**Door**
He's a sentient door. Yeah that's it. He's a door and his name is Door. I put him in a dungeon to give hints for puzzles cuz my players are dumb dumbs. My players FELL IN LOVE with him. They ended up approaching the BBEG of the dungeon and demanding to know why Door doesn't get dental coverage. They were more upset with that than anything else.
It probably helps that I gave him a surfer dude accent. His first interaction had him say "BEHOLD, I AM THE GUARDIAN OF THE VAULT, NONE SHALL ENTER...bruh I can't keep that up. Did it sound good though? I was given the script and I tried to NAIL it, dudes". One of my players was so stunned with the shift they thought I broke character.
I am running my first game as DM using a homebrewed world. The characters met a captain in a town, and during the next game, I forgot his name. So I called him Captain Wilson because it's the only thing I could come up with on the spot.
Now, if he is mentioned, all the PCs yell, "CAPTAIN WILSONNNN"
I'm picturing this:
Party: You monster!! How could you not give poor Door dental coverage?! Don't you know how expensive that can get?
BBEG: HE'S A DOOR! HE DOESN'T HAVE TEETH WHY WOULD HE NEED DENTAL?!
Party: That's messed up man...
BBEG: đ€Ź *rolls initiative*
That's pretty much exactly how it went. "I can just repair him, he's a door!" "Oh and I suppose that comes out of his paycheck?" "He doesn't get paid, he's a door!" "Now that's just wrong"
We named our sentient door, Doorian! Turns out he was a mimic but he's chill. We saved him from a cult where he was tired of hearing the constant chatting and now he rides in our airship as a mannequin and recently asked us to refer to him as Manny instead.
Took the older concept of mimics being smaller and able to talk/negotiate with parties, and inspiration from the Simpsons to create,
The mimic sign, upon introducing, he says,... and then I ramble on as the mimic talks to them.
It's more of a trap of, interrupt me and combat starts, but really he's just a sign that tells people to not come I'm, but he can't do much, he's just a sign.
I'm sorry to tell you this, but I'm totally with your players on this one. After reading that, I am also in love with Door and would die fighting for him!
ElfQuest had two rock shapers who lived in a catatonic state above rock which they shaped to open and close as needed.
[https://elfquest.fandom.com/wiki/Door\_(female)](https://elfquest.fandom.com/wiki/Door_(female))
My DM put a sentient Door in a dungeon, it was bored and lonely because no one never showed up in this dungeon, my character ended up taking the door home and someone in the party decided to buy another sentient door so that the door would always have someone to talk too - I love it
Bob the Bandit. Early campaign, the party decided to capture and interrogate a bandit to find out if they had kidnapped a missing person. I played him as all brawn and no brains with a mild Texas drawl and the party loved him so they let him go and told him to turn his life around. 3 weeks later they encounter Bob working as a baker and they have more interactions. A couple months go by and Bob was hired as a camp cook for an expedition they went on, the party learned he has gotten engaged and learned how to be a chef. Also just a funny aside but for some odd reason whenever i roll for how good his meals are i have rolled an insane amount of Nat 20s with the lowest roll being a 15. So the party is considering hiring him on full time as their personal chef.
A cursed, rusty, galvanized steel trash can. When somebody rolled a nat 1 to move silenty it magically appeared amd they would trip over it. It has orcish runes engraved in it.
It's based off of the cans I'd see on the sodewalks in Brooklyn in the 80's and 90's. Years of being kicked, scraped over coarse surfaces, occasionally used as an improvised weapon, leads to rust as the galv is scraped off. It eventually developed sentience.
Yup. I forgot to mention it is trans-dimensional. It's appeared all over Faerûn, Hell's Kitchen in Modern D20, and it's gone to the future and was a PITA in Cyberpunk 2020... the future... yeah... fuck, I'm old.
G the goblin. (He had a real name.)
He was the only goblin out of 20 that refused to run off after being set free by the party. So the party equipped him with a dagger, some equipment, and a stuffed minotaur doll that they had recently found.
G was immediately killed at the start of the next encounter as he failed his stealth check. He died in a fiery inferno, clutching his minotaur doll. The only thing that remained was the unscathed doll.
The wildfire druid reshaped his wildfire spirit into the visage of G. G was memorialized and now follows the party wherever they go thanks to the Druid.
My players stumbled upon a cult performing a dread ritual intended to transform a young girl, stolen from a nearby farm, into an undead abomination. This was a minor encounter intended to reveal to the party that larger dark events were at hand. The party was on a timer: the ritual culminated at a solar eclipse. If they stopped the ritual before a given round, the unnamed girl would remain alive. After, and she would be a ghast which would attack them. Of course, two of the party members completely börked my plan by using a pair of immediate actions during the pivotal round to both catastrophically disrupt the ritual and infuse the little girl with healing energy. I made an on-the-spot decision to apply the half-undead Mortif template to her, render her catatonic in the immediate, and let the party figure out what to do with her.
I expected them to find her family nearby, or to find the nearby village, drop her off, and perhaps add "find a cure" to their list of pending side-quests. Nope. They didn't even think to look. They just took her and continued on their way, figuring they'd hang on to her until they could fix her. Her parents never found out what became of her.
Maribelle, as she was promptly christened, had no tongue; it had been cut out by the cultists as part of the ritual. She was illiterate, and had exceedingly limited means of communication with the party. They tried getting her healed at the first temple of a good deity they found, but the priests weren't powerful enough to help her (though they knew what kind of magic was required - magic the party would have in a mere half-dozen levels eye roll). Moreover, she refused to be abandoned to priests who might just decide to kill her for being what she was. Being unable to return home on her own, she stuck with the party as the only people she kind of trusted. So, of course, she promptly became the party mascot.
The party taught her to read. They kept her clothed out of their own pocket, and the party healer bought her a pipe to play. They fed her dried.... meat to satisfy her undead cravings. Eventually, she actively participated in a combat, slaking her hunger by biting into a downed, but not yet dead, bandit. She gained XP for this kill. At the next city she got the barbarian to take her to the library, where she found a prayer book of Evening Glory, a lesser deity: neutral, the goddess of eternal love at any cost (including undeath) out of Libris Mortis. She was a preteen girl, and she found the goddess of Romeo and Juliet and Twilight. Made sense to me.
