This is a polish-up of a tweetstorm I wrote a while ago. I keep forgetting that it’s better to write here than on Twitter; force of habit I guess.

I saw someone talking about how “only certain important NPCs really need detail”. I came to thinking of how I applied the concept “all NPCs are major” when writing Hiss and Bridewell.

Obviously this is an impossible aim — after all, there are potentially infinite NPCs — but this was a driving force for incorporating the sly and suggestive approach inspired by Haiku and Sijo I took to describing characters (and everything else) in them.

During writing of Bridewell, I realised that by choosing which NPCs are the main characters of the story, I’m choosing the direction the story may take by limiting the referees choices. If all NPCs are major, then any route the story takes is the right one. I am constantly surprised at the routes players of Hiss and Bridewell have taken, because any route is supported.

The trade off is to fit this amount of opportunity into the module, I can’t fit all these major characters into a book if I give them all one-page character descriptions. So the referee has to take the seeds that my short descriptions provide and let them grow in their own minds.

Practically I’ve found that I have two levels of description. I’ve got multiple sentence descriptions, usually two or three sentences in length, but up to five, used for characters that definitely exist, and I’ve got single sentence descriptions, usually two or three words in length, but up to five, used for characters that exist to be picked out of the crowd. These shorter descriptions usually come in lists — d6 in Hoss and d14 in Bridewell — for when the PCs as to grab someone off the street. A useful technique to make the world seem more real, is to include some of the longer described characters in these lists too. This results in the result of the d14 druid roll potentially being one of the townspeople you met in the pub, an actual campaign–redirecting even that occurred in Bridewell for instance.

I have utter confidence in referees, even less experienced referees, capacity to do this.

So when you’re thinking about writing NPCs, consider that by grouping PCs into major and minor, you’re effectively providing a railroad through characterisation. It’s impossible to remove all guidelines. But what would it look like for all your characters to be major characters and none of them bit players?

I’d love to see what your version of this might look like; no doubt very different from mine. But if you’re curious what gesturing towards this may look like, Hiss is a load of fun to run and it’s the first release where I’ve tried to do this. Bridewell is yet to be released, but it’s the same, but on a far larger scale.

24th September, 2023

Idle Cartulary