Here’s how the Tyranny of Dragons campaign begins:

For the past several days, you have been traveling a road that winds lazily across the rolling grasslands of the Greenfields. Sundown is approaching when you top a rise and see the town of Greenest just a few short miles away. But instead of the pleasant, welcoming town you expected, you see columns of black smoke rising from burning buildings, running figures that are little more than dots at this distance, and a dark, winged shape wheeling low over the keep that rises above the center of the town. Greenest is being attacked by a dragon!

Although the boxed text doesn’t mention this, the dragon is accompanied by an entire army. Greenest isn’t just being attacked by a dragon; it is under siege.

So… what happens next?

The adventure assumes that the 1^st level PCs will head straight into Greenest.

Which… well… It doesn’t really make sense, does it?

It’s not just that it’s difficult for me to imagine any player responding to that scene by saying, “Guess, we head into town then…” It’s that, for whatever reason, the adventure just assumes that this won’t be a problem. It skips directly from “there’s an army and a dragon attacking that town!” to “okay, now that you’re in the town.”

This is bad design.

And the problem here is not just that Tyranny of Dragons is a railroad. I mean, yes, that’s a problem. I’ve told you that prepping plots is a bad idea. And I’ve given a detailed breakdown of why railroads are terrible.

But let’s lay all that aside.

Let’s talk a little bit about what makes a good railroad. Or, more accurately, what makes a railroad work.

THE TRICK OF THE RAILROAD

A good railroad, at a certain level, is like a good magic trick: The players won’t really believe that magic is real, but a good magic trick will let them suspend disbelief just long enough to be amazed.

Players in a railroaded scenario will almost certainly know that they’re being fed a predetermined sequence of events over which they have no meaningful control. (Players are not, by and large, stupid. Even if they’re polite enough not to tell you that they can see you behind the curtain.) But a good railroad will disguise this; it will allow them to suspend their disbelief and get lost in the wonder.

There are a lot of different tricks the railroaded scenario will use to do this: It will use illusionism to make meaningless choices look meaningful. It will give the PCs a lot of control over stuff that is meaningless, but which is nevertheless given the appearance of meaning.

(Illusionism is a technique in which the players only have the illusion of choice. Regardless of which choice they make, they outcome will be the same. A simple example has the PCs come to a fork in the road: If they go left, they end up at the vampire’s castle. If they go right? They end up the vampire’s castle. Because they were always going to go to the vampire’s castle.)

But the most important technique for the railroaded scenario is to frame the meaningful choices in such a way that the players legitimately WANT to make the predetermined choice.

The GM never forces a card on them. In the end, they do the magic trick to themselves.

When a railroaded scenario pulls this off, the suspension of disbelief is perfect: Players never feel as if they were forced to do something. They’re able to remain completely immersed in their characters, feeling as if the world is unfolding in direct response to their actions.

And this is why the opening scene of Tyranny of Dragons is hot garbage.

BREAKING THE ILLUSION

When you show a group of 1^st level characters that a town is being simultaneously ravaged by a dragon and besieged by an army, the choice you are signaling is, “Don’t go there. Stay away.”

This is true not only logically in the context of real people looking at that situation. It’s also true in the specific context of the entire D&D rule set, which is built around the clear expectation that 1^st level characters DO NOT FIGHT dragons nor armies.

Every rational signifier is saying, “Don’t go there.”

And this would actually be doubly true in a well-designed railroaded scenario, because the well-designed railroad would be using those signifiers – BIG DRAGON, YOU CAN’T SURVIVE THIS – to force the logical choice, not its opposite.

The only context in which running into that town makes sense is, in fact, the one where a DM says, “This is a railroad. Get on the fucking train.”

And even if the DM doesn’t have to literally say that, the implication is absolutely crystal clear to everyone sitting at the table.

The illusion has been broken. The suspension of disbelief has collapsed.

It’s the very first moment of the campaign and the book has already set you up to fail. They have dug a hole and now you’re going to have to dig yourself out of it.

Now, the reality of a railroaded scenario is it’s quite likely you will be forced into this situation at some point. The complex web of choices and relationships and emotions of your PCs will eventually force you to push them back onto the tracks. That’s just the nature of a railroaded scenario. (And it’s one of the many reasons why it’s not a good way to prep or run an RPG.)

But this is, in fact, the very first scene of the campaign. There is no baggage. No complex continuity that needs to be impossibly accounted for. Avoiding this moment would be trivial: Just put the PCs in the town before the dragon and the army show up.

