify a few clashing states, guilds, associations, or groups. Those will be your factions. Who holds influence in those factions? What are their ambitions? If the PCs did nothing, what would happen. Give your Factions some projects.
NPC Factions and Projects
You want your world to seem alive. Changes can happen, as a result of, or in-spite of, actions taken by the Player Characters. To facilitate this, set up a few Challenges for your iconic NPCs and Factions. We’ll call these “NPC Projects”.
Each project will represent an important project the NPC is working towards. The length of the challenge is related to the perceived difficulty of the task.
NPC Project Examples
- Demon King: Build a bridge made entirely of skeletons
- □□□□□|□□□□□|□□□□□
- Armadillo Tribe: Divert the great river and drain the swamp
- □□□□□|□□□□□|□□□□□
- Guard Captain: Build a massive siege engine
- □□□□□|□□□□□
- Shadowy Figure: Kidnap the Emperor
- □□□□□
In the examples above, “Kidnap the Emperor” was a very easy project. That could indicate that the emperor was very poorly guarded, or that the antagonist, “Shadowy Figure” was already working on the inside.
NPC Project Difficulty
GMs will have to use their best judgement to figure out how long an NPC project ought to be. Try starting with “long-term NPC projects of average difficulty” with 15 boxes. Adjust easy and difficult challenges from there.
NPC Project Progress
If the characters are struggling, distracted, or unconcerned, it gives the NPC opportunities to progress their agenda. When a player gets a bad tale, they can choose to give you a good tale to mark a tick on one of your NPC’s challenge tracks. This is particularly relevant if the PCs are not under any time-pressure or facing any direct opposition, such as while they’re attempting to recover resources during “downtime”.
Whenever an NPC project passes a milestone, 50%, 75%, 90%, 99%, make sure there’s some sort of very obvious foreshadowing so the players will become aware of the project and the dire consequences if it goes unchecked.
Players’ impact on NPC Projects
Sometimes players will interfere with NPC projects. Give the players challenges which let them knock back the plans of the NPC.
Occasionally, players will elect to allow, enable, or facilitate some NPC projects. That’s good. It gives you a story hook.
Smooth RPG 