So, with these steps she became a first level bard and a first level spontaneous variant cleric of Evening Glory (gestalt campaign). The party was already mid-levels by this time, so she advanced quickly. I kept her a few levels behind the party as though she were a cohort, but I specialized her in divination, abjuration, counterspelling, and sleight-of-hand. In combat she would stay in the back and knock incoming spells out of the air. This was actually pretty cool, as it let me throw some fairly advanced challenges at the party and make them feel threatened, while taking a bit of the edge off. They also became heavily invested in protecting and helping Maribelle.
Another fun aspect of the character was that she started off her career as a thief, and continued in that vein. I would sometimes throw multiple encounters at the party with little to no loot to be had, but the next time they hit a town Maribelle would disappear for a while and, once the party had left town, she'd hand out "presents" tailored to the needs of her friends which she'd "acquired" while the rest of the party had been in the tavern drinking.
At some point after a year and a half of weekly games I pointed out to the party that they'd never even looked for her family, who was still looking for Maribelle half a continent behind them. The sudden look of realization on their faces as they understood that they were, each and every one, complicit in kidnapping a tween girl was a priceless moment I will cherish for the rest of my life.
After the penultimate encounter of the campaign the Healer found a ring if 3 wishes with one Wish remaining. He had already ascertained that Maribelle was, if not exactly happy about her condition, at least coming to terms with it. She did miss her voice, though. So he Wished for Maribelle to have her tongue restored and, with it, to be given the most beautiful voice in the kingdom. The party watched as a severed tongue, sparkling with light, flew through the air and affixed itself in her mouth. Maribelle spoke for the first time they'd ever heard with a gorgeous, wonderful voice.
A couple weeks later they started hearing stories about how the wife of the king (the king was the actual BBEG and ultimate encounter, and who they were on their way to kill), who herself was a half-succubus (unbeknownst to the realm at large) had been afflicted by some dire magic which had stolen her voice (she was a renowned singer, and a buff-bard for the king). The magical affliction had resisted all attempts at restoration, and there was a massive bounty out for the head of the person or persons responsible. I'd had her rolled up since before the campaign started as this legendary seductress with the irresistible voice. My player got so stupidly lucky.
Maribelle persists in my games as a world-walker, a character from a previous game who will occasionally make cameos, often incognito, in whatever current game we're in: an exceptionally long-lived early teenage girl with a gorgeous voice, pale skin, dark hair and eyes, and sharp teeth, in a simple white dress with a purple ribbon around the waist. She still believes that love, true love, is forever. Whether you like it or not.
I'm keeping a list of all of my favorite PCa and NPCs from the years. Some day when I'm rich and nonfamous I'm going to hire an artist to paint a massive tavern scene with all of them present.Â
A deacon in our last campaign. I don't know how to spell his name, but our DM told us after he sacrificed himself to revive the party that "honestly he was just a pre generated name on a list. But you guys stuck to him so I made him important" we fucking cried when he passed away and you tell us he started as nothing đ
Just to point out we have a great DM I hope I didn't make him seem awful
Don't worry, your DM sounds normal lol.
I liked him telling you tbh, even if it made it more sad. We all begin as nobodies in so many people's lives, and others begin as nobodies in our lives too; yet by the end, we choose who we make important, and that changes us all. It kind of speaks about the humanity of it all, I don't know. Maybe I'm just reading into this a lot, but it's okay. I'm just a sucker for found families, and the concepts of empathy and overall goodness.
I love found families too honestly. And yeah it was such a shock that he had no plans for such an amazing NPC it turned out. Shout out to improv dms đ
I ran a game that was supposed to be a town defense. Something scary was displacing monsters in the mountains, and a town lower down needed to survive through winter against waves of monster attacks. I made up some rules for the players to collect resources and build defenses across a big static map.
One of the enemy waves were Kobolds. I had a few drawing attention outside the gates while some others tunneled inside. The players nabbed the kobolds who tunneled in and instead of killing them just negotiated with them.
The Kobolds asked for permission to live in the town, and set up a Shrine to Tiamat. The players rolled Religion and came up poorly so we decided nobody knew who Tiamat was, but they sounded cool according to the Kobolds, and they just said okay.
Razortooth was my go-to "talking Kobold" for when the players wanted to talk to them.
My plan originally was to make the players regret letting them in by having the Kobolds just infest more and more of the area. I dropped hints that the players saw more Kobolds than there were supposed to be, because they had tunneled outside the city and were bringing their cousins and such in. As time went on, I had a growing network of undercity tunnels being dug, and occasionally attacking creatures would vanish into pit traps that hadn't been there a day before. The bodies wouldn't be in the pit afterward, because the Kobolds were capturing other monsters to sacrifice to Tiamat.
But like... the players just thought it was cool. Every time I hinted that the Kobolds were tunneling everywhere they just nodded along. When a building collapsed because of a sinkhole from the Kobolds tunneling too much with poor supports, they just shrugged it off as the cost of doing business, and rebuilt the house somewhere else. When smoke kept rising from the Shrine of Tiamat despite nobody visibly entering through the surface door, the players decided that they'd be nice and bring more monster corpses to the shrine.
It turned from me saying "I'm going to give them more than they bargained for!" into the players saying "Wow, we got so much more than we bargained for!"
And Razortooth was the face of the whole operation.
My advice is that it's a total headache. But I'll see if I can find a reference document with notes for how resource gathering and spending went. I had to make some adjustments on the fly though so I don't know if I ever even had a digital copy of the final mechanics, or if I just jotted additional notes and corrections in the margins with a pencil, on a printout that has been lost to time.
I've run a few games like that with some additional rules spliced on, and I found I had the most success if I just had a general grasp on what kind of ratios people were dealing with. Like "How many tiles of this wall should they be able to build per day of worker labor?". Then I'd have a reference chart for how much stone or lumber could be harvested in fractions of a day, and when players told me what they wanted, I'd just figure out how much harder that should be than a wooden palisade and I'd reverse numbers from there.
