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Hey guys. I'm about to DM a game of Council of Thieves for my local group, but I have a question about a possible players handout. Namely the Westcrown: City of Twilight Chapter in the Bastards of Erebus. I've had a look through it a few times, and nothing really suggests that it'd be inappropriate for my players to read, other then the brief stat lines of course, but those are easily changeable. So, am I missing something important, or can I give that chapter to my players and not worry about spoilers?
Just make sure you notice that a number of NPC's alignments and class levels are listed on the second page of the article, some of whom have roles to play throughout the next few adventures. Also, when discussing the Dottari, they again give the alignments and classes of the captains. You may or may not want your players to pre-judge characters in the path based on a listed alignment. Otherwise, the article is quite awesome in its description of the city.
Pretty much spoiler free.
You should not include the "Council of Thieves" section, as it's not generally known to still exist. That is one of the APs revelations.
I think everything else is mostly safe to reveal, although I would cut the alignments and classes of the NPCs. There are several of these scattered throughout the article, even in the sections on specific locations.
But in general, the article would function very well as a handout.
It could be handy to let the player's know how much noble families there are living in Westcrown, their names and their standing.
I made some genealogy tables, starting with the provided information and expanding them later to give my PCs a slight connection to the poor anonymous nobles
I took the major families given and made a (big damned) hierarchy of noble houses, including the last names of professional or noble NPC's they will meet in the adventures. If the players were nobility, I gave them a name that fit into this structure and gave them the houses they were ultimately beholden to. Since the city background said there were about 250 families who claimed to be noble, I put about that many names in the chart, though some were 'orphan' families that nobody could directly connect to another.
This gave them connections to other families in the AP (and each other), and some connection to the high nobles, whether by duty or blood. I gave the families a 'vocation' as well, or an area in which they had direct control of major activities in the city.
It also gave me a pool of last names for NPC's without any, or for ones I needed to make up in the course of the adventure.
This was a pretty long process, but it added a lot of depth and got the players immersed. We also had a long campaign with lots of side quests, so it was worth the effort.
I did something similiar, basically denoting which families were party of the Council, if they were loyalists or radicals (Old guard vs new), and what businesses around town the families influenced. This made for more of a conspiratorial setting but also made for some good role-playing.
It seems to have paid off, as the last session I ran (first part of module 6) was a prelude to the chaos: the first nighttime theater production to appear in thirty years. At the after-party, the PC's basically mingled with the heads of all the houses and tried to sway certain nobles who were still loyalists of the Council toward there cause. It also let me weave Vuiper Ghivel in earlier, as has been suggested in another thread.
In any case, I recommend trying to incorporate the dynamic your players would like best when it comes to all the families listed. If they're light on the RP, you can simply have the families be backdrops, but for my group, I basically had to flush out who exactly works for the Council of Thieves beyond the obvious players.
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I took the major families given and made a (big damned) hierarchy of noble houses, including the last names of professional or noble NPC's they will meet in the adventures. If the players were nobility, I gave them a name that fit into this structure and gave them the houses they were ultimately beholden to. Since the city background said there were about 250 families who claimed to be noble, I put about that many names in the chart, though some were 'orphan' families that nobody could directly connect to another.
This gave them connections to other families in the AP (and each other), and some connection to the high nobles, whether by duty or blood. I gave the families a 'vocation' as well, or an area in which they had direct control of major activities in the city.
It also gave me a pool of last names for NPC's without any, or for ones I needed to make up in the course of the adventure.
This was a pretty long process, but it added a lot of depth and got the players immersed. We also had a long campaign with lots of side quests, so it was worth the effort.
Treppa,
This is an excellent idea. I'm getting to run this campaign for my group soon, any chance you'd care to share your work?
Treppa,
This is an excellent idea. I'm getting to run this campaign for my group soon, any chance you'd care to share your work?
Oh, shoot, it's horribly ugly. Give me a day or two to clean it up and make it more user-friendly. Do you have Excel?
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I haven't used Google Docs like this before, so hope it works.
There are two pages, one for nobility and one for non-noble families. A lot of the professions are incomplete, but you can add whatever you feel.
In hindsight, I should have distinguished the family names used in the AP from made-up ones. My schedule is jammed right now, but if I get time to update it, I'll let you know.
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Glad you guys like that. If your PC's are like mine and want to do tons of ad hoc RP, this might come in handy:
You need to decide what surname the family is, then this spreadsheet generates a standard family unit: husband, wife, and random number of children based on the wife's age. It will produce a gender, given name, and age for each person. It occasionally gets flaky ages or numbers of children because of randomness or rounding error. If you don't like what you see, F9 refreshes it. Flaky numbers can give you ideas for fun backstories, though, so don't F9 too hastily. In one test I made, I wondered what a 58 year old woman with 13 children was doing married to a 17-year-old man. There's gotta be a story there.
Copy and paste special (values) to save a configuration you like, or paste to a doc. You can load up the source sheets with your own favorite names. I used baby name lists from Italy for Westcrown. Enjoy.
Your friendly neighborhood lazy GM,
Treppa
Glad you guys like that. If your PC's are like mine and want to do tons of ad hoc RP, this might come in handy:
You need to decide what surname the family is, then this spreadsheet generates a standard family unit: husband, wife, and random number of children based on the wife's age. It will produce a gender, given name, and age for each person. It occasionally gets flaky ages or numbers of children because of randomness or rounding error. If you don't like what you see, F9 refreshes it. Flaky numbers can give you ideas for fun backstories, though, so don't F9 too hastily. In one test I made, I wondered what a 58 year old woman with 13 children was doing married to a 17-year-old man. There's gotta be a story there.
Copy and paste special (values) to save a configuration you like, or paste to a doc. You can load up the source sheets with your own favorite names. I used baby name lists from Italy for Westcrown. Enjoy.
Your friendly neighborhood lazy GM,
Treppa
i can finally fill out npc families!
i can finally fill out npc families!
I don't know why, but my players get curious about details about the NPC's, and are very likely to ask a shopkeeper, "So, you married? Got kids? How old are they?" and so forth. It's nice to have a family or two in the notebook to pull out at need. And sometimes these lead to story threads, so I hate to blow them off.