“When I found so astonishing a power placed within my hands, I hesitated a long time concerning the manner in which I should employ it. Although I possessed the capacity of bestowing animation, yet to prepare a frame for the reception of it, with all its intricacies of fibres, muscles, and veins, still remained a work of inconceivable difficulty and labour.” — Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus, by Mary Wollstonecraft (Godwin) Shelley It’s not easy, making a monster—just ask Victor Frankenstein.
Blessed with genius, imagination and the ability to take painstaking care in the fabrication of his own creature, he failed to consider its place in the greater world and, for that reason, Frankenstein’s story did not end well. In the end, Frankenstein’s monster destroyed everything the doctor loved and led him on a long chase that ended only with the doctor’s death. The monster, having outlasted his creator, was doomed to exist in exile. Victor Frankenstein created a monster for his world, but he did not create a place for his monster within that world.
If he had, perhaps they both would’ve met a more satisfying end. Similarly, you can help guarantee the success of your own “monsters”—your non-player-characters—by carefully planning their role in your own game world. Creating NPCs can be challenging for Storytellers, particularly when introducing recurring or high-profile NPCs intended to make several appearances in your game. Thankfully, there are a few tried-and-true ways to not only ensure your NPCs are vibrant, unique and well-rounded, but these tips can also help you avoid common pitfalls that often occur once an NPC encounters your players.
Through a little experimentation and a little game “science,” you’ll soon be making unforgettable, dynamic NPCs to enhance your game and elevate your players’ stories. The Bare Bones: Identifying an NPC’s Purpose As a Storyteller, you are not only responsible for the administration of your game, you also serve as the architect, gatekeeper, and interpreter of the game world, providing both an immersive setting and a wealth of potential plotlines for your players to explore that world.
NPCs are one of the most powerful tools Storytellers can use to achieve multiple goals— but it’s important to identify those objectives, before you can make characters to help you meet them. Setting goals will provide the foundation for your NPCs, and they will inform the majority of your choices as you proceed in the NPCs’ creation. Think of it like choosing the skeleton upon which you’ll build the rest of your creature—these objectives will provide both the foundation and direction for the rest of the decisions you’ll make.
Here are a few of the common reasons why a Storyteller might wish to use an NPC:
• To introduce or continue plotlines, such as two rival elders who seek to use the player-characters to their own ends
• To reinforce or highlight an aspect of the setting, such as introducing a Nosferatu spy-master to showcase how that clan can thrive in its stereotypical role
• To enhance the realism or vibrancy of the game, such as the introduction of a character who is closely attached to a real-world figure important to your setting
• To provide challenges or introduce obstacles for PCs to attempt to overcome, such as a powerful Sabbat antagonist for a Camarilla game
• To embody or react to story elements generated by players, such as an Archon who responds to a Masquerade breach caused by player-characters And it’s possible for an NPC to serve more than one purpose too—in fact, the best ones do—but it is critical to lay out all of the various reasons why you’ll use an NPC before you introduce it. Remember, these NPCs are often the “face” of your game—the channel through which players directly interact with your setting and plot. If you don’t have a clear idea why you’re using these NPCs, neither will your players. Avoid the temptation to create an NPC based on an incharacter task, such as “embarrass the Prince,” or “depose the Harpy.” At this phase, it’s best to keep your objectives wholly out of character. While your NPCs might take on the above tasks, in keeping with the NPC’s motivation (see below), if your NPC exists only for one task, you may find yourself without a reason for the NPC to change tactics or be affected by playercharacters’ actions. If you have a clear set of out-of-character goals for the NPC’s use, it’ll help you keep your stories from feeling like they’re “on rails.” (For more information about It’s Alive! Tips for Creating Dynamic NPCs Smith avoiding “rail” plots, see Mind’s Eye Theatre: Vampire The Masquerade, Chapter Eight: Storytelling, Player Agency and the Railroad Plot, page 344.) Example: Let’s imagine that you’re Storytelling a game with a large population of Toreador characters. Their players have banded together and formed an in-character clique; they hold several positions of power in the game, and they tend to snatch up the best rumors and plotlines and pursue them without involving the rest of the game. This situation is bogging down the game, especially for players of other clans. You might consider using NPCs for a few reasons in this situation, including providing more challenges to the Toreador players as well as the rest of the game, to provide some alternative perspectives on how Toreador characters can interact with your game world, and to pull some elements out of the Toreador characters’ backgrounds and bring them to life in your game. Flexing Some Muscle: Identifying the NPC’s motivations Once you’ve determined the out-of-character reasons why you need an NPC, it’s time to bridge the gap between intention and action by outlining some reasons why this NPC is motivated to interact with player-characters. This step is a little like adding muscles to the skeleton you laid out earlier—they give your creature the ability to move. Determining a character’s motivation is a technique often used by professional actors to make their own performances more believable—try using the same technique with your NPCs to provide clear motivation and enhance both your actors’ portrayals and the player-characters’ reception to your NPCs. Ask yourself the following questions:
• What is this NPC trying to achieve?
