Alright, so we’ve sketched out a framework and we’ve mapped a bunch of relationships, so at this point we have a mess of nodes and nexuses, but we only have the shadows cast by NPCs, not the actual NPCs themselves. We need to realize them at the table, and prepping some of that before hand is helpful. That means stats and details. Who are these NPCs? Why do the players care about them?
How Much Detail?
So the core thing I have advocated across this entire series is that you need to tame your complexity. The question will arise: how much detail should I give these NPCs? The answer to that question is: as little as you can possibly get away with! If you’ve done everything I’ve said, you’ve already put in days of work, maybe even weeks. Do you want to spend months fully statting out each character? No. Even if you did that, do you think you could remember it, or look up each NPC whenever they come up? No.
We need to focus with laserlike precision on what really matters. We can always scale up and down as much as necessary.
Wither the Spotlight?
One thing to realize is that not every NPC needs the same level of detail. Some characters matter a lot. Some characters barely matter at all. You should scale your level of detail with how much that character matters.
How do you know a character matters? Well, there are three criteria. First, how useful is that character to your story? Second, how much does the character matter to you. Finally, how much do you think the character matters to the players?
We’ve been talking about the Cute Gun-Runner Girl this entire series, so how much does she matter? Well, per the first criteria, not much. She’s someone who sells the PCs guns. She’s a bit of background color. The players probably don’t need to know that much about her. By contrast, that Mob Boss is probably very important, as he’s likely to impact everything that happens around the players. He certainly deserves a lot more attention than the Cute Gun-Runner Girl.
However, by the second criteria, she may matter a lot. Every GM has their strokes of inspiration and they may or may not be that directly useful to the plot, but they’re often useful as “seed crystals” for the full realization of your idea. Cute Gun-Runner Girl might not matter that much, but from her conception a lot of the rest of the NPCs have naturally sprang up. We may want to give her lots of detail to reflect that, or that we just naturally know a lot about her anyway, so we might as well note that stuff down.
Finally, if a player needs a particular character, such as an Ally or Enemy, that trumps a lot of other concerns. Consider the case of the Estranged Son: he’s not especially central to the life of Cute Gun-Runner Girl, nor is he especially important to the Mob Boss; he’s sort of an easter egg character whose existence says something interesting about the game, but certainly doesn’t need a full character sheet to reflect that role. But what if a PC takes the Estranged Son as an Ally? That completely changes the dynamic, brings the estranged son to the for and demands that he get a full sheet.
In short, carefully consider the role of the character in your game and how much detail you need to fulfill that role. It’s fine to go overboard if your own passion dictates, or the players have a special need. But don’t go overboard on characters that aren’t especially relevant yet. Remember! You can always come back latter and flesh them out further.
Given that, let’s talk about a scaling level of detail.
Name and Concept
This is the minimum. Every character needs to have this. We need to know at least something about the character. In the case of Cute Gun-Runner Girl, she’s… a Cute Gun-Runner Girl. That already tells us a lot. She’s at least modestly attractive, she’s female, and she’s a gun merchant, probably a smuggler. That, paired with all the other little facets we’ve determined about her from her relationships and the framework already tell us a great deal. We can fake the rest later, if necessary.
Names are less strictly important. However, I would reserve namelessness to highlight a character who really doesn’t matter. If some patron comes into Cute Gun-Runner Girl’s store, and he buys a gun, and he has no name, then obviously, he’s a nameless, faceless NPC and isn’t part of the NPC map. If Rhett Rapture, Soldier of Fortune, buys a blaster from Cute Gun-Runner Girl, then the fact that he has a name clues us into the fact that he might matter more a lot.
It’s really hard to come up with a name, but it’s a good habit. Once you have a name for a character, that can act as a mental handle that makes it much easier to think about the character, not to mention discussing her. Ergo, let’s give our cute gun-runner girl a name: how about Megara Chesterfeld, or just Red Meg for short.
A Signature
A well-designed comic book or cartoon character can be identified by their silhouette alone. It’s a sort of visual signature that makes the character stand out from the chaos of the other imagery in their medium, but also from the hosts of other characters competing for a little bit of mental real estate in the minds of the audience.
Have you noticed that sometimes people won’t remember your NPCs? They’ll either refer to them as “that girl who runs the gun store” or they won’t even think of them at all (“Where can we get guns? Do we know anyone?”). That might be because they lack a signature, some handle that makes them easier to remember.