A good railroad designer will recognize when a mandatory choice doesn’t make sense and they will restructure the scenario TO REMOVE THAT CHOICE.

That’s not always possible in the convoluted middle of a scenario after the PCs have begun strewing chaos. But in the very first chunk of boxed text?

That’s bad design.

Even if you’re OK designing a railroad.

Which you shouldn’t.

There are two places where tracks (along with the associated concept of tracking) can be found in the Alexandrian Hexcrawl: First, there is the Tracker watch action, in which characters can actively search for and follow tracks.

Second, the encounter system is designed to generate random encounters, lairs, and tracks.

Random encounters provide immediate obstacles and interludes while traveling, lairs spontaneously generate new locations in the hexcrawl (organically building up material along well-traveled routes as the campaign develops), and tracks are a trail that can be followed to a point of interest.

Thinking in terms of “tracks” seem to commonly conjure up the image of hoof prints in the sod, but we shouldn’t limit ourselves to that. In the wilderness exploration of the hexcrawl that sort of physical spoor is most likely very common, but the concept of “tracks” can really be generalized to “clue.”

For example, if we generated a result of “tracks” for bandits, that might mean footprints in the forest. But it could just as easily include a merchant caravan in panicked disarray due to their latest highway robbery; the dead body of a bandit that was critically wounded and abandoned; a bolt-hole containing documents implicating the mayor of a local village in collusion with the bandits; and so forth.

TYPES OF TRACKS

Spoor: What can be thought of as the “classic” tracks we commonly think of. This includes both physical prints and scents (particularly if you have a hound for a familiar or live life as a werewolf). Following a spoor path usually also means looking for and encountering other signs (like broken foliage) that are described below.

Spoor paths can include trails, which are paths used frequently repeatedly by a create. The common image here is the worn rut of a deer or fox path. Runs are similar to trails, but are less frequently used.

Subsurface trails are tunnels. In the real world, trackers frequently look for where small tunnels re-emerge (and will use the diameter of tunnels to identify creatures). In a fantasy world, it’s quite possible the tunnel will be more than large enough for adventurers to follow the spoor path right inside. (Tunnels created by one creature may also be used by other creatures.)

Sounds: The howl of a wolf, the roar of a dragon, the screech of a griffon, or the distant sound of a fireball exploding. Sounds emanating from nearby can be used as an encounter trigger, but distant sounds can (often ominously) indicate the presence (and direction) of creatures.

Smells: The zombie stench of putrefacting flesh, the lingering ozone odor of a beholder’s rays, the sulfurous stench of a hell hound, or the distinctive musk of more mundane creatures can linger in the air long after they have passed.

Moulting: Anything shed by a creature, such as feathers and fur. This can also include skin (like a snake) or an exoskeleton (like a crab, spider, or insect). Some lizards will actually lose their entire tails (a process known as “caudal autotomy”) in order to evade predators, and you could imagine similarly fantastical abilities. Perhaps there are creatures which, when threatened, will spontaneously generate a cloned copy of their “corpse” and leave it behind to slowly decompose into ectoplasmic residue.

Other creatures use parts of their bodies as weapons, which could be left behind in their victims or embedded in the environment, like the spines of a barbed devil being left in a tree.

On a similar theme, there might be body parts lost by animals due to hazard rather than nature (like a dismembered limb or pool of blood).

Food: This might include food that’s been stored (whether squirrels hiding nuts or a cache of the local rangers), but is probably more commonly partially consumed meals. This can include carcasses (including human corpses depending on which predators are active in the area), but also plants or area of foliage which have been grazed by herbivores.

Also consider pellets, which are masses regurgitated by hawks and the like. These include trace remnants of food, but are primarily made up of indigestible remnants from their meals (bones, exoskeletons, fur, feathers, bills, teeth, etc.).

Fewmets: The other end of the digestive track, specifically scat and excrement. Urine is also an option. Don’t be afraid to embrace the fantastical here, ranging from the well-known scale of triceratops poop to, say, the scorching phosphorescence of hell hound pee.

Kill Sites: This includes carcasses, but may just be signs (like blood spatter) left from a kill which a predator later dragged from the site (or consumed whole). This category is also worth calling out specifically because far more dramatic kill sites are frequently left by intelligent creatures (victims of goblin raiders or the rotting corpses left by poachers).

