Oct 24, 2019 by [ "James R. Miller"
]
Categories:
rpgs
Tags:
5e
dnd
homebrew
lets-write-a_module
This blog post will look at identifying some of our major and minor NPCs, and writing a 1-2 sentence description on our major NPCs. We’ll do our minor NPCs in the next post.
From part 4, we have our tentative working paragraph as follows:
A soldier returns to his childhood home from a long campaign waging guerilla warfare to find his beloved fiancee married to the town mayor. The soldier kills the town mayor in a fit of rage and then attempts to flee. Stricken with grief, a devil appears and tempts the soldier into an infernal contract giving the soldier powers and reinforcements to wage his revenge on all members of the town that encouraged or otherwise blessed the marriage. The soldier, using his new-found resources and powers, ambushes and kills those deserving the soldier’s revenge. As the soldier grows more corrupt and confident, he summons a powerful new devil reinforcement but the soldier loses control, and the devil escalates the infernal influence on the town.
How many NPCs do you spot in here? I see at the minimum:
Of the above, I think the major NPCs are the following:
I consider the rest minor NPCs. That doesn’t mean a minor NPC isn’t important to the story; rather, it simply means the NPC doesn’t need as much fleshing out as the major NPCs.
But that’s just me. Maybe you’d want to go in a direction where the fiancee was forced to marry the mayor and she would have run away with the soldier if he’d just asked, prior marriage be damned. In that case, you’d likely make the fiancee a major NPC. There’s no right answer here; there’s simply your answer.
With that in mind, lets flesh out the major NPCs. I like to start with their name, race, gender, stats, and then a 1-2 sentence description. In the description, try to cover who they are and why they are. This will help you when we drill down to state their explicit motivations and goals in a later snowflake step.
Try not to go into too much detail; think big picture here. I like to think that if I can’t fit the information on a 3x5 index card, it’s too much information for this step. This step is the 3x5 index card, and a later step will turn that 3x5 into a full page.