RPG aren’t an especially visual medium; they’re more of a verbal or literary medium. So while a picture doesn’t hurt, I prefer to get GMs to think of descriptive phrases or descriptive signatures that they can use again and again to remind the players of who the NPC is. For example, we might choose “freckles” for Meg. If we want to expand it out to a few phrases, we might note that her “freckled nose wrinkles when she smiles” or that she has an especially rich laugh, or that she smells of blaster oil and often has smudges of grease on her clothes or cheek. Ideally these should be relatively unique. If there are two freckled girls with guns, the players will start to confuse them.
A mechanical signature also helps. This is some sort of abbreviated game effect that’s unique to the character, something that will make them stand out in an encounter, something you can use that the players will remember. This might be a unique perk, or some sort of conceptual power theme, like “She’s the one with fire powers.” For Meg, we might go with Walking Armory. Cute anime girls pulling giant weapons out of nowhere is a common comedic trope that might fit her character, and she’s a gun-runner, so it would make sense she’d be able to hide guns under her coat. Plus we might expect her to have a really broad mastery of guns, so the idea that “she’s the one with all the guns” is an easy way to make her memorable.
If you keep touching on these two things, players will start to remember her more easily: “Which one is Meg?” “The freckled girl with the guns” “Oh right, ALL the guns.” “Right.”
A Picture
I said RPGs aren’t an especially visual medium and that’s true. RPGs are often run as nothing but a story told around a table, or even an email exchange between a set of players. It’s a written or spoken medium. But with the rise of VTTs and online gaming, the opportunity to offer a picture of a character has rapidly risen, so it can be useful to augment your descriptive signature with a picture. I usually use VTT tokens, rather than full portraits, for this purpose. Having that visual handle even in your notes can help you remember the character at a glance.
Here’s a picture we could use for Meg.
Roleplaying Notes
A few basic personality traits, a sort of RP signature on how the character behaves is also quite valuable. We can infer a lot of this from their relationships and where they are on our framework, but I also like to add some additional trait that highlights how they would play.
Some systems come built in with these. Old World of Darkness had Nature and Demeanor, so we’d just pick one of those. GURPS has piles and piles of Quirks and disadvantages, and we can just grab a few of those to get a quick shorthand of how we play.
I want to note that we don’t actually have to follow our particular system. If you want to use Nature and Demeanor to define how a GURPS NPC behaves, that’s fine. The point is at a glance you know how the character will interact and react to things. Anything that helps you do that, such as Myer Briggs or zodiac signs or even just a little phrase, is useful here.
Hillfolk uses an interesting system called Dramatic Poles. These represent the two sides of the character that are in conflict with one another, such as the vice-prone but justice-loving cop, or the mystical-but-cynical wizard, etc. Hillfolk demands that character choose which side of their personality that they manifest the most in a particular scene. It can be a nice way of thinking of an NPC.
Meg is probably Nostalgic and prone to lovingly repairing and restoring old blasters (might explain why she doesn’t want to leave the station). Her relationship with the bar owner suggests she might be a Party Animal and I like the idea of making her Impatient. She wavers between the quiet, thoughtful girl who knows everything about gun and can get you whatever you need, or fix even the most ruined gun as good as new, to the loud, boisterous party girl who gets smashed at bars. We have a sense, then, of how she behaves.
Abbreviated Stats
If we need more stats, we might be able to infer them from some brief notes.
Some systems have a general gauge of power level. Pathfinder uses level, while in World of Darkness, you can just note the various dice pools of physical, social or mental. GURPS Action has a convenient BAD rating. This might allow us to have a sense of roughly how powerful a character is.
If a game has Templates or Classes, we can just borrow from there. If we note that a character is an Action Assassin or a level 4 Wizard, we don’t know the specifics, but we have a general sense of what the character is capable of, especially with our mechanical signature above. If at some point, we need more detail, we have merely to expand the character’s template or class to fully flesh them out.
Some RPGs explicitly have rules for abbreviated NPC design. These can be very handy for rapidly putting a character together in the simplest way possible. In GURPS, for example, we can treat our NPCs as Contacts, which gives them a rough area of expertise, their general skill level (which, incidentally, neatly ties into BAD), and a general level of reliability.
If we need even more than that, we could define a few of their stats. This works best in games like GURPS or WoD which are point-buy or don’t tightly integrate their stats into a cohesive, holistic system the way many d20 games do, though even those will let you cheat a bit. So we might note what someone’s Broadsword skill is, or what their Will is (or general resistance to psionic or magical effects might be).
If we tracked any particular stat in our framework, we might note it down here too.
