How are multiclassed characters determined in power centers (communities)?

[Baramay]

To be clear on my question, do you substitute other classes? Are multiclassed characters just added since there are not many? For example, in Dungeon 85 Lord of the Scarlet Tide by James Jacobs there is a character named Bladestorm. She is a Clr6/Rgr6. I know this is not too recent but my campaign is headed to Narwell. What about a Wiz4/Exp10?

As a side not, I know that often submissions are not included 100%. Allan Grohe has extra material, from his Artifacts of Oerth, on his website. Gary Holian has/will present additional Irongate material on Canonfire. I am looking for Narwell material from anyone, specifically do you still have old notes, James?

[Thanis Kartaleon]

I made a thread on this a while back. Enjoy!

[James Jacobs]

Bladestorm's actually an established NPC from older Greyhawk material; I included her as an easter egg for Greyhawk fans and for continuity and all that. There's not really any guidelines for how many multiclassed characters show up in cities. Personally, I feel that they should be the exception; sure, PCs multiclass a lot, but there are only ever a few PCs in any one game. They're hardly the majority. By maintaining multiclass characters as unique characters rather than just generic NPCs, you keep that whole thing less commonplace.

As for Narwell, I don't have much more notes about the place. "Scarlet Tide" was originally going to be a 2-part adventure, but then when another adventure failed to show up in time for the issue, Chris Perkins decided to run the whole thing. There wasn't much (if anything at all) cut from the adventure.

[Baramay]

Thanis Kartaleon wrote:

I made a thread on this a while back. Enjoy!

Thanks Thanis I will check it out. I did a multiclass search and did not find anything, guess I just missed it.

Thanks James, I usually substitute multiclass and other classes not listed in the DMG breakdown (such as warlocks, scouts, etc.) for classes not familiar to the area. In Greyhawk I have few monks outside the Scarlet Brotherhood or Baklunish lands, so this is a good place to substitute. The same applies to barbarians in the more civilized areas. Maybe only 1/2 are barbarians.

[Rezdave]

Baramay wrote:

To be clear on my question, do you substitute other classes?

With all due respect to James' opinion about multi-class characters, my campaign includes a pared down Core class list and I encourage multi-classing where appropriate to the character concept.

I agree that multi-class PCs are far more common than multi-class NPCs, yet my world still has a lot of the latter for conceptual reasons.

If you're like me, my advice would be to substitute rather than add, making a swap with the Core class to which the multi-classed NPC's concept is functionally closest. You'd do the same with NPC Prestige classes and so forth.

You'll have to decide if you want to swap NPCs and CRs 1:1 or not. For example, does an Ftr5/Wiz3 replace an Ftr8 or could it replace both an Ftr5 and a Wiz3 (or Ftr4 and Wiz4) trading 1-for-2? That's your call. I'd be flexible and do whatever I felt was right for the given locale.

Rez