• Why does the NPC care about this situation?
• What does the NPC stand to gain, or lose?
• What might cause this NPC to change its mind or alter its tactics? Motivations can and should change as your players react (or fail to react) to the NPC’s own actions. Periodically, you should ask yourself questions to the ones above, and see if you need to make adjustments. Example: Knowing that your NPCs will exist for purposes related to the large clique of Toreador in your game, you consider some stereotypical allies and antagonists of Clan Toreador. Since you are hoping to provide some challenges, you consider traditional enemies—such as a Nosferatu, who will probably dislike Toreador, or a Sabbat Toreador antitribu, who may hold a grudge against clanmates from years before. Looking through your players’ character backgrounds, you notice that one of them used to be a Nosferatu ghoul, who was poached by and then Embraced into the Toreador clan. This connection gives you the ability to meet more than one of the goals you outlined earlier, and you make the choice to use a Nosferatu antagonist to offer your players a greater challenge. With this spark of an idea in mind, you work through the questions outlined above:
• What is this NPC trying to achieve? This Nosferatu wants to make the Toreador—and her allies—pay for poaching the ghoul.
• Why does the NPC care about this situation? He feels something precious was not just stolen from his clan, but also turned into something he despises.
• What does the NPC stand to gain or lose? If he succeeds, he gains the satisfaction of revenge; if he loses, he damages the reputation of his clan in the city.
• What might cause this NPC to change its mind or alter its tactics? If he becomes convinced that other vampires, not of the Toreador clan, were responsible for poaching the ghoul, he may focus on another target. Showing Some Skin: NPC Inspirations and Backgrounds At this point, you may be tempted to simply give the NPC a name and run with it—“after all,” you might think, “how much more do you need for a stereotypical NPC?” Resist this temptation—you’re just getting started. There’s much more you can add to this character to not only make it more dynamic, but to also equip it for success—and remember, success is measured not by whether the NPC “wins” or “loses,” but whether you meet the objectives you outlined in step one. Although your NPC should not need a background as fully fleshed out as a player-character, it should still have enough of a background to make it feel like a character, instead of caricature. At a minimum, you should identify the relative power level of the character and the resources it could bring to bear to reach the goals set by its motivations. Ask yourself the following:
• How powerful should this character be, relative to the average Experience Points (XP) of your game’s characters?
• How powerful should this character be, relative to the incharacter resources possessed by your game’s characters?
• What makes this character uniquely itself, as opposed to a simple stereotype?
• What methods does this character use to meet its aims?
• Are there aspects of the setting you can reinforce in this character’s background?
• Are there aspects from player-character backgrounds that could be tied into the NPC’s background?