When we’re done, we should have a quick, rough sketch of what the character is like without needing to write up a full treatment of the character. Ideally, this sort of thing should be accomplished quite quickly. If you have to look up a bunch of stuff in books or do any math, you’re probably putting down too much detail.
If we statted Meg up in Psi-Wars, I’d give her the Criminal sidekick lens and peg her at 125-150 points. If we’re concerned with appearance, status, wealth and psionic resistance, I’d give her an appearance of Attractive, a status of 0, a wealth of Average (though I think it varies a lot: she’ll go through periods of extreme success and wealth, and then shocking periods of debt and poverty, depending on how her deals go). She’s smart and stubborn, so she might have a Will of 12.
If we treated her as a Contact, she’s be a Criminal/Street contact and I’ve give her Gun-Running at skill 15 (she’s pretty good at her job) and make her Somewhat Reliable (she’s not devotedly loyal or assiduously perfect, but she’s probably more reliable than many other street contacts). If we wanted to break “Gun-Running” out into a little more detail than GURPS normally approves of, I’d call it some combination of Armoury (Small Arms), Connoisseur (Blaster), Smuggling and Streetwise.
Detailed Roleplaying Notes
What makes the character actually tick? What are fine details of how they look, how they play, and what makes them distinct? At this stage, we take our signature, our rough character roleplay notes and our relationships and do a deep treatise on her. This isn’t a full mechanical write-up, but a more detailed discussion of the NPC as a character. This is the sort of thing you might do if writing a book.
We might discuss precisely how Meg looks (how tall is she? How much does she weigh? What sort of fashion does she prefer? What color are her eyes?). We might pick out a unique voice, mannerisms and accent to make her feel different when we play her. We might look into her backstory and her relationships. Why doesn’t she want to leave with her dad? What does she think of her “new mom?” Why does she keep picking fights with her bar friend, and why do they stay friends if they keep arguing? What’s her favorite gun? What’s her fondest memory? What is she most afraid of?
We might expand this in particular directions based on her expected role in the game. Is she a love interest? Then what sort of past romances did she have? What makes her difficult to romance now? What sort of gifts will melt her heart (hint: it’s a gun). What is she like when she falls in love? What’s a deal breaker, or something that will make her fight with a love interest.
Is she a combat rival? What’s makes her a unique combatant? What sort of weapons does she favor? What social or physical vulnerabilities does she have that a PC could exploit?
Is she part of a criminal conspiracy game? Then what crimes did she commit in the past? What secrets is she trying to hide? What are her psychological weakpoints that a manipulator could use to break down her defenses? If an NPC is going to play a major role in a game, we might expand in details on that major role.
As noted before, these are all sliding scales of detail, but this one more than most. You can touch on some of these rather than touching on all of them. Perhaps you’ll want all your characters to have interesting and distinct mannerisms (I personally find that exhausting, but some GMs are naturals at it). Perhaps you can’t help but think of details of her relationships as you’re writing them up. That’s fine, that doesn’t mean you need to do the whole thing!
This is also something you can return to later. If a player character starts to flirt with her or express interest in her, we can pivot to her as a love interest, and we can tailor some of the character better towards how that player plays; are they romantically aggressive? Then she might be uncertain and we lead on her love of stability and nostalgia. Are they shy? We might lean into her party animal nature to pull them out of their shell. Or perhaps nobody is interested in her romantically, but the game is rapidly turning into a conspiratorial power struggle and she’s a piece on the board, in which case we might want to explore her relationships, her financial assets and her psychological vulnerabilities (and secrets from the past) in greater detail.
Realize that your prep builds on your prep. Because you have the framework, the relationships and some light sketches of what a character is like, it’s pretty easy to come up with the rest on the fly. And you’ll improvise. The mood you’re in, the random choices you make when you first introduce her (is she working on a gun? Is she at a club partying? Is she yelling at her dad? Is she helping a customer? Is she in trouble with the law? What accent did you pick?) will shape your players’ impression of her, and that will shape future characterizations. So you don’t need to define everything. Do so as it becomes necessary or as it becomes obvious.
You should even feel free to retcon things if necessary. Yes yes, I know, the mark of a great GM is that they had everything worked out in advance and their game magically fit the players on the first try, but the mark of a good GM is the willingness to fix a mistake or adjust to their players needs. So if you want to adjust or change things on the fly, it’s fine, especially if setting aside this extra prep means your character is done sooner than later and your campaign happens sooner. A half-assed NPC that the players actually interact with is better than a meticulously detailed NPC that the players never actually see because all that meticulous detail burned you out. You’ve got 99 more characters! Take a break!
