NPC Lists

I have run a few campaigns that have gone on for years, and I return to them time and again, because I have a lot of data on NPCs, that just 'makes' the game more alive.. Players always comment when they find out, and I thought maybe I should share.

NPC LISTS.. 

A simple 'how to take your game up a notch'.

When we start Gamesmastering, we often have simple notes, names of towns on a map, dungeon locations, maps of the dungeon, but often when players arrive in a town, we have to quickly invent names of Taverns and N.P.C.s. Its so common, many game systems even have charts to help the GM come up with these, in the rules. Usually the Casual GM with a fly by night campaign, will end there.

But what about the consummate professional?

Fable II NPCs.

When players are arriving back in your city or town, weeks or months later, will they ever see your NPCs again? or worse, will they only ever see your NPCS?

If they frequent the same bars, sure, the bartender will likely still be there, but what of the staff? the patrons who frequent the place, might on certain nights of the week, but every single day?

Taverns

A simple approach is to have a page from a calendar, rip one out of an old calendar, re-write over the month with the name of the tavern, jot down the name of the bartender, and depending on your size, 2-3 bar wenches. 

Now, on the first row assign the bar wenches to days of the week, busy nights, get all 3, average get 2 and empty, one or maybe just the bartender. 

On the rows below.. roll on your favourite NPC generator and jot in regulars, each 'day' could cope with 3-6 names, in a social 'group' and on the very last row, non regular visitors.

Busy nights, should have 3-6 regulars per bar wench, so make sure you've got a bunch of names in those columns.. They aren't all going to be brawling 2nd-3rd ranked fighters, there should be some kind of hierarchy, choose 1 per 'group' as a leader, mark him as such. F2 or something. add some key 'visual' feature "broken tooth" or something..

Thomas Schmall: The Inn Keeper : oxpal.com

Viola, Your players arrive in town, you pull out 2-3 'calendar' taverns and ask which one they want to visit, remind them of the day of the week (they should be able to tell based on market activity). Once they choose, glance at your days of the week to determine how busy or empty your tavern is, roll d6 more irregulars, space them out on separate tables.. based on the weather.. cold: put em all closer to the fire, warm? the windows.

If your players engage in conversation, it'd be likely the leader who'd address them, point out your visual feature.. because weeks later when they return to this tavern, they'll remember 'broken tooth' better than they'll remember "Bob Farnsworth"

Now.. heres the fun part..

If your players are using this town as a base of operations.. have your irregulars turn up in different taverns, maybe broken tooth might be brokering a deal in a different place when the players turn up. Players aren't playing this game 24/7 so they'll forget and blunder over to talk to him, remind them.. "You see the broken toothed man from the Boars head, but he's engaged in a private conversation, seems like a bad idea to draw any attention to yourselves", If they now decide to go talk to broken tooth, its their own fault that they've angered him and he's now against the players.. add a -1 friendly to his name.

Over time, you'll add notes to N.P.C.s that players engage with, events that may (or may not) be relevant to the game.. maybe they sold a magic dagger to Klint Korgush, so next time there was a brawl in the Boars head, he accidentally killed a guy, and he sits in jail, blaming the players, his friends in the tavern don't look kindly on the PCs from now on.. 

But how will you know this?

Each session your players are going through adventures.. at the end of the session, roll some dice, consult some charts, and modify some N.P.C.s. Maybe Two NPCS have fallen in love with each other, a regular and a bar wench, or some guy fell off a ladder at work, and has a broken foot..

Make up a chart of things that might happen, roll once per tavern, 3d10 to find which 'day' of the month it happens to, d4 or d6 for which one in your list. it takes all over 5 minutes, 

But when your players come back after a quest, and spy Lillian the bar wench being overtly friendly to Bob.. then after the next quest, Bob has a black eye and Lillian is with Steve, then next time, Lillian has stopped working at the tavern they might inquire and find that she's married Steve now..