Glyphs: Intentional markings left by intelligent creatures. These might include navigational signs carved into trees, strange runic carvings, odd fetish sculptures, demonic graffiti, or simply a discarded note.

Sleeping Areas: Many sleeping areas will actually be generated as lairs, but there are also transit beds and lays, which are used as less frequent or irregular resting areas. For animals, this often takes the form of crushed vegetation. Intelligent creatures may leave a wide variety of signs (remnants of a campfire, a latrine, discarded food remnants, miscellaneous refuse, etc.).

Marring: The activities of beasts and monsters will often damage or leave their mark on the natural environment. Rubs are produced by an animal rubbing against trees or rocks. Gnaws and chews can give clear indication of the size of a creature’s teeth. (You might similarly find a place where intelligent creatures were practicing with their weapons or using a machete to chop through thick overgrowth.) Scratchings can be both intentional (sharpening your claws or digging for grubs) and unintentional (signs left from climbing or scampering over terrain).

In the realm of fantasy we might add to this things like burns (fire or acid), phase marks (distinct traces left by incorporeal creatures passing through physical objects), ectoplasm, and the like.

Tip: When imagining tracks and other signs, don’t get fixated on the ground. Remember verticality! In the real world, woodpeckers drill in trees above your head. In fantasy, bloated stirges can leave smears of blood up there, too.

SCALE OF TRACKS

Something else to consider is that tracks can vary from the obvious to the almost impossibly obscure. You can use this to provide varied flavor to tracking sequences, or to reward particularly good Wisdom (Perception) or Wisdom (Survival) checks.

Large scale tracks are significant and obvious. You might not automatically notice them, but even untrained people will likely recognize clear pawprints in mud, well-worn trails, significant damage to foliage, big animal carcasses, and the like.

Medium scale tracks are perhaps the most common (being left almost constantly by anyone or anything not intentionally covering their tracks), but are more difficult to notice or may only be significant to those with training. This can be stuff like gnaws and chews, pellets, and subtle vegetation breaks. It can also include more obvious tracks which have been obscured by the passage of time.

Small scale tracks usually require a sharp eye, special training, or both. They include many of the same signs as previous categories, but are subtler, sometimes as the result of extreme age. These are faint pawprints on hard ground, a handful of partially buried bones left from a months-old kill, or an orcish arrowhead buried deep in a tree trunk.

Ghost scale tracks almost certainly require training and experience to spot and interpret. They also frequently disappear quickly. This can include dullings (in which a creature passing through the morning dew leaves a “dull” area by brushing the water off foliage), shinings (later in the day, creatures walking through the grass press it down, revealing its shiny side), and other incredibly subtle tracks (like leaf depressions).

Back to 5E Hexcrawls

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Rhodarin Press has published five supplements fleshing out Avernus, presenting a unique vision of the first layer of Hell. The first of these I stumbled across was Tyrants of the Purple City, a brief gazetteer describing an entire infernal city that lies somewhere along the Styx.

TYRANTS OF THE PURPLE CITY: The city is primarily presented through a number of distinct factions, each of which has a barebones quest/job that they want accomplished. This is an interesting lens for viewing the setting, but seems very practical, resulting in a lot of bang for your buck in a relatively short supplement.

The biggest shortcoming of Tyrants of the Purple City is the appalling proofreading. (Although the malapropism of “portuary ward” is almost delightfully evocative.) This is a problem which unfortunately persists throughout the Rhodarin supplements.

• Grade: B-

CHARON’S DROWNED SHRINE: Charon’s Drowned Shrine presents another Avernian city lying along the Styx, but this one was utterly destroyed in a flood forty years ago.

I will just never understand paragraphs like this:

Characters will most likely approach the city through the main course of the river. If they traverse the town to the Temple they should come across the districts in the order Outskirts, New Harbor, Eastern Gate, and then the Inner City, where the Temple resides, but through magic means or other strategies, they might be able to circumvent some wards.

First, there’s a map, so this is immediately obvious and the text is irrelevant. Second, stop trying to force non-linear environments into being linear, plotted experiences. Third, the phrase “if the PCs figure out how to do something, then they can do something” seems to be the #1 favorite way for RPG authors to write “I feel a need to write something, but have absolutely nothing to actually say.”

With that grumpy pet peeve out of the way, the biggest problem Charon’s Drowned Shrine has is that Orinxis, the ruined city, is… mundane. Absurdly so given that it is a CITY IN HELL ITSELF.