Fully Statted NPCs
You could completely write up an NPC like they were a PC, complete with stats, point totals, backstories, etc.
I very rarely do this, and I almost never do it before the campaign begins unless I plan on introducing the character in the first couple of sessions. I usually reserve this for explicit allies or “big bad” villains, and even then, “faking it” can get you a very long way.
This is not just laziness. A lot of the work you’re going to do is going to crash and burn once you and your players start to interact with it. Characters, including NPCs, always change as you get to know them and their context in the world. For example, right now, discussing Meg, I see her a boisterous and vivacious. If I wrote her up completely, I would lean into Compulsive Carousing, Impulsive and maybe even give her Flirtatious. She might have a low level of Sex Appeal, and certainly has some Carousing. But maybe as I actually play her, her serious side, her precision with cleaning and repair, her understanding of guns, her philosophies and her tragedies all come to the fore, and these become the elements we want to focus on instead, and her partying becomes more of an outlet for sadness than an exemplification of her boisterousness. Such a character might be statted completely differently!
My point is I won’t really know her until I run the game and get a feel for her, and this is true of most NPCs. So once you spend two days meticulously writing up all of your character’s stats, you may find you have to throw it out and start all over again after you get a better feel for your character, or you may waste it entirely if the players never buy a gun, or never meaningfully interact with Meg. So I say wait to write up the full stats until you’re sure you need it. If you do the stuff above, you can probably fake it pretty well, right?
Where to Find Detail
Alright, so we’re going to write up the details on these NPCs. All… uh… 100. How hard can it be?
So, what, we just sit down and start writing? Sure, if you like. I personally can get quite far doing that, and chances are, so can you, especially if you have a lot of practice writing NPCs, but you’ll run out of steam eventually. So where do we go when we’re out of inspiration? Or, you know what? Where do we start, because nothing says we have to muscle through the process until we’re exhausted. We can start by using some creative aids!
Kidnap that Character!
You’ve already written characters up before, haven’t you? You probably have a stable of characters you often go to. Nothing stops you from just using them again, unless your players might make fun of you for yet another amazonian blond tsundere, but generally, I find most players like interacting with familiar expies.
But you also consume media, right? So take notes! A character’s design, or their personality, or a unique take on a particular trope. Borrow from those ideas and integrate them into your campaign. Will players notice that a particular character strongly resembles Yor Forger or Barney Stinson? Maybe, but the context will be sufficiently different, and you can often add other elements, and frankly, many players don’t mind at all. I know quite a few GMs who will use pictures of actors or actresses as the portraits of their characters, and the NPCs themselves resemble characters played by those actors and actresses, and it makes it easier to remember it (“Oh right, she was the angry Gal Gadot”).
Note that some RPGs even include sample NPCs. There’s nothing wrong with grabbing them and plugging them into your game. That is, after all, why the RPG created them in the first place!
Remember, you don’t get bonus points for originality!
Remember your Notes
All of your previous work on frameworks and relationships? We did a lot of that to help inform your work. You should be able to extrapolate a great deal from those notes.
Let’s imagine we need details on our Estranged Son; the whole Chesterfeld family tends to be good looking, so perhaps he’s attractive; perhaps they’re all afflicted with a wanderlust (that only Meg actively resists), and we know he works with a criminal gang, and maybe we find we’re coming up short on villains. There’s also something about him that keeps him from being easily uncovered as Belter Dad’s estranged son, right? Once we see all of that, it’s pretty easy to fill in the blanks.
The Players
Your NPCs should be written with an eye towards your players. This works best if you already know who your players are. You can take their predilections and preferences and integrate them into the game. The sort of love interests you design for a group of mostly male players might be different for a more mixed group, or a mostly female group. If you know a particular player really likes a particular sort of character, or a particular sort of story (perhaps they love stories of martial arts rivalry, or military camaraderie) then include such a character in your game.
If players express interest in Allies, Enemies, Patrons, Contacts or Dependents, you can just integrate those into your map too, though you may want to advance notice on those.
You can also talk to your players, see what they come up with, and integrate them into your design. I wouldn’t do this too much: players like to be surprised. But some GMs get it in their head that everything has to be a surprise. Players are often more interested in cooperative world-building than you might think. The point of this design is to play with emergence as a property, so not even you’ll be able to predict what will happen. Your players will certainly be surprised, even if they get an early peek behind the curtain.
Itemized Lists
You need names? You need personality quirks? You need cool powers? You need neat visual signatures? There’s an entire genre of RPG supplement designed precisely for your needs. Drive-thru RPG has a specific search option for them, but the genre can be found on other sites, such as Warehouse 23, you just have to look harder.
