As a GM, I like to periodically trawl through my backlog of NPCs. That's because a sprawling cast of characters can serve your verisimilitude. When a few months or years of campaign time go by and you’re able to pull out a blast from the past, the world suddenly feels more real. These characters don’t disappear simply because they’ve gone off-screen, but have continued to grow and change while the PCs were away. In my opinion, the effect is at its most powerful when it’s a minor character: a quirky shopkeeper who now owns a franchise or a stray dog, saved by the party back at level 1, who’s since been adopted by a local nobleman. Verisimilitude comes in a lot of different flavors, but I find that minor characters growing, changing, and making return appearances is an easy trick to pull off.
What about the rest of you guys? Have you ever seen a throw-away character come back into the campaign months or years later?
I have had some returning NPCs, but none perfectly fit the definition of throwaway character encountered months later.
1) A villain who escaped returned in disguise for revenge during my Rise of the Runelords campaign. Her revenge failed because unknown to her the party had gone up three levels in three months. Then she started feeding them information about her boss because she did not like her boss. In the final battle, she sided with the party, and ended up as one of their followers. She was too important to count as a throwaway.
2) In The Hungry Storm in the Jade Regent adventure path the party led a caravan over the frozen north polar continent, the Crown of the World. Two of the passengers were a bounty hunter and his captive. Later in the side adventure, The Ruby Phoenix Tournament, the escaped captive approached the party to ask for aid. He had a backup plan of blackmailing them. He unfortunately approached the shadier PCs behind the scenes rather than approaching the kind-hearted good-aligned PCs out in the open. The sorcerer charmed him into revealing his full plan, the ninja killed him instantly, and the barbarian helped dispose of the body. The good party members never learned of the incident.
3) The blackmailable secret in Jade Regent was that the party escorted the lost heir to the Jade Throne of Minkai. However, I had altered the campaign to provide two heirs: Ameiko Kaijitsu who remained behind in Varisia and her half-sister Amaya of Westcrown who traveled across the world with them. But at the beginning of Forest of Spirits, after the party crossed the Crown of the World, Ameiko joined the party. She had very powerful friends from the Rise of the Runelords campaign capable of transporting her across the globe in a single day once Amaya learned the Sending spell and invited her sister along.
4) A throwaway character Dewey Baros in my Iron Gods campaign had a friendly boxing match with a party member at a beer festival in Scrapwall during the Paizo module Lords of Rust (the festival is not in the module). Later, when the party needed to hire some workers, they hired him. When the party had to flee the Technic League, they took him with them. After he almost died in The Choking Tower, they let him stay safely in Torch as the new manager of Silverdisk Hall, a gambling hall that they had converted into a dance hall.
5) Their ally Dinvaya Lanalei, who had provided them with a safe place to stay in Scrapwall, escaped the Technic League on her own. She showed up in the party's hometown Torch weeks later. The party members bought her a house in thanks for her help in Scrapwall.
6) Other workers they hired in Scrapwall were captured and enslaved by the Technic League. Rescuing those slaves was one of their goals in Palace of Fallen Stars, but the slaves had been sent to Silver Mount. The party rescued the surviving slaves in the final module, The Divinity Drive.
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As a GM, I like to periodically trawl through my backlog of NPCs. That's because a sprawling cast of characters can serve your verisimilitude. When a few months or years of campaign time go by and you’re able to pull out a blast from the past, the world suddenly feels more real. These characters don’t disappear simply because they’ve gone off-screen, but have continued to grow and change while the PCs were away. In my opinion, the effect is at its most powerful when it’s a minor character: a quirky shopkeeper who now owns a franchise or a stray dog, saved by the party back at level 1, who’s since been adopted by a local nobleman. Verisimilitude comes in a lot of different flavors, but I find that minor characters growing, changing, and making return appearances is an easy trick to pull off.
What about the rest of you guys? Have you ever seen a throw-away character come back into the campaign months or years later?
Usually, I forget about characters between sessions, let alone I’ve the course of multiple campaigns (usually the name of a character), but I think the idea would be cool.
Off topic, but would you happen to be the author/illustrator of those comics?
Organized Play Developer
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All of our most popular and memorable NPCs in my home games have been throw-away NPCs that were made up on the spur of the moment because the party did something unexpected.
Wattler the ratfolk merchant has shown up across three different campaigns and was originally introduced because a party member died protecting the group from the consequences of another party member's bad choices and the group couldn't afford a raise dead. So they "bumped into" a traveling ratfolk merchant who was willing to take some things in trade from the party they wouldn't necessarily have been able to sell. The party ran into him every now and then throughout the remainder of the campaign and he's become something of a folk hero for that setting.
Old Salty, the blind bard, came about because of a joke that one of the party members was so bad at being on watch they may as well just give their turn in the crow's nest to the blind ship's cook. The blind cook overheard this conversation and agreed that he would do a better job. A couple nights later he joined the party member on their watch and did, in point of fact, hear the muffled splashing of an approaching ship's oars through the fog before the party member was aware they were being raided.
One of my players has a running feud with Sanvil Trett from Iron Gods. Sanvil isn't exactly a throw-away character because he's a statted NPC in Iron Gods, but
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All of our most popular and memorable NPCs in my home games have been throw-away NPCs that were made up on the spur of the moment because the party did something unexpected.
It's a sobering reminder not to use unsustainable voices for silly one-off NPCs. My wife improvised a lisping unicorn once upon a time, and that goofy dialect haunted her for the rest of the campaign.
It's a sobering reminder not to use unsustainable voices for silly one-off NPCs. My wife improvised a lisping unicorn once upon a time, and that goofy dialect haunted her for the rest of the campaign.All of our most popular and memorable NPCs in my home games have been throw-away NPCs that were made up on the spur of the moment because the party did something unexpected.
My partner once GMed an accidentally-recurring winter wolf NPC whose accent was described by one of the other players as "the wolf that ate Sean Connery." He said it was murder on the throat.
We often have NPCs recur in our games, usually AP NPCs with one-line descriptions. Klarah from Wrath of the Righteous went from a one-off NPC for the party to save in book 1 to
WOTR spoiler:
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In my homebrew games, recurring NPCs are probably more the rule than the exception, and they grow and mutate so they can arrive at opportune/inopportune moments.
I even seeded character backstories with NPCs that were going to grow into allies/villains over the course of the campaign.