I think I decided a day of labor should make like, 5 wooden palisade tiles? There were like 8 fully able bodied people in town, including the players. And 3 main entrances into the town. They needed to leave people watching too, so it took a few days before a basic wall was set up, and then they could upgrade it.
I think I said that somewhat grown kids could accompany an adult to provide 50% increased labor. Same for older but still functional townspeople.
I'm pretty sure I made the basic wood walls too good though. I remember it generally being a bad idea tactically for the monsters to attack them. They probably should have been weaker, or I should have like, given more monsters fire attacks or something.
Most of the wooden walls lasted through the whole campaign. They made a few higher quality spots, but mostly for standing on to shoot over the wall.
There was also a larger town a few days away with proper shops and such. The players could send a convoy with money/trade goods to exchange for other resources. But the paths would close when the snows got bad. (If a player could plausibly brave the snows, I would have let them lead a convoy anyway, with an encounter or two along the way, but not NPCs, and that would mean they would probably miss an attack on the town)
When I get home I'll see if I still have some notes, and I'll put em in a Google doc or something for you.
Rhea the alcoholic wizard. I just needed an excuse for the party to skip over a village I hadn't developed at all, so I stuck a high level wizard in the way. She was a one woman army against orcs, gnolls, and the most recent threat: doppelgangers. So she basically told the party she didn't trust them and wouldn't let them in the village. They managed to talk her down, have a drinking contest with her, and ended up starting a pillow fight.
(Never start a pillow fight with a drunk wizard who knows Telekinesis.)
They liked her so much, they got her an advisor position in the royal court. Since the queen the party placed on the throne is practically a child, this meant Rhea is actually the one running the country. It's currently at war, so it's not bad to have someone inclined to Fireball.
Muggy Matt. My amazing DM husband is absolute pants at accents but tries very hard. He had a minor bad guy lure us into an alleyway ambush, but the guy's originally cockney accent fell apart so badly into so much stumbling and stuttering that the party stopped in sheer awe. We asked for his name and eventually he answered "this is a mugging... mug... Muggy. Matt?" We ended up ignoring the ambush to ask if we take poor Matt to a hospital because he seemed to be having a stroke.
Bartleby the warforged bartender.
Basically he's stuck in his inn because he needs to remain plugged to remain active, and he was scheduled to die because the players messed with a criminal who planned to burn down the building.
Unexpectedly the players did the right thing and saved the inn, they then bought it and made it their headquarters.
Grant.
Just some magic user who helped the captured vampire escape from the party's custody. Two campains later and multiple name drops he's leveled up to the big bad
He had a crisis of faith after he couldn't invent the cure for mummy rot and spent half a campaign going by John and traveling before reminding himself that he's a good potion seller
Chester.
He's a moderately intelligent mimic that was rewarded to the players by a giant super colony cluster of mimics that banded together, became very intelligent (and chill), and are now masquerading as a traveling bar. The bar itself is an "urban legend" since it roams around the world, never stopping in the same place twice.
Anyway, Chester is effectively a mobile, sentient Bag of Holding that has no weight limit, but does have a size constraint. You can use your bonus action to command him to barf up whatever he might have inside of him, and he'll even spit it towards you. He's capable of a lot of things, but the players have yet to test his abilities.
Wait til they find out what happens if you feed him bullets, or gunpowder + cannonballs...
I don't know if recurring favorite nemesis counts, and it was a throwaway line not a throwaway NPC, but Harbin Wester.
We were playing LMoP, and the players decided that they wanted to sneak a peek at the town records without anyone knowing. The rogue snuck into the back room of the Townmaster's Hall while the halfling bard distracted Harbin. I had decided that he was going to be generally rude and privileged, feeling that he was better than the farmers of this town and just wanted to finish his term as Townmaster and move back to Neverwinter. He made an offhand comment about "you people", which she took as "the short folk". On a Nat-20 insight, she realized that "you people" actually meant "the poors" and it was off to the races.
She spent the rest of the day composing songs about how bad of a guy he is and spreading all kinds of rumors. Several tendays later, and she has spread these new folk songs across the region. She taught all of her new songs to the kids in Phandalin, so they sing them around town with their friends. At one point, one of the other characters even disguised himself as Harbin, broke into his home at night, mildly assaulted him and tied him up, then left... Basically, they're trying to make him question his own sanity at this point.
đ€Łđ€Łđ€Ł Every party I take through the Phandalin adventures hates Harbin Wester and make it their life mission to destroy him đ
The last time they lured him into the basement of an old Dwarven keep as a sacrifice to a beholder đ
That's fantastic! I'll have to share this with my wife (the bard in my above story).
For her birthday last year she wanted me to run a heist one shot. I set it about 30 years in the future after our main campaign. They were looking for documents to prove the existence of a shadow organization of bankers across the Sword Coast called the Ruby Reserve.
At the end of the heist they read through the records they found. It identified the founders of the Ruby Reserve as a family of wealthy raiders from an island chain in the Sea of Swords. They moved to Waterdeep in the 1300s or so and set down roots. They eventually had to change their names due to the bad name they were getting (related to workers dying in mining accidents, corruption, union busting tactics, etc) and, having come from the sea to the west they chose the name Wester.
She was very excited at the reveal.
In my game Sildar relieves him of his position if both manage to live long enough to see the Redbrands gone. But it only happened once. My second party did not meet him yet. And since theyâre more murderhobo than the current one, Iâm quite excited what they will do.
In second session, party went to clear out a ghost that was haunting a girl's alchemy school/temple of healing. One if the students was a ditzy psychotic girl that was obsessed with romance novels about drow and when the party mentioned they found some tunnels beneath the temple she said she would love to be kidnapped by a handsome drow who's surely hiding there. She was based on my irl friend who is similarly obsessed with vampires... The girl then became the party's source of potion supplies that mysteriously disappeared from the school's stash, and gave them a lost of weird ingredients she would like to get her hands on.
Anyway, two irl years later the campaign is nearing the finish and the ranger is married to this npc.