Your RPGs probably have lists of these anyway. Most RPGs I know now include some suggested names for a particular ethnicity or a detailed list of personality traits (the previously mentioned World of Darkness’s Nature and Demeanor list or GURPS Powers Ups 6: Quirks). A lot of RPGs I’ve seen include these as inspiration for players, but nothing stops you from borrowing from them.
While the internet doesn’t intentionally create such itemized lists, you can usually search for particular real world elements that you can borrow from. Behindthename.com is a great source for names. You can find detailed descriptions of personality traits on various astrology sites or psychological profiles (like Meyer-Briggs). I’m not advocating these as real things, just as sources of inspiration!
Randomizers
Itemized lists often double as random tables, but the internet has a variety of random generators that might be useful for your NPC creation purposes. I often use Fantasy Name Generator.
Chat GPT and other AI Tools
Okay, I know AI is a touchy topic right now, but a friend of mine clued me in on the value of chat GPT to a GM. You can just ask it for NPCs, and it’ll give you surprisingly detailed responses.
Name: Captain Nova
Appearance: Captain Nova is a tall, athletic-looking human with short black hair and piercing green eyes. He wears a sleek, black space suit with red trim and a matching helmet. He always carries a blaster pistol on his hip and a laser sword on his back.
Personality: Captain Nova is a natural leader and a skilled pilot. He is brave, confident, and always ready for action. He is also fiercely loyal to his crew and will do whatever it takes to protect them. He is also a bit of a rogue, and doesn’t always follow the rules if it means getting the job done.
Backstory: Captain Nova was born and raised on a space station orbiting a distant planet. He grew up idolizing the pilots and space travelers who passed through the station, and he knew from a young age that he wanted to be a space explorer. He trained as a pilot and eventually joined the crew of a cargo ship, where he quickly worked his way up the ranks to become the captain. He eventually got his own spaceship, and he and his crew now travel the galaxy, taking on dangerous missions and fighting against evil forces.
Living on space station: Captain Nova’s home is a space station that orbits a remote planet. The station is a hub of activity, with ships coming and going, cargo being loaded and unloaded, and people from all over the galaxy passing through. Captain Nova’s quarters are located in the command center of the station, where he can keep an eye on all of the activity and respond to any emergencies. He has a small team of crew members that help him run the station, and he is always on call to take off for a mission.
Is that painfully generic? It sure is. And we can certainly do better. I wouldn’t necessarily shove Captain Nova straight into an NPC list (though it wouldn’t hurt). The point here isn’t that it’ll replace your prep, because, I mean, look at it. But as a language model, it tends to aggregate all the “obvious” ideas, and so it sort of serves as a master randomizer that has all the tropes, so noodling around on it for awhile might remind you of some ideas you had forgotten about.
Pinterest, Image Boards and Image Search
Finally, if we’re looking for pictures, or even just interesting descriptions, an image search certainly doesn’t hurt. I’ve been making a lot of small, cheap commissions for Psi-Wars NPCs, and it’s forced me to really think about what a character looks like in great detail, and I often search for references or build little collections of images about how they look. The result is that I have a much more cohesive idea of how they look. Of course, this sort of thinking applies best to major NPCs rather than minor NPCs
But if you have a gather a large art collection or a pinterest board for NPC portraits, it’s pretty easy to glance through it to get a sense of what an NPC might look like and pick onne out as your main character.
Putting It All Together
Some final notes before we put this post to bed.
First, don’t over do it. I’ve offered a ton of resources and scaling depth of detail, but that scaling depth isn’t a checklist. It’s meant to focus you on the fact that you don’t need everything. Remember, and I know I’m repeating myself but sometimes you need to, that you can always go back and add more detail later.
Don’t be a hero. You can absolutely use the tools at your disposal to rapidly prototype these characters later. Nobody will (or should, at least) judge your for it.
Finally, and this is important: it’s not important that your NPCs be terribly unique. You can have a unique and interesting NPC or two, and that’s great, and you want the NPCs to feel distinct from one another, but there are no prizes for the most wild NPC concept. The point of the 100 NPC challenge is to create a large and interesting social space. If you use familiar, stock characters to do it, your players will probably still enjoy it. The 100 NPC challenge involves having a huge mental load in trying to track 100 NPCs and their relationships and that’s difficult enough without also having an enormous amount of detail on each one, and each one being crazy hard for you to run. By using some familiar, stock NPCs, you’ll find it much easier to track what’s actually going on.
Mailanka's Musing 