The good NPC
Turn of a Friendly Die is running a writing exercise on NPCs. Thought I’d get my two cents in.
(For you non-gamers, “NPC” stands for “non-player-character” and generally means anyone who turns up in the game who is roleplayed by the gamemaster rather than one of the players. Sometimes, however, a player may have secondary characters generally treated as NPCs.)
The best NPCs I’ve run into were those who clearly had their own agendas, orthogonal to the PCs’. Helpful reminder to players that the world doesn’t revolve around their characters. Such NPCs are far more likely to inject something new into a game, give the PCs something to chew on, something to react to, something to learn from.
No arch-villains, huh? Well, that lets out one NPC I was going to mention, but oh, well.
Rahim al-Husaini is a beggar-brat NPC in the Al-Qadim campaign my husband and I indulge in when he’s not swamped with work. (This week the movie people started kicking up their heels again—calling him after hours and generally being a nuisance.) Rahim is mouthy, bitter, and stubborn, with a naive but not entirely unconvincing sense of class warfare.
My characters found him snooping around their rented house in Muluk and nabbed him (injuring him in the process, neither intentionally nor seriously). We impressed him into the party rather than let him go, as we were figuring prominently on city wanted posters at the time and could not afford to have our departure gossiped about. (Long story. We had not in fact done anything particularly wrong.) It wasn’t until considerably later that Rahim revealed he had been sent by one of our friends. It was very like Rahim to hold such cards close to his chest; it often fed his sense of personal injustice.
Juskinah alternately pitied him, got annoyed with him, or ignored him. Shams did her level best to teach him language and deportment, with rather mixed success. He lives in Muluk now, and (we believe) is employed as a spy by the current sultana of that city.
NPCs who betray the PCs tend to be memorable. Handsome, green-eyed Fadiyah was no exception. She and her nonentity brother Omar guided our little group someplace we could find no other way to reach, with the aim of opening talks with a group of bandit-assassins. Juskinah did not listen as carefully as she should have to Fadiyah’s history and reasons for accepting the post as guide. On the way, Fadiyah became rather smitten with Juskinah (how honestly so Juskinah has never been sure), managed to seduce her—and then betrayed the group for reasons of her own, attacking the assassins’ leader. The betrayal was not successful; Fadiyah was captured and executed by the bandits.
Juskinah has only once commented on the episode since… but that was a private conversation which I have no intention of sharing with you. The betrayal certainly left its mark.
And then there is Sid, the benevolent, studious nobleman in Rat’s campaign. Who turned out to be a silver dragon. Talk about memorable. Rat won’t go anywhere near him these days unless forced to, though he had been kind to her before she joined the party. Rat has strong opinions on the continuity of identity, shall we say, and Sid rather transgressed against them.
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