For example, the first keyed location is the Old Water Mill. Oooh… A mill churned by the cursed waters of the Styx itself! What alien and infernal purpose could it have been built for?

Grinding flour.

In similar fashion, the adventure just kind of blithely assumes that the PCs will be casually wading (and even diving!) into the waters of the Styx. The whole thing just feels like an adventure designed for the Material Plane that has been awkwardly copy-pasted to Avernus.

This one just doesn’t do it for me.

• Grade: D

ESCAPE FROM THE BLOOD FORTRESS: Originally written as a one-shot that could also be potentially used as part of a longer campaign to bring the PCs to Avernus for the first time (by having them kidnapped and then locked in an infernal prison from which they must escape), the author has hypothetically retrofitted Escape from the Blood Fortress to be used as part of a Descent Into Avernus campaign (although, as far as I can tell, no actual effort has been put towards achieving this goal).

The dungeon from which the PCs are escaping is painfully linear, which is made worse because options ARE given.. it just turns out they’re designed to murder you if you’re stupid enough to take them. For example:

Exiting through this exit is highly inadvisable, as it would probably mean a very complex encounter and almost certainly incarceration or death.

So go back to the Preapproved Exit™ you dummies.

Other design problems include encounters which are… vague. For example:

The denizens of this kitchen are mainly imps and quasits following the orders of Jakll, a blind and very old tiefling (non-combatant) with excellent cooking skills.

How many imps? How many quasits? No idea.

The aforementioned “gonna kill you dummies for picking the wrong door” encounter is similarly undefined. There’s just, like, so many devils out there!

Eventually the PCs follow the linear dungeon up high enough that they can look out a different window and see a huge cut-scene play out which is, despite them having no agency in it whatsoever, the “climactic moment in the adventure.” Oddly, the adventure then continues.

This one is a miss for me, too.

• Grade: F

THE ADMIRAL’S SUCCESS – A GUIDE ON SAILING THE STYX: This supplement consists of two parts. First, a set of alternative mechanics for handling exposure to the Styx designed to moderate the consequences of doing so.

Second, ten scripted random encounters designed for groups traveling along the Styx. These encounters are mostly serviceable, but also fairly pedestrian.

Unfortunately, several of them once again suffer from the “I forgot to put combat stats in this combat encounter” problem seen in Escape From Blood Fortress, which is fairly crippling in a product pretty much exclusively designed to provide ready-to-use encounters.

• Grade: D

VYSIANTER’S GUIDE TO THE RED WASTES OF AVERNUS: This is an example of what I mean when I talk about GMs lacking scenario structures. The author’s concept here is a blasted swath of Avernian wilderness called the Red Wastes, but the only scenario structure he knows is “linear plot.” And so the trackless waste through which the PCs are supposed to “roam” is presented as… a road.

With a sequence of programmed encounters that play out as the PCs walk down the road.

Once again, several of these encounters are vague, with some basically consisting of the author saying, “Here’s an idea for an encounter that might work. Maybe. I dunno.”

The typos also remain on point with this one, producing “bad-reliefs” and a temple to “Armodeus” (who I’m assuming is Asmodeus’ n’er-do-well cousin who’s also a frat boy).

The book is rounded out with the Lost Temple of Dak-Thrael. This dungeon is very atmospheric and evocatively packed with a ton of lore about the Queen of Lilies (who once ruled over the verdant paradise which preceded the Red Wastes). I find the key to be a little muddy – with boxed text that violates the “don’t tell the players what their characters are doing” rule and a presentation primarily based on theorizing about things the PCs might do (instead of just clearly describing the room so that I can run the game) – but it’s serviceable.

If you’re looking to add a little enigma to your version of Avernus – a reminder that its history stretches back through countless aeons beyond human comprehension and its wastes are filled with the lost palimpsest of unknowable epochs – Vysianter’s Guide to the Red Wastes might be worth snagging for Dak-Thrael alone (to which I’d give a grade of C-).

• Grade: D+

After stumbling into Tyrants of the Purple City and being pleasantly surprised, I was really excited to discover that Rhodarin Press had done a whole slate of Avernus-focused supplements. Unfortunately, I was pretty consistently disappointed by the rest of the line. With that being said, I see a lot of potential here, and will be keeping an eye on Rhodarin in the future to see how they develop.

One last thing to note, which may not have been immediately clear from the above, is that all of Rhodarin’s Avernus products are loosely bound together, forming a shared continuity. Each book stands on its own, but they’re also designed to work with each other.