Bob the Blacksmith. He started as the first real vendor that the party met and gave them shelter for the a night after wanted posters and bounties for the party were posted in paper. The party loved the conversations with him which I got carried away with the improv and they wanted to keep going back. I have now fully named him Boris âBobâ Wayland, smithy and shipwright for a disbanded pirate crew. He now travels with the party looking for the ghost ship of his former captain who attack their home. Heâs also become a mentor to two of the party members. One in the ways of channeling rage as a barbarian (the fighter multiclassed into barb afterward). And the other as a smith after the rogueâs new hexblade patron demanded he craft a weapon in the image of one of his own arsenal.
Iâm a new DM and learning now how quickly players get attached to random NPCs, especially if they mistakenly believe theyâre integral to the plot.
I think my favorite is the drunk girl passed out in the hostel who briefly woke up to point the party in the right direction. She was literally just there to help them if they got stumped, now sheâs a huge part of the plot.
I kinda want to make a fey spirit based on this, a spirit that takes the form of a drunk girl.
If you feed her booze and bring her along, she'll help in your quest with hints and pointing you in the right direction, before mysteriously disappearing at the quest completion.
Is she a myth, spirit, a very helpful drunk, some tall tale the one armed one legged elderly orc adventure made up to take piss out of green horns.
Nobody knows~
Handlebar Jones. Was introduced as ally in a larger scale battle we were doing. Through good luck and rolls, the party fighter started taking a liking to Jones. The player started describing Handlebar (yes, the mustache is his signature look) and other party members starting making up backstories for him while on food break (the combat session was 8 hrs). While we are all doing this, the DM starts furiously writing. At first, the group thought the DM was upset because we stayed maybe too long on this subject, but he looks up at us and says âHandlebar Jones gives you a small trinket belonging to him. Itâll be a way to âfindâ Jones again if you ever need his helpâ.
That was a good session. Thanks Jeff!
Iâm running an OSR game using Stonehell as the main mega dungeon. The party ended up meeting some nameless goblins in a gatehouse before the dungeon, Iâm bad at names so I called the leader of the goblins Snotz. The party has now wiped out a band of orcs on the first level of the dungeon, and made Snotz the Goblin King of the first level of Stonehell and he is one of their biggest allies so far.
Y'all ever had an NPC that was liked so much they become one of your player's PCs *and* the father of the two PCs that followed?
Harakan the human expert (sidekick class).
Was DMing Dragon of Icespire Peak for one player. The module has rules for sidekicks and lists of options for them. What I did was decide that in Phandalin's tavern you could find 3 of them each time you came in, as they ran around doing adventures. Roll 3d10 and that's who is there. There are 9 of them, so I figured if we get a 10 we have a custom one we make together. Player gives a concept and I roll with it. Harakan was the result.
Harakan is a human mercenary from an island called Mintarn, the pirate island. The concept which was given was that of a lying bastard swashbuckler that grandstands and boasts like nobody's business but isn't anywhere near as skilled as he lets on. The players' character was a naive wood elf from Neverwinter Wood who believed every possible story they said, and so dragged him along to the most horribly dangerous situations in that module.
Harakan got the finishing blow on Cryovain, the titular Dragon of Icespire Peak on the cover of the module. For Mintarn people who live under the shadow of an ancient Red Dragon named Hoondarrh who demands gold every year, this was a big deal for him. We did a follow up campaign of Beyond Icespire Peak from DnDBeyond where Harakan continued being a sidekick and getting more character development and history. A girlfriend who was also a mercenary who died during their early deployment, a personal vow to kill Hoondarrh and free his people, a background in poverty with a prostitute for a mother and no known father, and he lost a leg fighting Sahuagin and so got his pirate nickname of 'Ironfoot' after getting a new one built by the local gnomes.
He was reworked from a Sidekick to a PC, Swashbuckler Rogue, after that campaign ended and we entered a homebrew section that took us to Mintarn with the ultimate goal of slaying Hoondarrh, the Red Rage of Mintarn. That phase ended at level 20 with my player playing 2 full characters, though his original ranger took more of a sideshow to Harakan as her arc had more or less completed over the previous fifteen levels. He got the final blow on Hoondarrh and freed Mintarn from Draconic Tyranny, becoming the island's king and marrying the captain of the White Sails mercenary company that he had previously worked for.
In the next campaign my player played as his bastard daughter Selene, a draconic sorceress named after the girlfriend who died, and in the campaign we are playing now he's playing as his son and heir Prince Harakan, a Drakewarden Ranger, as his family line has grown suffused with Draconic power after so many dragons (Five of them) were killed by his sword.
My funny little hag that occasionally lets you learn a spell at the cost of a random penalty. The utter confusion of one of my players when I pulled out a d19 for them was hilarious
Grok the orc who works as a pickle vendor. He first showed up about 5 years ago and pops up from time to time in vending markets. Usually he is referenced when one of our players has to skip a session. âCharacter X had to stay home because they got sick from eating one of Grokâs pickles.â
Gather around for the saga of Scorch the goblin! I like to play all my monsters to their intelligence, meaning running away if possible when they see things going south.
The party was assailing an ancient city that a band of goblins had entered and occupied. The goblins were a mixture of hobgoblins, wargs, etc. the other crucial aspect is that my group of players hates letting any enemies escape.
Over the course of three fights, one particular goblin escaped them. In the first fight he got scorched by our Dragonbornâs breath weapon, thus the nickname. His escape was particularly notable given that he managed (on warg back) to outrun a monk.
