From walk-ons to guest stars, this article on The Harrow discusses walk-ons, guest stars, professions, choosing names and other NPC-related details: Adventure Writing: Nonplayer Characters. It’s a good approach to the topic of NPCs, and it covers the basics well.
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Nice article. It already has me thinking about non-stereotypical NPCs that I can include in my current campaign. Even the BBEG, who I had planned to be a small human child that is trapped in a dream state. Why not have her be an Orc child, of something even more bizzare like a Beholder child? Will the PCs still want to help her then? I can just imagine the conversations at the table..
That sounds like a fun layer of interest to add to your BBEG. Tomorrow’s post is also about NPCs — hopefully you’ll get some good mileage out of that one, too. 🙂