• Are there any roleplaying quirks I can give this character, to help guide my actor’s performance? Consider for a moment how these questions will inform your choices about the character. For example, while you may wish for your Nosferatu character to present a considerable challenge, you can easily make your players feel powerless to affect the story if you make it too powerful. Tip: Power Balance You can often balance the power level of an NPC, relative to your game’s PCs, by giving it powerful in-game resources, without giving it a large quantity of XP. For example, if an Archon comes to your game to investigate, but the Archon doesn’t have a significantly high amount of XP, that Archon will likely be forced to build alliances and hire playercharacters to assist it with its task. One of the character’s motivations may be preventing the PCs from discovering that it is not particularly powerful in combat. This will not only help your actor portray a more complex character, but it will also give your players more opportunities to become active participants in the story the NPC generates. Tip: Draw On Local History In Vampire: The Masquerade, characters can be inspired from nearly any period of history, and using real-life past events almost always helps a character feel more real, assists you and your actor identify unique roleplaying opportunities, and enhances your game’s setting. Do a few minutes of research on the history of your setting and see if you can find an anchor for a vampire character there. For example, a character from Las Vegas may have been Embraced during the hey-day of the mob; a character from Chicago may have lived through the infamous Chicago Fire and have Derangements triggered by fire. Take the time to write some detailed notes about the NPC’s background. Even if the character isn’t slated for many appearances, you may find it helpful as inspiration when you’re working on related stories. Your actors will also find your notes very helpful as they prepare to portray the character. Example: Considering your Nosferatu antagonist, you spend some time researching your locale’s real-life history. Since your game is set in Hawaii (lucky you!), you draw on the attack at Pearl Harbor for inspiration. You decide that the character used to be a Navy mechanic, who was badly injured during the attack, particularly across the face, and even after his Embrace into Clan Nosferatu, you can still see the distinct scar marks that crisscross his face from that injury. Because he dealt with the social stigma of his scars during his mortal years as well as his vampire ones, he bitterly hates attractive people—a hatred he often channels toward Clan Toreador. Additionally, you check your characters’ backgrounds again, and confirm that the time frame works so that this NPC can also be the Nosferatu domitor of the character who was poached as a ghoul and Embraced into the Toreador clan. Now he has two reasons to desire revenge on the clan of roses. Making these decisions will help shape some of this character’s other attributes and will help you determine the resources he might use when he acts on his motivations. For example, this character has been Embraced for about 70 years—he is not an elder. As a former mechanic, he’ll likely be comfortable working with technology. As a former military man, he likely knows how to fight, and so forth. You decide that he’ll be of Ancilla generation, and you focus his Skill purchases in Brawl, Melee, Computer, and Crafts: Engineering. The Breath of Life: Foibles, Flaws, and Falsehoods At this point, your creature’s shape is nearly complete—it may even look perfect—but the human (or vampire) condition is never flawless. Even Doctor Frankenstein could not see his own creation’s horrific qualities until he gave it life. In order to give your character a touch of realism, now’s the time to introduce some defining weaknesses and really give that NPC a spark of vitality. Defining your NPC’s flaws is just as important as defining its strengths and resources. Without weaknesses, not only will the character lack authenticity, it may also present too daunting of a challenge to players. Give your NPC a few limitations that can be exploited—and make sure to introduce flaws that mesh well with a few different types of play styles. For example, if you design an NPC who is physically weak in combat but has no weaknesses that social roleplayers or downtime-action masters can use, you narrowly limit not only the types of players who can be involved in its plots, but you also restrict the strategies that can be employed against it. Take a variety of play styles into consideration as you build your NPCs. Example: You’ve established that your Nosferatu antagonist hates attractive characters, and since this is a defining characteristic, you want to represent this quality as an actual mechanical Flaw. You give him a Destruction Derangement with the trigger “attractive people,” but this Flaw is one-dimensional, so you consider your players’ tactics and look for other weaknesses to introduce. You decide that although the character’s Computer and Crafts skills could be very useful, he lacks money and equipment to utilize them to their fullest potential. You opt to give the character zero dots of the Resources background, nor does he possess