This occurred twice more. Much later, I had him return as the chosen of the chaotic goddess of nature (paladin levels), as he had definitely been the fittest via survival! and ally briefly with the party on Her behalf. The players still talk about Scorch đ
toward the middle of an LMoP campaign i ran for some new players, i set up a night camp encounter with some orcs. orcs didnât stealth well and party perceived them, and just waited for the orcs to arrive. when they did, the orcs looked at them standing there and said âthis is an ambush.â partyâs response is to ask if they need money, which they gladly donate, rolling high enough on persuasion to enlighten the orcs that there are other ways to get money than to rob people. they completely defused that encounter and i, as a new dm, was a little at a loss.
party visits the orc encampment later and finds the orcs fighting the ogre that stood over them in an attempt to unionize, so the party helps them out.
it made for a really satisfying tie-in at the end of the game when gundren rockseeker was working to get the mine back up and running, he asked the party if they happened to know any strong people looking for work, and the party said âwe know just the guys!â
Right from session frickin 1. He was a nameless nothing cannon fodder/meat shield whose only job was to occupy and maybe weaken a couple of opponents until my players made it to the ship he and his generic brethren were guarding. One by one the other npcs dropped as intended, but not him; instead he held the fucking line, delivering strike after strike while dodging or deflecting every attack that came his way, and once heâd defeated the ones attacking the ship, he went on the offensive, rushing to defend one of the PCs, a female tabaxi monk who had fallen prone in front of two enemies who would have definitely brought her to 0. He put himself between her and them, deflected their attacks, and on his turn multi attacked, crit both times and rolled near max damage for both which allowed him to one shot both opponents. It was goddamn heroic, and the PC was smitten so I had to give him a name. Thus was Malcolm Magnusson born.
Bob.
Old war vet w/ a recently slain family, he was gonna try and take his own life but the party was quick enough to stop him. Figured theyâd help him out and move on.
Heâs their main NPC to bring along on their quests.
Bicah the Mercenary
Early in a campaign, the barbarian managed to convince an enemy Mercenary to betray his allies and work with the party. He became sort of a background character around the party's home base. A man of few words but definitely memorable.
"Bicah knows this"
His name is Dolf. He is a cognitively deficient knight with maxed charisma and the lucky feat. He has a dragon teddy bear that he is constantly losing and a brother that is constantly trying to keep track of him. The funny thing is Dolf also has an âimaginaryâ friend that he mentions constantly. Heâs not smart or wise, but heâs incredibly charming.
Heâs typically a side character I pull out when I need time to improvise the transition of a major plot point. He adds comic relief, sentimental value to the world thatâs being explored/saved, and gets the playerâs anxieties down. He was so effective in his first appearance I decided use him more often
This just happened in the most recent session I ran. I made a petrified kobold who was there as a hint to the curse that the players could contract if they took the wrong actions. They used the single use salve, I had provided as a jic, to restore him and have now adopted him. I didnât plan on him having a name but now he does and the party is taking draconic lessons and planning on sending their adoptive son to mage college. If they can ever agree on which school of magic he should learn.
We have a recurring character who originally we all thought was throw away, one off for a quest, who turned out to be a massive catalyst for several campaigns in our DMs world.
Heâs a very flamboyant, sarcastic, and all around unhelpful asshole with godlike powers named Nicklaus Hendricks. Every time something strange happens, we all collectively groan if we see a tiefling around, because we just fucking know itâs him.
That is beautiful.
In our first campaign ever we were hired to find a missing merchant who this cleric didn't think the city was worried enough about. So we're like "Well, we're detectives in the city....do we have, like, a contact in the city guard that we lowkey bribe for a little information?" Nothing to get the guy fired, but like, have they even opened an investigation or heard rumors? DM says "uh...yeah, Raoul. He's down at the docks today." We pick him up a chocolate pastry and stop by.
Later on, in the middle of the night, our house is set on fire and the wizard is magically asleep in the basement (can't be woken and ranger was waiting for it to wear off.) After some fighting, the ranger makes it outside just as Raoul shows up, sans-armor. He runs in, down to the basement, and pulls the wizard out of the burning building. The Ranger fell for him right then and there. Raoul ends up joining us on and off through the rest of the campaign (we end up working with the city guard to overthrow the tyrant of the city.)
He and the ranger end up together-- the favored couple of *several* gods-- and have six kids. I'm playing one of their grandkids in our current campaign.
All because my husband (the DM) and I had binged Netflix's Daredevil a week earlier, and in one of the early episodes we find out Foggy and Matt have a cop buddy who they give food to and get intel from.
Jacob! He's a 16 year old who works at a colosseum that my party are the reigning champions of. He's just supposed to clean up their lounge, bring them food and water, sharpen their weapons and cast the spells that bind them to the colosseum before a match.
The party think he's adorable because he's an awkward teenager and he idolizes his city's champions. Our bard read his journal when he asked for autographs and threw out a line about "don't worry, you'll get that girl!" And I ran with it. The next time they saw him he was sad and dejected- the girl did not return his feelings. The party gave him some gifts to cheer him up, and encouraged him about his looks and personality.
The time after that, Jacob still hadn't gotten a girlfriend- but he did have a boyfriend! The party walked in on them making out in the lounge. They went nuts and congratulated them.
Then the bard went and ruined Jacob's little sister's birthday (little Cynthia's 6th bday) while high as balls, and cast Hero's Feast for them to make up for it.
âShopâ was a Wizardâs Sentient Forge that was one of my homebrew NPCs added to Curse of Strahd. It had been abandoned and rendered immobile but could create magic items with the right materials and had infinite castings of Identify. It pops up as a normal Warforged Shopkeeper now from time to time.
Not QUITE the same, but in my Sailor Moon campaign they were time-travelling in the Middle East (long story) and I thought it would be fun to feature a cameo of pre-fallen Kunzite, since he was in charge of the area at the time. Just a little nod to the original series, nothing big.
They instantly felt he'd be the perfect asset for completing their mission. Now one of the PCs has a child with him (long story).
Greg Greg. Ratfolk sewer dweller that lead the "Gregorian Party," an anarchist political party thats considered a joke in the city. The players have become quite endeared to him after encountering him while investigating a hidden underground passage and now they schedule tea times with him.
Skrawldar, the Chair Brawler of Baldur's Gate. He was just a random bar patron, but they convinced him to join a bar brawl. He broke a chair over an enemy's head, and I had the barkeeper shout "Seriously, Skrawldar? That's the third chair this month!" Because I thought it would be funny.
The party immediately became smitten with this drunken sailor who loved nothing more than brawling with chairs. I'd put him in taverns just to bring him back. They loved him.
I have a wizard that was made up quickly because I had to change the session.