Years later, the characters have traveled the world, and return to grab some stash.. and you've been making the rolls all this time, and they walk into the Boars head, and find that Steve is no longer around, Bob is, and he's talking to a 16yr old kid that looks a little like Lillian and Bob, and he's interested in being the players sidekick, learning the ropes to be an adventurer, because Steve used to tell the stores of the adventurers often, before he died defending the town against goblins, and Bob took over as dad, but turns out all along that its Bobs kid..

20 rolls on the chart got me that.. 20 adventures, taking between 3 months and 2 years to perform, 17 years of adventuring, in real life, maybe 2 years, and the players return and the look on their faces when they see Bob in the Tavern, with a kid that looks like Bob, That's the moment, as a Gamesmaster, that my players understand the level of depth my world 'potentially' has.

Not just taverns, but town halls, guilds, and market squares all have the same or similar regulars, and goings on..  Noble families, administrations, governments too.. just a few more rolls.. and now you have a whole continent of NPCs for players to interact with.

The Gorgon: DD12 Cataclysm & Beyond

Backstory: DD12:Cataclyzm is the survival horror scenario for Dungeon Delvers Twelve world/system. Your group has 'arrived' on this world, and before they have time to even think, something in the shadows and darkness has decided that you are its next meal.

The Male Gorgon.. minus snake hair...

The Gorgon:

So what is a Gorgon?

According to several mythological stories, the gorgon gets a wide variety of descriptions, from snakes, snake haired, bulls with volcanic or metallic flesh, other things with scales, wings, claws, tusks, mixtures of all the above, even the sphinx, satyr, hippocampus and mermaid are considered a gorgon.

All of the above.. maybe

So likely gorgon means demon, more than specifically Medusa and her sisters, of which they are likely demons.

So what is a demon? well, for a medieval peasant, anything that's scary enough to have come up from the depths of hell (if that's their local religion).

So Gorgons are just labels for demons.. but more commonly, demons that are mashed together bits of other animals. So, a hybrid right?

More like the Colchis Bull or the D&D gorgon here

Except, not theriocephalic, because that's just head of an animal, body of a human. and we're not talking humanoid, because that's a whole nother set of monsters.

So Gorgons, are hybrids, Heads like humans, or at least faces like humans, and then a whole mixed bag of what the rest of it is..

Except also, that any of those body parts, could be parts of humanoids, or theriocephaloids?

Whoa, where is this going?

So In Cataclyzm, the idea is that anything could come from anywhere, and as such, alot of it, might not so do well on a world with gravity, or air, or sunlight or a lack of sunlight (like nighttime) and so, a Gorgon, in this context, is any creature of anything that the GM comes up with, a mishmash of bits and peices, resulting in something the players might run away from, get eaten by or manage to hack apart and use.

Cataclysm was about lack of resources, cave-people of the Coyn World, you start with nothing and you build something, on a wider scale than a standard RPG where you start in an existing culture, and rise a little bit in comparison to all that is around you, to a well known hero.

Catacylsm won't have grand overarching bag guy plots, or heroic status when visiting nearby towns, not instead people will probably just have a general Awe and Fear for someone who managed to travel from one location to the next, and not get eaten.

Googling Gorgon can produce many varied results

So, The Gorgon is a multi-roll (or choice) on a chart that gives the GM a thing that he can describe, maybe its a bull body, a fish tail, arms of a rhino and the face of a chicken, it breathes air, but lives in a 0.5x gravity. As a result the GM can double the creatures Initiative costs, making it slow, it has a peck attack, and horns, it stomp around on two legs and maybe has a slap attack with its tailfin.

More interestingly, when you defeat it (if you do) you've gained access to cow leather, fish scales, large fore-arm bones, horns and probably a strange beefy-fish meat, with intestines, organs and the like.

Surprisingly, no Heart as Meat Potion images exist in google

While Early DD12 Cataclyzm notes had leather, horns and bones, more recently I've added in the organs, intestines and such so you can play as a shaman who gathers strange exotic liquids and meat sacks to attempt to brew up some very weird things indeed.