Go to the Avernus Remix

Go to Part 1

Vampirina is childen’s television show created by Chris Nee for Disney Junior. Although based on the Vampirina Ballerina books by Anne Marie Pace, our focus today is strictly on the TV show (which is almost unrecognizably altered from its source material).

For reasons which are, as far as I can tell, never truly explained by the series, Vampirina and her family (vampires don’t drink blood and just have kids normally in this universe) decide to move from Transylvania to Pennsylvania and open a bed-and-breakfast for ghouls, goblins, and other creatures that go bump in the night.

STRUCTURE 1: GUEST OF THE WEEK

The central structure here is pretty straightforward:  Each week a new monster (or group of monsters) shows up at the Scare B&B and they bring an adventure with them. This often takes the form of some sort of problem the guest is suffering from which Vampirina and her friends need to solve.

For example, in “Mummy Mayhem” a mummy sneaks out of the local museum for a vacation at the B&B. The museum believes the mummy to have been stolen and sends search parties to go looking for him. In “The Ghoul Girls” the Transylvanian girl group Scream Girls makes a pit stop on their tour and need an opening act.

It’s pretty easy to see how this structure can be adapted to any number of roleplaying games in which the PCs might end up in charge of an inn or similar establishment:

• In Over the Edge, it’s a seedy motel where each featured guests brings a little weird with them.
• In Vampire: The Masquerade, it’s a safe house for vamps passing through the area.
• In Stars Without Number, it’s a small space port where each adventure arrives in a ship.

This is good as far as it goes, but this is very much the exemplar of an incomplete game structure: Like a Mr. Johnson in Shadowrun or the briefing rooms of Paranoia, the “guest of the week” is a very flexible template for reliably delivering scenario hooks, but doesn’t really help you with the scenario itself. You still need to create that from scratch (presumably using other scenario structures).

Which is why Vampirina has a second episodic structure.

STRUCTURE 2: SECRET AT RISK

Other than a few close friends, the humans who make Pennsylvania their home cannot be allowed to find out that Vampirina, her family, or her guests are supernatural, and the series includes several characters (mostly neighbors) from whom this secret must be kept.

One way we could structurally implement this in a roleplaying game is to make a random check each time a PC or one of their guests exhibits supernatural abilities or properties to see if they’re at risk from a human. The key words here, however, are “at risk.” The result of this check should not be a human immediately seeing the supernatural manifestation. Instead, it should create a point of uncertainty: a crisis that has to be solved to prevent the human from discovering the truth.

This second structure largely completes the first one. As long as the guest is either innately supernatural (like a walking, talking mummy) or has some motivation for manifesting their supernatural abilities, the crisis points created by the second structure (combined with the solutions to those crisis points created by the characters, which may feature the use of supernatural abilities themselves, creating a cascade of trigger events) will innately create a complete scenario. You’ll probably want to play around a bit to figure out the right “pace” at which supernatural abilities trigger risk in order to create a satisfying adventure.

The episode “Dancelvania” is a pretty clear-cut example of this: A sleep-walking zombie shows up while Vampirina has some of her human friends over. The episode consists entirely of Vampirina and the other main characters (i.e., the PCs) trying to make sure that the zombie doesn’t expose himself.

Of course, you can also drape additional stories off of the visiting guests. Having a complete scenario structure isn’t a straitjacket that prevents you from having other content in your game after all.

Note, too, that this Secret At Risk structure isn’t the only way we could complete the Guest of the Week structure. Similarly, you could also take the Secret At Risk structure and pair it to a difference scenario hook.

PREP CHECKLIST

To use this scenario structure, you’ll need:

• The inn or similar facility where NPCs come to visit.
• The themed “secret” which needs to be kept and which the guests put at risk. (In Vampirina this is simply “the supernatural exists,” and this can work in any number of settings where the “masquerade” needs to be kept.)
• The guest for the current adventure, who should either inherently reveal the secret or have a motivation which will cause them to take actions which do so.
• A set of NPCs who can put that secret at risk.

And you should be good to go!

BEYOND THE BED & BREAKFAST

For an additional exercise, consider Rick’s Café Américain from Casablanca. This is a bar (and, shockingly, a “secret” casino) rather than a bed and breakfast, but the application of the structure is fairly straightforward. Although at the beginning of the movie Rick infamously “sticks his neck out for nobody,” slightly more proactive PCs could be confronted with a cavalcade of refugees seeking help (and usually having secrets which must be kept from the Nazis).