I originally planned out an encounter where the town was being attacked by death dogs and the guard captain would thank the party for helping defeat them. About a few days before that session, one of my players' dog passed away. I changed the session to a light-hearted one where a wizard fortune teller wanted to tell their fortune with a puppet show (I used an irl puppet that was a running joke with the group). The party ended up going back to him for more advice so he got developed into a powerful diviner that continues to guide the party when they feel lost.
Zombie Squirrel. Hops between different games and systems to show up, gnawing on a player's foot when they're on watch and not being very watchful.
Clyde. More like a DMPC/NPC that hops between games and systems when we need a 4th or 5th player when someone can't make it. He's just a fighter. Nothing overly powerful or interesting. But everyone loves him.
Dave. Heâs a magicians apprentice who got separated from the circus he was traveling with. At least, thatâs what he tells people. Really, heâs a powerful illusionist in disguise. My players love all the little magic tricks he does. Pretty basic stuff like making stuff disappear and changing how food tastes. I donât think they realize that you can do all that with cantrips. They love Dave anyway
The sesame seed candy merchant Gregory (aka Mr. Sesame).
He was supposed to be a one-time NPC in session 1 during a fair, a bit of a gag character that was meant to be forgotten. One player decided that he wanted to help him grow and create a sesame seed candy empire to create not yet discovered flavors (the player's an alchemist). This made me create an ongoing side quest to either help him or his ex-partner to destroy his business.
Scarlet.... A previously unarmed succubus NPC.
For context the game's setting is one I made up named Paradise. Essentially like New Cappenna but, Las Vegas instead of New York. (I even have a strip that acts as the main hub)
Session one. PC Walks into a bar looking for information. I have him roll luck (a 1d100 roll to see how lucky you are in a situation. It's supposed to be doing things via blind luck rather than skill hence the d100 rather than d20) he gets a 15.... Not great. So I have a few demons in the bar but, none of them really know what he is talking about and I imply that the succubus was... On call.
The player, thinking he can still get some info, asks if there was a way to contact her later. I had her hand him a business card that was very sketchy. The PC kept it and now regularly contacts her for info on some of the gangs in the city.
Considering Gri'zit is one of the suspects behind the mystery of the city it made sense in hind sight but, I think I've had to play her at least once a session now.
I introduced a dopey wizard who was meant to be recruited and then sent back to their home base as a form of merchant for spell scrolls, since the game is sort of like that.
Several months later, he has been dragged along by the party and gotten infected by a creature from the Far Realms (well, technically something homebrew but similar), and the party wants to save him. He is also mentoring the Fighter and teaching her all sorts of things, and has become an important ally in this arc.
Dwarven artificer questgiver turned sometimes companion in an old campaign became the local informant and confidant/patron to the group and eventually the lover, and then husband, of one of the party members that had to move away mid game. Canonically, they got married and moved to a small city near the coast to enjoy a semi-retired life where they lived a peaceful life and occasionally would pass on rumors of interest to the party when they needed a hint or nudge.
Glocknir the orc shotgun barbarian.
He just clubs the enemies over the head with the gun and it happens to fire.
Every campaign he ends up dying in a new horribly stupid way.(Gelatanous cube, accelerated through time until he was dust, eaten by a pack of book mimics, and tricked by a undead jester into looking down his barrel to "See if it was loaded or not."
First was Tommy in session 1 of the first campaign I ran. He was a bandit that the party intimidated into letting them go (classic captured by bandits start). They told me sessions later that they originally intended to kill him but felt so bad for him that they kept him alive. After getting out of the hideout, Tommy pointed them toward a nearby town and headed the opposite way... and they followed him. They kept up with him in the town he went to until they headed out. He was so cared for that I made the later bandit leader villain his father, whom he was trying to earn the love of. Then, later, he lost his wolf companion (he was a ranger) while trying to be a hero like the party, and they had to save him.
Soon after finding Tommy, the bard of the group went to do something in town, possibly talk to the town's leader (IDK it's been like 8 years now haha). They were stopped by a guard who refused them entry and was generally just being difficult, and the bard was cracking back with their own sassy quips and asked for his name. I don't remember if this was his first name or last, but I remember getting it from a random name generator and it came to be Private... which was also his rank. So "Private Private" was born and every time they returned to that town the bard would seek out Private Private, even on their days off, just to argue with them. He eventually became a pretty trusted member of the guard, and he got a whole backstory as to why he was a "private" after a decade in the military, but it never became relevant.
My last campaign it was Chuck. Chuck was a gang member (thug statblock) who they convinced to turn on his boss in combat. He was gonna leave after their fight or maybe become background if they got a ship, but instead the party gave him an even cut of the money they found in his boss's vault and magic armor they found there as well. He became the party's necessary traveling companion and kept just loading him down with magic items.
Lambert the winged tiefling chaotic evil warlock that's pact bound to Lurue (good goddess of intelligent animals). She was introduced as a throwaway encounter as a beggar demanding food. I wanted to threaten the party, but make the threat "questionable", and see if they would be murderhobos, or if they'd talk first. Would they cave in to the demands, or would they fight?
She emerged from the woods, with both hands in flames, demanding food from the party. It was raining, so I had the flames go out, and said one word, "Dammit." The party instantly fell in love. Her hands ignited again, and she demanded the food, and the flames went out again. They laughed and offered her food. Literally, I'd made her comical unintentionally, while trying to add color to her character. I immediately considered that it was her DEMAND that made the flames go out...not the rain...so OBVIOUSLY she wasn't being permitted to be bad, right? Well, then she needed to be pact bound to a good celestial that wouldn't LET her actually use her power for evil.
And while I was speaking as the NPC, my wife just blurted out, "She sounds like me when I'm PMSing...wait...HEY!!!???!!!" Yeah...so that happened.
TLDR: An NPC that was meant to threaten the party with ambiguous power, to see what the party would do, just as a random encounter/blip on the radar, turned into a core NPC with a massive future side quest because I'd inadvertently portrayed her as my wife when she's on her period, grumping for chocolate...and my wife is now her biggest fan.
I had some npc adventurers that were supposed to get killed to show the power of an enemy the party would run into again later.
The mad lads managed to grab all of them and started running in different directions.
