Smuggler's Shiv NPC's

[warpi9]

How important are the NPC's in the Smuggler Shiv? More importantly do they appear later in the Serpent's Skull AP?

I was thinking about only using a couple, because it seems like a lot of work to keep track of them. And I'm not good at running NPC's along with managing an adventure.

Or if they do appear later in the adventure path are they easily able to be taken out? Though I do like the diplomacy involved with them early on.

If I only run a couple of NPC's any suggestion of who? And then what about base camp, can 2 NPC's realistically defend it, or should I not worry about defense then?

Sorry for all the questions but this AP looks great and I really want to run it, but there is a lot of stuff involved.

Thanx

[ithuriel]

Spoiler:

Once the players make it off the island several groups are going to try to recruit them to find the lost city of Saventh Yhi. Each of the 5 NPCs in the first adventure has a link to one of those groups so it is possible that at least one of the NPCs will become a recurring character throughout the campaign. If one becomes your ally he or she will be a handy npc for the PCs to rescue from danger here and there. While the PCs will end up working for one faction, all five will be looking for the lost city. They will have rivals out there working against them and some other castaway could end up as a recurring adversary. It is certainly possible that none of the NPCs make it off the island and the adventure will go on without them. In that case you just lose one element that adds some sense of continuity to the overall path, but the story goes on.

It's too bad if you only run it with two, but if you know your players well enough to pick which faction they will likely ally with I'd make sure that guy is there. It's like this:
Pathfinder Society: Gelik
Aspis Consortium: Ishirou
Red Mantis Assassins: Sasha
Shackles Pirates: Aerys
Sargavan Govt: Jask

Personally I'm not that great at improving so many NPCs either so what I'm doing to try to compensate is to basically create a series of "camp scenes" ready to run on different nights when the PCs make it back to camp. Something to make sure they get an idea of who is who. There is a lot of day by day dice rolling during those initial days of the AP with so many NPCs. I'd recommend pre-rolling several days worth of disease exposure, morale, wandering monsters, etc for each session and preparing them in a handy chart. Something to reduce the on-the-fly book keeping.

[warpi9]

hey thanks, actually that sounds worth dealing with the npc's

[ithuriel]

A little more edited in above.