I've been playing a lot of Dark Souls lately and always look to incorporate things I like from it into games I DM.
One of those things is the recurring NPC's who move around and pop into the game as you slowly learn more about them.
What are some of the best recurring NPCs that you guys have had in a game and what do you think NPCs like that have to have to be a good addition to the game?
>>44166647
I have an NPC I basically bring into any fantasy game I run. A cosmic being showing up as an orc woman of unnecessarily beautiful looks while always covering her face. It is worth noting I don't play het as sexy or anything it is simply the art I used of her I borrowed from somewhere. She trades only for what she desires at the moment. One time she traded a wine bottle for an exploding axe and another time she asked for a kiss from the face of the group to give them some items. She can pop up anywhere and sells basically whatever I feel like the players would enjoy having.
One or two of my players now constantly buy wine bottles on new characters in an attempt to trade it with her even if it has proven ineffective.
>>44166647
The key to any good NPC is to make sure they DON'T TAKE THE SPOTLIGHT FROM THE PLAYERS.
Make them interesting, make them friendly, and make them survivable if your PC's are murderhobo's but don't make them the star.
The only thing I took away from this is that your player is stupid.
A long time ago I played a pathfinder game where one of my players played the "witch" class. In pathfinder, witches get their powers through contracts or as "gifts" from otherworldly powers in exchange for worship or sacrifices or whatever. A key feature of the witch class is that their "patron" grants them a familiar, a small magical animal companion, to serve as a tutor or conduit for their power.
Anyway, said player's character was a young elven girl who was granted power by her familiar seemingly for free. Mori was it's name, a small furry dragon of sorts (or at least that was the form it preferred to take) with a white slightly-rainbowish coloring like a pearl or the inside of certain shiny seashells. As far as the character was concerned, Mori was her "friend", it was taking care of her, and teaching her defend herself through the development of her magical powers.
The truth was more sinister. Mori was "grooming" her as a vessel, with the ultimate goal of getting her strong enough to make a good body for the otherworldly mistress he served, who would then possess her body and be reborn into the world.
The party eventually figured this out and put an end to it... but occasionally in other games I'll still drop mentions of young girls with very... peculiar pets. After all, the familiars are weak disposable things... disposable and easy to manifest in this world...If I ever decide to do an epic "save-the-world/defeat the demon queen" campaign in the future, this will be how the apocalypse happens.
>>44166647
It's not specific to any one game I've played but a few years ago I played a couple of smaller campaigns with a small group where one NPC showed up.
The NPC in question is an arrow sniper that always targets the party's magic users from an ALWAYS inaccessible location. The sniper doesn't stay for long, only cracks off a few shots, and then flees. I don't even think he killed any pcs, his appearance just eventually ended up instilling a G-man sense of paranoia in my players. The sniper always took up a position around an area the players could only navigate linearly, and the areas they went into after running into him were loaded with traps and ambuscades.
Eventually, it got to the point where the pcs got very suspicious of lone bowmen in general. Particularly if there was a fort or a city with a lot of guards, every once in a while if someone rolled perception I'd mention them being eyed by the bowmen in the crows nest of a particular place, or something similar.
They never did catch him, kind of makes me want to move back to play with them.
>>44166907
>>44166879
You know You guys have something going there.
I mean say the word NPC and everyone thinks of their favorite waifu but I'll be damned, some of the best Npcs are the ones you grow to hate.
>>44166879
become meguca
>>44167077
Yeah, the original concept was pretty much based on a mix of Madoka Magica (I even chose Mori's coloration to be white for that reason) and the Shadow Queen from Paper Mario: Thousand Year Door.
>>44167077
No, meduca
>>44167077
>>44167103
>>44167141
but being meguca is suffering
>>44167151
The player in question had never even seen Madoka, and Mori was under my control as GM. (As per player request, actually).
Also... there wasn't much suffering to be honest. The rest of the party caught on before anything truly bad happened... and even the player's character herself caught on when the rest of the party proved to be more "heroic" and better people than Mori (who often encouraged evil or selfish acts for the sake of strengthening the character).
No matter how much you try to convince someone that you're the only one who cares about them or knows what's good for them, it tends not to work so well when other people do things to actually show it. Eventually character development happens and you start making choices for yourself...You know... until sometime in the future when the familiar finally finds someone too weak to think for themselves and that whole apocalypse thing happens. But it's a delicate balance, giving people enough power that they don't need you, but keeping them convinced that they do.
currently i got a fairly shady yet good intentioned (as far as my players know) hedge wizard type charater who besides the regular "helping the local farmers with sickly chickens and cropblights" also was found out to meddle in necromancy and also sold the party a few magical items, even if pretty weak ones with no real benefit besides rp and opening up for some smart player solutions (in this case they bought a "stubborn nail" and a "sustaining spoon")
he will come in handy if the players need help with necromantic stuff or other stuff later, but so far they have only met him twice
>>44166647
I just drop recurring NPCs that the players might use for solving stuff or get stuff easier with. For example in my Shadowrun game i have a horny dwarf that frequents nightclubs and back alleys for private fun that the players helped out some time ago. He now works as a "oh you guys can get in with this shit because i have all the money in the world" NPC if they manage to find him in any given happenstance.
A gnome who rides a beetle and smokes cigars constantly. He turns up now and then, pushing the party in the direction of doing 'good'. Not so much now they're all fighting one another, but hey ho.
>>44166647
Does it count if I turn past player characters into recurring NPCs? Because in one of our games we had a wizard who discovered that aging was an "imperfection" in the evolution of humanoid creatures (more so in some, such as humans, than others such as elves) and figured out a way to "correct" it and slow it dramatically (although only for himself).
Anyway, he still shows up in games whenever the party has any need to interact with the Mages guild in the Capitol City. He's been alive for nearly 200 years now and capable of out-performing even the old traditional elven wizards, so it's only natural that he'd do some "off-camera" advancing to such a position over the course of the next few campaigns that followed.
We've also got a Thief who used to be a PC, who steals things more for the challenge than the wealth... that was about 70 years ago in our game world, but she managed to outsmart a minor "god" and trick it into maintaining her youth every decade... assuming she can steal something "impossible" each time, something bigger and more grand than anything else any other thief in the setting has stolen that decade.
The players have never actually encountered this character personally (aside from the session in which she WAS a player character), but her exploits are a common subject of conversation amongst both the local populace and criminal underworld alike, as well as rumors as to whether it's even her anymore or just copycats paying tribute to her legend or trying to imitate her,
>>44166647
Once the PCs ended a game imploding the party with in fighting so they never managed to get to the end of the mystery. So the next characers they made are coming from another angle to solve things. The fun part is, the game is taking place several months after the last characters were seen. But, the ones that survived didn't give up searching for the truth, so I made them NPCs, it was fun.
>>44166907
What were the bowman's motives for this?
>>44172432
Underling for a BBEG I was working on for a campaign that never came to fruition. He was also my prototype for what would have been an extended guerrilla campaign against the pcs if we'd actually gotten to that point. He also had an intense personal hatred for spellcasters.