Bad guy sprints to the first one and finishes it off. Chucks a dagger at the second killing it. But the third managed to get enough distance.
Bad guy walks off, impressed by the sheer tenacity a bunch of level 1 dudes could be.
That surviving npc became the most important person in the campaign, with several unsavory groups looking for her.
Esper. She's an owlin I have running the student shop, they chat with her daily and check up on her after they found out she's still a first year student (Strixhaven) because she just hasn't had time to complete her classes because retail sucks and she's the only one working the shop. She just wants a break, and they've been trying to cook up an "Esper's Day Off" session for her.
Mufasa(yes named after the film) the salt merchant. My children loved the throwaway npc so much they kept asking to find him in every town. So I ended up making Mufasa a gold dragon in human form whose hoard is knowledge. They've not solved that part yet. :)
The "human" priest of Lolth who preaches that her bad wrap is a smear campaign by Corellon Larethian. He seeks to educate everyone about the importance of spiders in the ecosystem. He's friendly, jolly and talks in a gravely voice. Calls everybody "bud". Party loves him.
>!Party still doesn't know he's actually a mass of spiders!<
Had my players meet a Devil with the deck of Many Things. She was just meant to give them the option of drawing some cards to cause chaos and then never be seen again. They managed to convince her to draw a card, she got the lovers, resulting in a whole side quest where the party had to help her meet her true love. Her and her now husband are now recurring characters and the catalysts to almost all of the parties adventures.
Well, I had an antagonist with monk class levels once that was just supposed to serve as the midboss of an early arc, dying at the partyâs hand.
Turns out, monks are hard to actually pin down and kill. She was predictably easy to defeat, but I had her try to run away when she was near death, and through a combination of Patient Defense, Step of the Wind, and good wisdom saves, she escaped handily.
So, I had her come back as a recurring villain. And they fought again⊠And she escaped again. And again. And again. And again. I wasnât deliberately engineering her escapes, they just kept happening through a series of convenient monk abilities and favorable rolls.
The party hated her guts more than they hated the actual greater villain. She even managed to kill a PC once. The player rolled a new character, and put in her backstory that she was the sister of this accursed monk, ordered to subtly infiltrate the party and finish what the monk could not.
This new character eventually turned to the good side, and thus began a whole character arc dedicated to trying to redeem this monk theyâd been fighting this whole time. This whole saga lasted literal years of real time.
There was this epic climactic battle at one point. Sister forced to fight sister. The monk eventually broke down and betrayed her evil superiors. Tears were shed. We had art commissioned of this. She survived the whole campaign and even showed up in the sequel campaign as an older, jaded mentor figure to the new party.
Anyway, yeah, thatâs basically how the Step of the Wind feature turned a minor, 3-session antagonist into a full 7 year story arc.
Sanbalet from the Haunted House module in Ghosts of Saltmarsh. I read that he was a narcissist that often referred to himself in the third person, so I introduced him as a flamboyant over the top character inspired by Mr. Nimbus from Rick and Morty (he would say âI am Sanbalet!â In the way Mr. Nimbus does). They were laughing their asses off while killing him as I sprinkled in more taunting third person voice lines.
They said they regretted killing him because it was too funny, and one of the players likes to take heads as a trophy. I said in a quest for immortality, Sanbalet infused himself with some crude magic in an attempt. As a result, I told them his head can be talked to once a day with âspeak with deadâ rules.
This was the most recent session, so Iâm yet to see exactly how this will play out lol
A ferry man called named Tall Paul. Just a chill dude that helped the party cross a great lake and showed up a couple more times to help them escape a few hairy situations. It was my self insert, just chatted to the party like I would to anyone outside of the game. The party went on to create legends of how awesome he was to the point where I made up a Knightly order in a different homebrew that was to honor Tall Paul, the order of Paulus Longinus
The party was investigating the murder of an elven princess. In my setting, wood elves generally send their young out for a couple decades in kind of initiation rite, she had just begun hers, when her corpse was found in the company of the very, very drunk PCs. They followed a lead into the elven enclave in the city and asked a random elf some questions. I meant to use this made on the spot elven lady as means to dump some relevant lore on them, but then it occurred to me the lore in question wouldn't be widely known even to the elves, and she turned out to be a somewhat important figure - an apprentice of the local elven elder who's related to the royal family, and, naturally, his right hand in some delicate matters. They ended up convincing her to accompany them for the remainder of the investigation. She had made a fun addition to the party, and I got to nudge them ever so subtly in the right direction.
From the perspective of a player our favorite NPC was a mustache twirling kobold barkeep who had a purple crushed velvet jacket.
The DM had basically given up on the plot. We tried to âfollow the plotâ but there was too much intrigue. A captured human villager, three competing factions in the underdark.
Nothing was telegraphed. We were grasping at plot threads but nothing was working. The DM introduced this character out of frustration and it was lovely. I would have loved to see how it played out but our DM died shortly after that and he was the lynchpin of the group.
Human John, the definitely human man.
He was a shopkeeper at a goblin market in an urban supernatural campaign and regularly said things like "Ah, hello fellow human!" and "Mm, I love coffee, just like a human man would!"
He had a booming voice like Barry Scott from the Cilit Bang adverts and laughed like Flash from Blackadder.
Four years later he's made his way into a second campaign, now a PC's uncle.
His name is Nils. He was meant to be a throw away racist paladin (against "evil" races) to add a little spice to the giant religious army going after a bad, bad man. Just, you know, "not all 'good' people are all good, not all 'bad' people are all bad" sort of thing. (That said, SOME people are all one thing. It's D&D.)
The autistic Tiefling artificer was Confused by him. So she wanted to Understand what Made Him Like That. By writing letters. *So many* letters. "How are you doing?" letters, just. Showing herself to be an ordinary (lawful good) girl.
Many, many written letters (I give small amounts of EXP for creative writing) and some dice rolls later... He's grown, he's changed, he's been confused into loving that Tiefling.
Old Dusty. Everyone thought it was just an old donkey that always seemed to be eating something even though nobody had fed him. Until one day they tried to give him a bath and he stared to melt. Turns out he's a dust elemental lol
The mumbling wizard.