The Gorgon, gives us the ability to create some truely weird things, without the need for the exotic locations and the plot on how your group got you there.

Cataclyzm works well as a "westmarches" style game, each week you can have a whole new set of players, make up characters based on the villagers that still exist. They go out into the wilds to discover whats around, maybe they survive, maybe they don't, they bring back information, resources and new skills, so that hopefully, an established location can be added to the historical maps.

Gorgons should be used somewhat sparingly, once a month if you're playing weekly, its a freak of ... well not of nature.. it might be defeatable, it might be able to live in the world and become a re-occuring nightmare.

While the name Gorgon, brings up images of snake headed women, or metallic bulls for some, I do wonder if the controversy of keeping the generic "abomination" called a Gorgon would be a good idea or maybe the old adage, "All publicity is good publicity", if they're talking about my game, who cares if its trash talk?

My Thoughts on Pay-to-Play in roleplay, As a Full-time Paid GM.

At the height of my career, I was taking home almost 6 figures as a paid Gamesmaster. This is my story.

Pay to Play? Gotta be worth it

From 2003 to 2013, I was a travelling English Teacher, I started raw, I didn't know what I was doing, and frankly, it surprises me still that I managed to pull it off. The number 1. thing I did was to learn how to do what I was supposed to be doing every night, until I was as good as I said I was in the interview, it took 3 years.

In 2003, I left Australia to travel the world, and promptly ran out of money. So I needed money. I took on a bar-tending job in Shanghai during the evenings and started teaching English during the day.

I discovered after about 6 months, that I knew nothing of my own language, school had not trained me anything more than nouns, verbs and adjectives, and I still suffer to correctly Capitalise my words.. I capitalise when I emphasize, so if you want to read things in your head, like I say them, then raise your inner voice every-time you see a capital.

So I learned, I downloaded books on the subject of teaching, I studied English for myself and I got better at it.. and I discovered that there was a part of language teaching that I excelled at..

Roleplaying.

In Teaching, Roleplaying is a set of circumstance that puts the student into the 'role' of a person who needs to speak English, in order to get through the task. This might be getting through customs, or buying shoes in a shop, or business negotiations to strike a deal.

For a Gamesmaster, Roleplaying is of course So much More! These books on how to teach? were trying to tell me how to 'teach' with 'roleplaying' OMG I was laughing at it all..

So after getting my feet as a teacher, I started introducing the art of actual roleplaying to my students. I started with the TV series 'lost'. My students were to learn new words each week, so I would write up 20 new words that made sense to learn while being 'lost' on an island.. we put those words into sentences, played the scenario, the students would need to use the words, to survive.. plank of wood, hammer, nail, rope, rope bridge, chasm, I was feeding them clues on how to solve the puzzle, but since the words were not known to them, it was a puzzle unto itself.

the players... ahem,,.. students.. loved it, they came back for my, my classes got more interesting and the students grade went up.

The only problem was management.. when they saw we were playing games.. they thought it was a waste of money and dropped the courses.. until later, when I would provide them with statistical evidence that gaming lessons had a more than 30% improvement in language retention that all other lesson types.. I did this by running the same grammar lessons with one group and no roleplay, I had more than 50 groups, of around 4-6 students a group, at approx 2 years per student of learning, the lower end of the spectrum was 30% improvement, for students that were roleplaying..

That was when I went full time.