A similar example can be found in Spider Robinson’s Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon. Here the eponymous saloon is visited in each story by some strange creature or character out of speculative fiction. Often these visits are simply the framing device for the visitor to tell their story, but not always, with the visitor’s problems often following them into the saloon itself.

Callahan’s doesn’t particularly lend itself to the Secret At Risk structure, so it might be a good opportunity to think about what other structure(s) you might pair up with the Guest of the Week.

In the case of both Rick’s and Callahan’s, there’s a natural pairing with the Tavern Time™ system for fleshing out a wider cast of characters (including those who put the Secret At Risk if that applies).

For another example, consider the Continental Hotel from the John Wick movies. With a multitude of assassins constantly taking up residence, it feels as if the PCs filling Winston’s role as proprietor should be constantly intersecting various adventures. However, the rules of Continental more or less ban those adventures from actually crossing the threshold.

Is there a second structure we could implement that would resolve that? Or would we be better off with a completely different set of structures for a Continental campaign?

In 2015 I shared my Universal NPC Roleplaying Template, which is designed to structure the description of NPCs so that they can be quickly picked up and played at the table while simplifying the prep you do for them.

More bang for your buck, in other words.

The template is designed to be used with any system: I’ve used it in adventures for D&D, Numenera, Eclipse Phase, Trail of Cthulhu, Ars Magica, The Strange, Star Wars… The list goes on. I also implemented the template when I was the lead developer on Modiphius’ Infinity and, as the RPG Producer at Atlas Games, we now use it across most of our titles, notably to date in Over the Edge and Feng Shui.

Since posting the template, my use of it in development and at my personal table has seen further refinements to the system. I’ve also had a number of people contact me with either questions or suggestions. I thought this might be a good time to revisit the template with some advanced tips and tricks that you might find useful in enhancing your use of it.

BRIEFING SHEETS

The first thing I’ll note is that, when I’m using the template, I often think of and use NPCs as briefing sheets: For my personal campaigns, I try to have one NPC per page. And will try very hard to keep them on just one page. That’s not always possible, but the benefits in being able to quickly access information during play are usually worth tightening the NPC up if it means keeping them to that single page.

I say “page,” but I also try to keep it to just one sheet. (So the back of the page is usually blank, which – if the front of the page is rather full – can be a great place to keep notes for updating the NPC for future sessions.)

In addition to having easy, clear access to the information for an NPC I’m currently playing, when I’m setting up a scene this also allows me to “cast” the NPCs in it by simply grabbing the appropriate sheets.

I usually keep my campaign notes in a three-ring binder, so I can just pop these sheets out and lay them all out on the table behind my GM screen. I can swap between characters with just a flick of my eye.

Similarly, when running a scenario using my party-planning scenario structure, I can just pull all the guests’ briefing sheets and then quickly rifle through them, making it easy to constantly mix and remix the social situations the PCs are in.

For added utility, if there’s room on the page, I will always try to include a picture of the NPC at the top of the sheet. (Assuming I have one, of course.) This simple visual cue makes it infinitely easier to quickly find the NPC I’m looking for, particularly in large, complicated scenes.

In published books we have to compromise, but I will generally try to segregate the template from the main text (placing it in a box or sidebar). This also usually guarantees that an NPC’s description stays entirely on a single page in layout. (You can see an example of this from Paul Stefko’s Feng Shui: Apeworld on Fire! on the right. You’ll note that we also dropped the bullet points here for stylistic reasons.)

QUOTE NO MORE

The original Universal NPC Roleplaying Template included a section for a sample quote from the NPC (e.g., “Just give me time to think. There must be a way,” or, “You’re a goddamn crazy freak! A certifiable circus clown! Fuckin’ hell, man!”).

Truth be told, I don’t use these any more. Your mileage may vary, but I found they just weren’t providing reliable value, and they were almost always the first thing I’d cut when trying to reduce the size of a particular NPC write-up (e.g., to make it fit on a single page).

If it seems like it would be useful for a particular NPC – i.e., that the word choice and phrasing of the character is the best way to clearly communicate character to yourself – it can be dropped into the Roleplaying section as one of the bullet points.

ROLEPLAYING: NO REPETITION

A note I frequently give when looking at the Roleplaying section of the template is to avoid repetition.

