In the first part we went over some information about setting up your first homebrew campaign. We talked a little about building the town that the characters would interact with and the surrounding areas.
Now lets talk a little about the people they can interact with. Without NPC’s
in the town there’s not much for the characters to do. I’ve included an example of a NPC screen from Lore20 so you get an idea of what you can do with a character. I generally put everything in the details section, but you can see there’s room for other information if you’d like to use it.
I don’t try to make all my characters at once. You never know if you’re going to use someone or if there needs to be a new someone during the adventure. For example, in the adventure I’m running the good guys ran into a group of wolves. They were winning pretty handily. I needed to throw something a little extra into it so it wouldn’t be an easy fight. So I had an alpha wolf appear, who was actually a werewolf. He joined in the fight but only to help the wolves disengage and run away. He didn’t want to see all the wolves die. So he isn’t truly a bad guy, he’s more interested in mother nature though.
That werewolf that I created above has appeared in a few other adventures with the players, but not in wolf form! They don’t know who they are speaking with, they think he’s just another NPC that has befriended them. In reality he’s keeping an eye on them and making sure they don’t needlessly slaughter innocent animals.
Having said that though, I would make characters for each building that you expect the players to go to during their adventures. I created all the main characters before the players were even selected to play. I knew what was happening and what direction the game would lead before I ever had players lined up at the table. This gave me a slight advantage when I was working on things.
I hope these two articles gave you a little bit of background on how I do things. I always find it interesting making a new world for my players. I hope you do also.
About the Author – Common Definitions