If there’s one design element that’s in my wheelhouse as a game master, it’s designing NPCs of varied backgrounds and motivations.

Being an avid reader of fiction and understanding the genre of a particular game help in crafting characters that the players at the table find engaging and memorable.

So, yes. So long as I’m armed with a keyboard and my imagination, I’m usually in good shape. Besides, there’s that nifty little doorstop of a book, Masks: 1000 Memorable NPCs for Any Roleplaying Game, within easy reach if I really get stuck.

Now, as much of a fan as I am of Mask’s traits and keyword system for NPC development (and endorse its use by any GM), I recently had an occasion to dabble with another character generator and found it useful.

The Pathfinder supplement “Ultimate Campaign” has a background generator for player characters that could just as easily be used by GMs to kickstart NPC creation.

The generator appears in a hardback supplement, which retails for $39.99. It also is available as Open Game Content at http://paizo.com/pathfinderRPG/prd/ultimateCampaign/characterBackground.html

I’ve written about “Ultimate Campaign” before, describing the utility of the Downtime subsystem. The background generator may not match the Downtime rules as an innovative element, but it is worthy of inclusion in any GM’s toolkit, regardless of system.

Yes, the background generator is integrated with the d20 3.5/Pathfinder rules system, as it makes suggestions for players to incorporate thematic Traits (mini-feats that grant bonuses to third edition PCs) into their characters.

But setting those suggestions aside, it also provides a backstory to a character’s life before they started adventuring.

Now we’ve seen similar generators before. The ones that tell you how many brothers and sisters you had growing up, your parent’s occupation, and that traumatic event that set you off adventuring. All that is here in the Ultimate Campaign generator. A few d20 and d100 rolls and you’ve got the important notes in your character’s childhood and adolescence all set down. These are the seeds to a character’s background.

What the generator does best, though, is give you the characteristics of the character. Here is where the generator shines.

First, there are the class backgrounds. Each of the 19 classes has ten life events, one of which influenced your character’s choice in profession. Why are you a cleric? Why was the path of druid appealing? How did you fall into the life of a rogue?

The key thing with these is they are presented generically enough so that the GM, in the case of making an NPC, now has a direction they can take the character. Each of these is a nudge, a suggestion, as to the character’s origins and motivations.

Secondly, and this is what sets the generator apart, there are charts for the character’s moral conflicts, relationships and drawbacks.

Rolling on these charts establishes the nature of these confrontations, ranging from a minor failure to mass murder. It details the other party involved in the act, the character’s reason for doing it and how it was resolved. Each of these results is weighted so that a tally of the results can be placed on a standard law-chaos/good-evil alignment scale (if your game relies on such a barometer).

The upside for a GM is that you have an NPC who has either done wrong or was wronged (depending on your interpretation), a pattern of behavior and an ethic to follow. Paired with a result from a table of possible flaws, you have the makings of a villain or rival, their motivation and a sense of how far they will go to achieve their ends.

Before you’ve rolled up a single game stat, the GM has a fleshed-out NPC, which can add flavor to an existing campaign or serve as a focus for a given session.

The beauty for Pathfinder GMs is that once you’ve got the background for an NPC, a supplement like NPC Codex provides stats for adversaries of every base class and level. Meaning that finding a match is simply a matter of referencing the table of contents.

Either way, Ultimate Campaign’s background generator is food for thought, a worthwhile list of suggestions for NPC development.