Now, jump back in time, remember how I used to run a games club for kids? That was Sunday afternoons, 5 hours, each kid paid $2 to come to the club each week, plus membership fees of around $10 a year, eventually we got up to 3 GMs and a profit of around $60 a week from sales of drinks, minis and entry fees, what I learnt from that was how to set up and run a game fast, how to keep the plot hooks going at the end of the session "Come back next week, same bat channel, same bat time" and how to keep the 'customers/players happy'

A few years later, Instead of catering to the Junior Roleplayers, I had a few phone calls to my club, asking if I could come out to their place and run a game. To begin with, It didn't quite feel right to ask for money, so I simply asked that they chipped in for the pizza and I'd supply the game, but after the first 2 sessions, I was losing cash on the deal as I had to transport myself across town, supply the dice, pencils and paper to the guys, charactersheets and such, so I asked them, would they be ok with chipping in for the costs, $20 a month would do it, else I couldn't afford to cross town for this group of strangers, they agreed and I got my next round of experience as a paid GM.

So, when I was showing my clients the difference between boring class results and roleplayed results, I had more than enough confidence to talk about how I'd been doing this years before and how easy it was to set up and run, I guess my sales pitch succeeded, because they agreed and I was roleplaying, primarily, for the bulk of my income from around 2009/2010.

I was, I consider myself, to be extremely lucky, to be in the right place, with the right experience, to be able to offer this unique service which had proven results, but I knew the laws of supply and demand, so I offered this service, but at a premium price. 2x 1.5 hour lessons, twice a week for $90 an hour, per 'group'. They accepted for those students who wished to participate. which was maybe 90%.

In such a closed environment, I was able to have groups run synchronously in the same world, meeting the same NPCs, either before or after previous groups, the logistics and economy of each group affecting any later groups, "Oh sorry sir, a group of adventurers just bought my finest sword just last week". I could even allow 1 of the groups to be the bad guys, having them just ahead of other groups, plotting evil, leaving traps and ambushes along the way, before they settled down in a well defended location, and only when a player from one group disguised his character as evil (and he asked the group if he could join, because he wanted to play an evil character too) could he then reveal himself at the last possible moment and foil their plans.

After watching this Legacy style play, I invited several other GMs I knew from other countries to participate. One from Estonia, one from latvia, Germany, England and the US, to have their 'groups' running in the same world, I sent maps of events via email to the GMs and their groups interacted, somewhat, with my groups.. I even got my old players from Australia to join in via skype for some epic moments.. it was amazing.

But real life, always seems to throw you a curve-ball.

My boss, who approved the games for the majority of my client base, and his boss who joined in once or twice, moved on, and the new guy was more hard-nosed to the idea of 'games as education', the country went into turmoil over govt restrictions, another of my clients warned me that things were going to get difficult in the next few years, so I left, returned to Australia and decided to knuckle down and get my degree, get my site up and running, and after raising some funds, publish my game.

I've run some Legacy style games since then, gotten my old Russian players and even the American players to join in, I think its the angle that sets my gaming apart from others, knowing that any NPC can often be a PC from another group, seems to wake players up just a tad more and take notice.

 So, my thoughts on Pay to Play

I've talked already in a previous post about how I think you need to bring more to the table than just 'run a game' to be a professional GM. To me, that's attention to detail in your world, your NPCs and being able to run your game without a rulebook. This usually means a working knowledge of Physics, Human communication, Psychology, Cultures other than your own, Sleeping outdoors, walking in caves, fighting in the rain, anything that gives you an edge from any other guy that just 'reads the rules and runs a module'.
When your paying to play a game, you're paying for the convenience of having a GM that is prepared and unable to flake and players of a like minded attitude of "I'm paying to be here, so I'm not going to mess around, or waste time with off topic chatter or argue about rules", Other players are there for the same reason you are, to have fun in the limited time you have, because you work hard, want to rest up, relax and play a game, and you only have 4 hours spare on a thursday night to do so. You could spend $30+ at any number of events IF you had the right friends and the timing was right for that particular time frame, so why not spend your $30 sitting down, relaxed at a table, with some like minded adventurers who wish to get their game on.

As a Paid GM, I love having players that are ready, attentive, pay attention to the details, play in character, don't cancel unless its actually important and bow out if its not the right group, the right setting or the right game, rather than stay 'because its your friends' and disrupt the game for everyone else.