I recommend having three separate bullet points in that section, and the key word there is “separate.” Too often I end up seeing the same idea expressed in two or three slightly different ways:

• He respects hard work when he sees it in others.
• He’s worked for years to make the Talon & Eagle the best tavern it can be.
• Hard work is how he finds solace from the death of his wife.

“Hard work is important to him” is clearly a crucial concept for this character, but it can almost certainly be more clearly (and usefully!) expressed as a single bullet point. (Which will also leave you with more space to explore other aspects of the character.)

One tip for avoiding this trap is to have each bullet point describe a completely distinct classification of things: values, physical mannerisms, ways of speaking, personality, etc. This is far from being a hard-and-fast rule, but it’s a useful tip if you’re struggling to flesh out a character. (I talk about this a bit more in Random GM Tip: Memorable NPCs.)

BACKGROUND BOLD

The Cool Mama used the Universal NPC Roleplaying Template on her website and introduced the idea of using bold text to call out key concepts in the Background section. This is really smart and makes it even easier to pick up your NPC briefing sheet and almost instantly re-familiarize yourself with the character.

For example, you can take this character background:

Bhaltair is Ariadnan of Caledonian stock. When he was just a young kid, his father went off to fight in a bloody frontier conflict between Caledonia and Rodina. He never came back. Bhaltair made a pledge that he would work to never see his homeworld torn apart by such senseless violence again. He became a politician and quickly discovered how difficult the dream of peace can be. When the Human Sphere returned to Ariadna, he was at first overjoyed at how it unified the planet…and then watched in horror as the Commercial Conflicts ripped his planet apart again. He lost himself in drink for a time and then, concluding that the only way to bring true peace to Ariadna was to solve the off-planet problems that were manifesting themselves there, he became a diplomat. He did not participate in the negotiation of the Tohaa Contact Treaty, but he has recently arrived to take part in the Alliance Summit.

And greatly enhance it with some key bold:

Bhaltair is Ariadnan of Caledonian stock. When he was just a young kid, his father went off to fight in a bloody frontier conflict between Caledonia and Rodina. He never came back. Bhaltair made a pledge that he would work to never see his homeworld torn apart by such senseless violence again. He became a politician and quickly discovered how difficult the dream of peace can be. When the Human Sphere returned to Ariadna, he was at first overjoyed at how it unified the planet…and then watched in horror as the Commercial Conflicts ripped his planet apart again. He lost himself in drink for a time and then, concluding that the only way to bring true peace to Ariadna was to solve the off-planet problems that were manifesting themselves there, he became a diplomat. He did not participate in the negotiation of the Tohaa Contact Treaty, but he has recently arrived to take part in the Alliance Summit.

Knowing that you want to call out key concepts in bold, you can also write to make those most effective. For example:

Bhaltair is Ariadnan of Caledonian stock. During the frontier conflict between Caledonia and Rodina, his father fought in the war and never came back. Bhaltair made a pledge that he would work to never see his homeworld torn apart by such senseless violence again.

The slight rewrite there allows for a much tighter and actually more comprehensive bold key point.

EXPANDED KEY INFO

The Key Info section of the template is frequently misunderstood: This is not where you put important information ABOUT the character. That’s what the Background section is for. The Key Info section contains the essential details about whatever the character’s structural function in the current adventure is.

For example, if it’s a mystery scenario then you would probably list the clues that this NPC can give to the PCs. If the NPC is a noble the PCs are approaching to join their alliance against the White Hand, then the Key Info section would probably describe their reaction to that request (what they might want in exchange, what aid they’re capable of giving, suggestions they might make for other potential allies, etc.). If it’s a heist scenario, then it might be the score, information, or resources they can offer to support the heist (and what they want for it). And so forth.

Usually, the Key Info section should be short and straight to the point. Its whole function is, in fact, to pull these essential details out to make sure that you don’t overlook them during play. The longer and less focused the section becomes, the more likely you are to overlook stuff even when it’s listed as Key Info.

Some NPCs, though, are natural nexuses for lengthy Key Info sections: Either they’re crucially positioned to serve a lot of different functions, or the information they have to share is complicated or very detailed.

In those situations, what I’ve found useful is to actually use multiple Key Info sections.

These might be distinguished by a specific function. For example, if an NPC who has clues for solving a mystery is attending a party, I might include both:

• Key Info – Clues
• Key Info – Topics of Conversation

With the former, obviously, listing all of the clues, while the latter has any notes pertaining to the various topics of conversation being bandied about at the party.

