Colin R. asks: “What tricks or devices do you have for generating memorable NPCs? Especially for creating them on the fly when players go in unexpected directions.”

This will not attempt to be an exhaustive discussion of how to create memorable characters. You could write whole books on the subject, and people have. But perhaps a grab bag of techniques I’ve found useful as a GM will prove useful to you, too.

1. Give them a distinct mannerism. I talk about this in the Universal NPC Roleplaying Template, which is itself a good, quick structure that you can pour characters into. A simple, physical action that you can perform at the table — crossing your arms and stroking your chin, scratching your knee, tapping the side of your nose, winking, speaking with a particular accent, scratching the top of your head, a notably colorful preference for a particular swear word — will make it much easier for you to slip into and out of a given character, and make that character more memorable and distinct for the players.

2. Give the NPC a strong agenda. Make them want something. Better yet? A pair of agendas. If they’re agendas that partly conflict with each other, even better.

It actually works best if this agenda is not aimed directly at the PCs. Something that simply overlaps the PCs’ areas of interest is usually more effective. If the PCs’ actions/knowledge/connections/whatever could help (or hinder) the NPC, I’ve found it’s often more effective for the NPC to discover that during their interaction with the PCs. (Or for the PCs to discover it and then decide what to do with that knowledge themselves.)

This is not a universal rule, obviously: There’s nothing wrong with a patron showing up and wanting the PCs to do something for them.

But the less the players think “X exists because the GM wants us to do Y,” the more they will think of X as an actual person.

3. Throw out lots and lots of NPCs and then pay attention to which ones “click” with the players. Focus on those and be OK with letting NPCs that aren’t clicking move on with their lives. I talk about this a bit in Party Planning.

4. Neel Krishnaswami’s Law of the Conservation of NPCs is also useful to remember here:

In our last Nine Worlds session, I introduced Perseus, a captain of the Lunar space fleet, who was married to Nick’s PC’s wife. In the session before that, the players had been boarded by a Lunar ship which had confiscated our engineer’s robot as technological contraband. That ship had a captain, who went unnamed. So when I first mentioned Perseus, the players’ first response was “Hey, is he the same guy?” and my answer was, “Of course — the law of conservation of NPCs demands it!” The players chuckled, and we went on playing.

The principle of conservation of NPCs actually is one of my GMing strategies. Whenever I introduce a new conflict into the game, I try to see if existing NPCs can be integrated into this role before I consider introducing a new NPC. I find two big benefits from doing this.

The first is simply that the size of the cast stays under control — I’ve run plenty of games where NPCs multiplied without limit, and that meant that months of real time could pass before we saw an NPC reappear. This limits the amount of shared history the players can develop with a character, and is often a little unsatisfying as a result. So reusing NPCs helps prevent the narrative from fizzling out.

Secondly, re-using NPCs means they will have multiple facets relevant to the players. In our 9W game, Perseus’s family became a center of the narrative — each of the players was off doing something else, but they affected each other because their actions influenced Perseus and his family. So despite the characters being separated the players were still interacting with each other.

5. Have NPCs connected to each other and give them strong, contradictory opinions about each other. If everyone thinks Lord Bakersfield is a pompous asshole… eh, whatever. That’s fine. If some people think he’s a pompous asshole and other people think he’s the greatest man they’ve ever met (and they both have cause to think so), Lord Bakersfield is a much interesting character.

You’re also basically forcing the players (and their PCs) to make up their own minds about Lord Bakersfield. That means they’ll need to think meaningfully about him as a character, and that’s step one to memorability.

TOOLS FOR IMPROVISATION

Something that I talk about in Smart Prep is that if you’re looking to improve your improvisation, then you should prep tools that make it easier to improvise the stuff you find hard to improvise. What these things are is different for everybody: Some people find it hard to come up with cool names on the fly; other people find that trivial.

So which tools you find most useful is going to vary a lot.

NAMES: I put together a list of Fantasy Names by culling cool names I ran across in a data entry job and I’ve used that list over and over and over again in the last couple decades.

I recently prepped a name list for the Infinity RPG by doing a lot of research into real world cultures and their names, specifically to highlight the rich panoply of cultures found in the setting.

On a far more focused scale, Feng Shui 2 does something similar by distinguishing between characters from Hong Kong, characters from mainland China, and characters from Ancient China by using different methods of Romanizing Chinese names.

The globe-hopping Eternal Lies campaign very wisely includes a list of first and last names for each location the PCs go. Notably I did NOT follow the same practice in designing my Severn Valley expansion to the campaign because I felt confident in my ability to to improvise English names.

Over the Edge is another interesting example because Jonathan Tweet basically invented a set of naming conventions for the island of Al Amarja, subtly emphasizing the strangely akimbo nature of its place in our reality. I developed a cheat sheet of Al Amarjan Names to encourage GMs to lean into this. It can be found on Atlas’ official website.

MANNERISMS: Here’s a quick, one-stop shop: Maze Rats. It has a one page “Character Creation” sheet which includes random tables for appearance, physical details, costumes, personality, mannerisms, and hobbies.

You can get a lot of mileage by, say, randomly generating a part of your body and thinking about what you can do with it. If you have one of those dedicated hit location dice, here’s a really creative way you could use it.

AGENDAS: These are trickier to generate meaningful, high-quality random tables for, because they are generally going to be heavily dependent on the specific context of the game setting.

Assuming that your setting is already well-stocked with NPCs, however, one thing you can do is basically just co-opt an existing NPC’s agenda: In the real world, after all, there’s not just one guy who’s pro-Brexit or seeking to buy real estate in the Guildsman’s District or aligned with the Mafia or engaging in anti-android-apartheid activism.

So add this new NPC to one of these existing factions of interest. It works best to then give their agenda a twist so that it’s providing a different angle or insight into the agenda. The easiest twist is to simply flip the agenda and have them opposed to whatever the other NPC is trying to accomplish: So they’re anti-Brexit, trying to protect middle class property rights in the Guildsman’s District, a gangbuster, or an android-tester enforcing the apartheid.

KEEP A FILE: Something else you can do is to start keeping a file of cool NPCs you’ve seen in various adventure modules. I talk about this a bit in Strip-Mining Adventure Modules.

You don’t have to limit yourself to characters from RPG products, or even from the same setting or genre. A lot of the stuff that makes characters cool and memorable — their beliefs, their look, their mannerisms — all tend to translate well.

If these characters are a little too well known, this can be less effective. (Although, honestly, Ian McKellan’s Gandalf is basically an archetype at this point and it’s perfectly acceptable to have a wizard show up smoking a pipe, waggling their eyebrows, and speaking cryptically in dramatic whispers.)

Genre flips often solve this problem in any case: Use Gandalf’s mannerisms for a mafioso or Luke Skywalker’s characterization for a petulant halfling and your players will probably never even realize where you drew your inspiration from.

Random GM Tips: Accumulated Lore Random GM Tips: Getting the Players to Care Random GM Tip: Rewind Your Timeline – How to Use Published Sourcebooks