Oct 24, 2019 by [ "James R. Miller" ]
Categories: rpgs Tags: 5e dnd homebrew lets-write-a_module

Let's write a module part 5: Major NPCs

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:

  1. The soldier
  2. The fiancee
  3. The town mayor
  4. Some townsfolk
  5. The town constable
  6. A few NPCs instrumental in getting fiancee to break her promise and marry another
  7. The big-bad-evil-guy devil that is summoned
  8. Some minor devils / imps that serve as reinforcements

Major NPCs

Of the above, I think the major NPCs are the following:

  1. The soldier
  2. The big-bad-evil-guy devil that is summoned

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.

The Soldier

Name
Vyncis Gysby
Race and Gender
Human male that becomes a variant tiefling after his deal with the devil
Stats
Before deal with devil, uses the Veteran stats. After the deal, will get some buffs (tiefling racials plus some other buffs)
Description
Vyncis is a human male soldier that loved his fiancee and who honed his skills waging guerilla war against an orc tribe in the far-north mountains. Losing his fiancee unleashed a latent dark side, as he employed his skills for evil instead of good. Deep down, he knows that there is little chance for redemption and earning his fiancee back after murdering her husband in cold blood.

The Big Bad Devil

Name
Asquirion
Stats
Barbed Devil
Description
Asquirion is a minor devil of the first-level of Hell, Avernus. He has been looking for ways out of Avernus in order to avoid the horrible Blood War that wages on between devil and demons in Avernus. He sees this opportunity to corrupt Vyncis and his time on the material plane to harvest enough souls to be promoted from Avernus.

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