any Equipment to boost his technical skills. This means that before he can fully realize his plan to act against the city’s Toreador, he’ll need to find other allies who might compensate for those obstacles. Now you’ve not only established a flaw the Toreador might exploit, but you’ve also given this character a new secondary motivation (obtain resources)—complete with a related task (find allies)—to act out once it’s portrayed at game. Braaaaains: Selecting an Actor to Portray the NPC There’s one more important thing to consider before you can allow your NPC to encounter the players—who will portray it? Think of this step like choosing the right brain for your creature. Often, Storytellers feel they don’t have a sufficient pool of people—or the time to properly prepare those people—when considering potential actors. But even the most theatrically skilled Storytellers can’t portray every NPC, and splitting your time between NPC portrayals and Storyteller duties often results in lack of time to do either role justice. There’s also an additional benefit to selecting an actor to portray your NPC—they frequently add their own flourishes to those characters, giving them new angles and hidden depths you would never have conceived on your own. This not only adds further realism to the characters, but they also help your NPCs avoid feeling routine or predictable to your players. Even though having an actor provides many benefits, it can feel tough to find actors sometimes. Consider the following people when looking for someone to portray your NPCs:
• Former players who left your troupe on good terms
• On-again, off-again players who are too time-challenged to routinely attend game on a long-term basis
• Current players whose characters seem to be stagnating
• Experienced players from other games in your area
• Potential new players—ideal for groups or teams of NPCs led by a knowledgeable player It’s important to consider those actors’ strengths and weaknesses when casting NPC roles. Some players may be experienced with the game mechanics, but aren’t personally eloquent. Others may have unique skills, such as costuming or real performance skills, that will enhance a given role. Once you’ve selected an actor, provide him or her with your character notes as far in advance as possible, and invite the actor to suggest additions or modifications to the NPC— particularly modifications that help the actor play the role using her own personal strengths. This collaboration will not only help you provide a unique and realistic character, well suited to its purpose, but it will also help the actor prepare for and feel comfortable in the role. Opening Your Eyes and Ears: Maintain Player Agency After putting all this work into your NPC, it is natural to become attached—and if the NPC becomes popular, your players will seek out ways to encounter it as much as possible. This is good—it means you’ve built your NPC well—but it can also lead to a slippery slope in which the NPC slowly steals more and more spotlight from the PCs. After a while, the players may come to believe that their actions don’t matter as much as the NPC’s, and this can damage the health of your game. Remember, NPCs are merely a tool to enhance the story the players are telling—the NPCs are supporting cast, not the stars of the show. Every time an NPC appears in game, you should make sure that both you and your actor reinforce the importance of the players’ actions in the course of the game’s events. This can be done directly—such as by having an NPC make a public announcement praising a character’s actions— but you can also introduce subtle ways of making players feel empowered to affect the course of the story. For example, your NPC could simply ask, “What do you think we should do?” This straightforward question can go a long way to help maintain players’ sense of agency. It’s also important to periodically revisit the purpose you established for the NPC in step one. Have you achieved your objectives? Maybe it’s time to allow the NPC to fade back out of the story. Perhaps alterations to the story have created a situation where the NPC cannot possibly meet the objectives you laid out for it—this may be the time to script a dramatic death. Are the players relying on the NPC too often? Maybe it’s time to have the NPC fail spectacularly, to reinforce the fact that it is fallible. When you create the character, make sure to estimate the amount of appearances it may have, as well as how long it will be available as an offstage resource for your players—and revisit this information when you reconsider the NPC’s purpose. Sample NPC: Franklin Stein, Nosferatu Antagonist
• Purpose: Provide challenge for large population of Toreador players; Reinforce game setting utilizing local history; Encourage alliances between smaller groups of non-Toreador.
• Motivation: Character desires to get revenge on the Toreador clan for poaching his ghoul—he wants to see the clan humiliated and to tangibly lessen their power. Secondary motivation is to increase personal resources and build alliances to support the primary motivation.
• Background: Former Navy engineer, injured during WWII attack on Pearl Harbor. NPC has military knowledge and experience, harbors grudge from disfiguring injury towards those he feels are attractive.
