Creating Memorable NPC's

10/16/20 • 13 min

Hello Storytellers,
There are only two types of NPC's: those that are forgotten and those that are remembered. Sadly, most storytellers have forgettable NPC's. That is a shame because with a little work (and not a lot truly) you can create 1 - 3 NPC's that the players could love or absolutely hate.
This brings your game to life. Now I am not advocating that EVERY. SINGLE. NPC. should be remembered, but the ones that are helpful to your players should be. The ones that are recurring should be. The ones that you might want to kill much later for dramatic effect have to be.
Listen to find tips and tricks from using different voices or accents to props if you can't modulate your voice to make your NPC's stand out.

Previous Episode

Play this idea: Village trapped in time due to a botched experiment

Hey Storytellers,
One way to amp up the suspense and terror is to put your players into a "closed-loop" scenario. If you ever watched any movies from the 1980s or before it was very common to have this happen to your heroes. There is a storm, the phone lines are cut (and cell phones don't exist yet), everybody is trapped in one location like a mansion or hotel. Queue lights turning off for less than a minute and then one person is killed. Queue lightning crash. Shocked gasps.
Ok, that is harder to do if your players have teleport or many forms of magic. Stuck in a room, "I cast stone shape." But here is a scenario where it works.
Your players come into a town. They can start to notice that fashion and language sound odd. A "knowledge Local" or similar knowledge will reveal the language is about 200ish years old. That is odd, but maybe the players ran into the RPG equivalent of the Amish.
I won't get into all of it here in the description, but we lay out many possible ways for the players to discover that there is a wizard who is going to perform a grand experiment in the next X days or hours. The issue is the experiment failed and it locked everyone in time.
Over the next hours or days, your players are slowly becoming a part of the story and are less and less able to affect it. If they can't stop the wizard from doing the experiment they will be trapped in the story forever. Of course, there are consequences to stopping the wizard.
This builds on the ideas of psychological horror and choice, as well as using a timeline to build suspense and terror. These three concepts were handled in earlier episodes not that long ago.

Next Episode

Game Idea: Ghosts of children are really demons in your RPG

Hey Storytellers,
Nothing is more frightening in horror than children. If you haven't watched Netflix's The Haunting of Hill House (season 1) it is worth it. So much horror deals with children in some shape or form.
Learn more at https://skullrpg.com
Get the free Tell Your Story course here
What happens if you turn this on its head? What happens if your gaming group is asked to help a woman put to rest the ghost of a child?
We will explore changing each ghost in your RPG to function as spirits of the dead do in the show Supernatural. There are rules to properly dispatch a ghost.
And if your group determines that those rules don't work then what is left? What about a demon that can take on the appearance of a ghost child to invoke pity and fear? And those are the emotions it feeds upon.

Come down the rabbit hole for a good story idea that you can use this week.