In some cases, you may also find it useful to create multiple Key Info sections by topic. For example, an NPC might have some information on the werewolf sightings and also a lengthy account of the Haunting of Greybear Mansion, and thus:

• Key Info
• Key Info – Werewolf Sightings
• Key Info – Greybear Mansion

I’ll note that you should try to avoid doing this capriciously. Just because you break up one NPC’s lengthy Key Info section by topic, it doesn’t mean that every other NPC needs to have the section broken up in the same way (or at all). Most of the time, a single Key Info section with a couple bullet points is all you need.

UNTESTED: ADVANCED KEY INFO

These Key Info section types are things I’ve been experimenting with, but which have not yet been put through rigorous testing at the table. They may prove useful or they might turn out to be pure bupkis. (If you use them, let us know how it goes!)

KEY INFO – REACTIONS: This special Key Info section lists an NPC’s reactions to specific prompts from the PCs. This section can be a little trick in actual practice, because it can be real easy to fall into contingency planning here. (If the PCs say A, then the NPC will do X. If they PCs say B, then the NPC will say Y. And so forth.)

I think the key here is to think of the section as being stuff that gets “unlocked” in response to specific stimuli. One example would be what the GUMSHOE system refers to as a leveraged clue: Just talking to someone will never elicit a particular piece of information. You first have to ask exactly the right question (which is usually predicated on learning a revelation elsewhere

But you can also imagine a similar rationale being applied to non-clue information. For example, in some cases the Topics of Conversation category I mentioned earlier for party scenarios might, in some cases, be interpreted as being of this type: The NPC will only offer their opinion about X if it comes up in conversation.

KEY INFO – ACTIONS: This is the section is for proactive social gambits that the NPC might attempt. I’ve always tried to play my NPCs proactively, but the presentation of the Universal NPC Template can often lend itself to a reactive presentation — it lists what the NPC knows, with the implicit assumption that the PCs will need to do something to extract that information.

Particularly in published material, there’s frequently a need to communicate clearly what courses of action the NPC will actively pursue in a social situation. For example:

• Carefully question the PCs regarding Old Man Rigger.
• Try to arrange a marriage between Fiona and their eldest son, Frederick.
• Slip a nano-tracker into a PC’s drink.

One thing I’m playing with here is the line between the NPC’s general goals (which I think probably fit better in either the Roleplaying or Background sections of the template) and the sort of specific actions (i.e. “this is a thing you, as the GM, should make sure this character does during this conversation”).

Design Note: Neither the Reactions nor Actions sections are meant to be comprehensive. They’re for keying very specific content that is essential to the structure of the scenario. It’s unlikely that they will be needed for every NPC. Most of the time you’ll be better off actively playing the NPC and discovering their actions and reactions in the moment.

KEY INFO – RESOURCES: This section would list any resources that the NPC has available to them. These might be resources that they can offer to the PCs aid (I’ve frequently included this sort of thing in the Key Info section without specifically calling it out). Or they might be resources they’ll employ to some other purpose.

Several of these tools were inspired by DragnaCarta’s social encounter stat block.

UNTESTED: SOCIAL PROFILE

This is another experimental tool, but the Social Profile would be an entirely new section of the roleplaying template.

An NPC’s Social Profile summarizes what social tactics may be particularly effective and/or ineffective when interacting with them. When used in conjunction with D&D 5^th Edition, I think this could be cleanly keyed to the mechanical hook of advantage/disadvantage on subsequent social checks:

• Advantage: Complimenting Frederick on his clothing or sense of fashion.
• Advantage: Anyone signaling their sympathy for the White Hand.
• Disadvantage: Offering a bribe.

Something to potentially think about is how the PCs might learn or be cued into this information. (It might involve research or perhaps Wisdom (Insight) checks. See Rulings in Practice: Social Skills for some additional discussions along these lines.)

It’s possible that the Social Profile should actually be folded into the Key Info – Reactions section (i.e., someone complimenting Frederick’s sense of fashion causes him to react favorably), but at least for the moment I see a clear and distinct utility for the Social Profile.

Once again, I’m not sure the Social Profile is something that needs to be done for every single NPC. (Although maybe so if it got hooked into a wider social resolution structure in which the PCs were expected to investigate the NPCs they’re socially interacting with to figure out how to approach them. In that case the Social Profile would be kind of like Armor Class for social encounters.) But significant, central figures in a scenario, particularly those the PCs are likely to need to negotiate with or need to sway one way or another in their opinions, would almost certainly benefit.

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