• Relative Power Level: Moderately challenging—20% more XP than average player-character; Ancilla generation.
• Resources Available to this NPC: Physical prowess, local area knowledge, computer and engineering skills.
• Roleplaying notes: Unreasoning hatred of attractive people, regardless of whether or not those people are vampires or of a particular clan. Uses slang appropriate to the 1940s.
• Estimated Timeframe for Use: Three months—scheduled to appear for four games—two back-to-back games the first month, and then once every other game for another two months.
• Possible Exit Conditions: Successfully embarrass or cause to harm to multiple Toreador; Suffer significant social embarrassment or public condemnation; Convinced to target another opponent who is not a PC; Character death. Alternate Sample NPC: Victoria, Toreador Antitribu What if we’d chosen the other option we considered at the beginning of this exercise and opted to use a Toreador antitribu antagonist instead? Here’s how this antagonist NPC might look:
• Purpose: Provide challenge for large population of Toreador players; Reinforce the cold war between the Sabbat and the Camarilla as dictated by the default game setting; Encourage players to explore the roleplay opportunities presented by juxtaposing Humanity against Paths of Enlightenment.
• Motivation: Character desires to punish the Toreador of the Volgirre bloodline for leaving the Sabbat; Character seeks to infiltrate the Camarilla and obtain information useful to the Sabbat.
• Background: Although not of the Volgirre bloodline, this NPC used to have a Volgirre member of her pack— the NPC considers the departure of the Volgirre to be a personal betrayal as well as treason against the Sword of Caine. The NPC came to Hawaii only a few months ago; she is previously from a nomadic pack ranging the American Southwest and northern Mexico. Before her Embrace, she was a driver for Mexican drug cartels— she is a Neonate, familiar with modern customs and technology. Her pack—the Desert Scorpions—has come with her and routinely checks up on her to ensure she remains loyal during her infiltration.
• Relative Power Level: Extremely challenging—75% more XP than average player-character; Neonate generation.
• Resources Available to this NPC: Physical prowess, assistance of her pack (which includes a Coyote, a Brujah antitribu and a Tzimisce), skilled at tracking, survival and subterfuge, possesses an established Alternate Identity as a Camarilla Toreador.
• Roleplaying notes: Integrates Spanish slang into casual conversation, follows the Path of Cathari and has difficulty concealing her desire to indulge in vice. Possesses Camarilla lore, but not all of her information is correct, will occasionally make awkward mistakes of understanding.
• Estimated Timeframe for Use: Two months—scheduled to appear for four games.
• Possible Exit Conditions: NPC is expected to be discovered and destroyed; possibility exists that NPC will uncover one of the two Volgirre PCs and will attempt to abduct them and bring them to Mexico with the aid of her pack (likely to result in pursuit and combat). If NPC is not uncovered and does not succeed in finding a Volgirre in four games, NPC’s pack will insist they depart and return to the mainland U.S., at which point the NPC will deliver the information she’s collected (to be used in future plotlines). The Bride of Frankenstein: Preparing for the Sequel Once you’ve had the opportunity to build and observe your creations in game, you’ll see how a well-crafted NPC can not only enhance the game’s richness and excitement for your players, but you’ll also be better prepared to build even better monsters in the future. Perhaps your creations’ stories will live on past your tenure as Storyteller, much like Doctor Frankenstein’s monster surpassed his creator’s infamy and lives on to capture our imaginations to this day. Jen “Loopy” Smith has more than 15 years’ experience as an editor; her credits include working as the editor and a developer for Mind’s Eye Theatre: Vampire The Masquerade. She’s a life-long gamer and has been playing Vampire since 1994, primarily as a member of One World by Night, where she’s held a number of global administrative positions, including Camarilla Sect Coordinator and Toreador Clan Coordinator. She has a favorite punctuation mark—the dash—and she’s not afraid of semi-colons.
Originally published in Mind’s Eye Theatre: Storyteller Secrets by By Night Studios. Presented here under Resources for chronicles and live play.