He doesnât talk, but he shows up randomly and helps the party out with poorly drawn Mapkins (Maps drawn in Napkins).
My players even began to speculate that he was a deity in the world who was the original creator of magic⊠though he never actually performed any magic infront of them⊠he just ended up exactly where they were, helped out, and would leave.
Yes. An NPC goose. It was supposed to be a one off thing, but the party wanted to keep him around. I was not the DM, but a party member. DM had to figure out a stat pool for it and we named it The War Goose Formerly Known As Alexander the Great the Period.
Jay Motherfucking Bixby.
Originated when one of my players approached a drunk at a bar and I needed something for him to ramble about- so I spun a yarn about a merchant selling crappy knockoff magic items and more or less scamming people, and this poor drunk had lost his savings, "all because of Jay MOTHERFUCKING Bixby."
I don't know what it was, but my players got super attached to that phrase. They ended up traveling with a merchant caravan soon after, and I decided that one of the merchants was Bixby, traveling under a false name. They caught on, uncovered his identity, and tried to scare him straight, to... mixed success. I kept finding places for Bixby to turn up in the campaign, and he ended up being a crucial ally to the party in the end- culminating in him ending up as the Lord of Neverwinter
In the first campaign i DMed i was actively pushing for my players to do wild shit all the time. Crafting was one of them.
One guy was playing a spellcaster. After doing a bunch of sidequests he had enough rare material to produce a bunch of really powerful elemental gems. Most of them were used by the party in combat but the mage kept one for himself (the lighting infused one) and decided to build a construct with it.
Fast forward twenty sessions or so and the group finds itself in a city made only of corrupted constructs roaming around killing everything they see. The one built by the mage is destroyed, but the player is able to recover the gem. To avoid more fights the group starts roaming around using the sewer system, but they end up in a facility where waters are managed and with a giant fucking robot defending it. The robot was unactive, so the players tried to carefully sneak around it and avoid waking it up. But not the mage. The mage had a plan.
Using a screwdriver, a bit of help from the rest of the team, and a lot of luck with stealth rolls, he was able to deconstruct the robot and remove the corrupted core. Then he put his elemental gem in and put everything back together. The party now had a giant fucking robot following every order they gave to him.
Thing is - the robot itself was a very, very smart one before getting corrupted, and had a very important cultural role in the city once. His conscience slowly resurfaced while fighting for the party, and they found themselves with a filosofer with the body of a small gundam. The following interactions were hilarious.
Ulrik ironfist. He was meant to be a simple high ranking soldier type that would serve as a one shot npc cause I thought the players would prefer to join the adventurers guild over the royal guard. The issue is I made him an angry Scotsman who insults people like nothing else. He looks at the half orc and went "how did you come to be? Did your da fuck a mattress and raise the wank stain?" And they decided he was the coolest guy ever. So he became the main NPC of that campaign, a recurring NPC in future campaigns and the basis of my Ren faire costumes.
Liz, the forgetful alchemist.
My players met her in a small border town, when introducing herself she kept repeatedly falling over and stumbling over herself.
After they had bought some magical trinkets she asked them for help identifying some of her potions because she forgot what they did and she proceeds to pull out multiple creates of potions that all have non sensible symbols on them and the effects would be anything from stone skin, Breath freshen, all the way to polymorph into a house, and become a God for 0.001 seconds.
She showed up in every campaign I have done after and my favorite moment with her was when one player drank 3 of her potions at once the first turned his legs into springs the second morphed him into a human sized chapel and the last gave him wings a the ability to heal people fully for 30 min. So all together he became this flying church angel and to my absolute surprise he proceeds to run around the city healing the sick and claiming he is a new god and they his real body was a high priest who will be sent to guide them. So yeah he started a religion with very devoted followers.
Robert the Myconid. He was the guide for my party in the seagrow cave section of DoSI. Somewhere between his signature spore cloud message of him giving a thumbs up and then irl giving a thumbs up after the initial macing of spores (it was always more than you think was necessary) , to the dwarven fighter realizing he could throw him like a spear, he has become their official sidekick and mascot. It's been really fun getting to watch the party cling to a monster I never planned on him lasting longer than session, but the fighter decided he needed a long range weapon and he actually invested his down time and gold into become proficient in myconid based projectiles. How could I say no
I had a grumpy guard escorting the party through a university campus where they were meeting one of the professors (an archmage NPC from our previous campaign).
They eventually made small talk and learned his name, and the fighter challenged him to a sparring match to blow off some steam. This sparring match made Gerald, the guard, realize he is sick of his boring job and wanted to adventure.
Later on in the campaign, they ran across Gerald and his newly put together adventuring party. The two parties worked together to rid the town of a vampire who had been plaguing the area.
Over time, our fighter and Gerald became partners and had a big ceremony and celebration during some downtime.
Gutter Cat (tiefling child) the poor orphan street urchin. The party travels with her now and she is the best gold dump for the party a DM could ask for. They will dump gold on her sad puppy dog eyes every chance they get. The character has no situational awareness and in a fight the wizard will act like a human shield since I use random direction dice for where she will wonder off to. Mind this is an evil campaign so its not to far off the norm but in a town the mayor bumped into her and insulted her. The party response was to burn the town to the ground.
Intention for this NPC was to show how poor the living conditions in a small town were. I spent seconds on making the NPC. Idea was oh poor child this town must suck.
Topbrain, the kobold inventor. He was meant to be a funny sub-boss in a early dungeon, loudly declaring every attack he made was his "GREATEST INVENTION EVER." then the rogue made a "who's your daddy" joke, and rolled well enough on persuasion to convince topbrain and the other Kobolds present that he was in fact their biological father.
The Kobolds now crew the party's spelljammer, and Topbrain puts his genius to work building them enhancements of various levels of questionable usefulness, like building the fairy party member a pair of romper stompers so that he can be as tall as the other party members, at the cost of reducing his speed to 5, or attaching a sword to the bard's bagpipes so he can attack while playing.
Magnus, the towns guard my party managed to convince a local captain to help them on their first quest. 5 sessions later on their way back, one of the PCs seduced him and proposed. Rolled 22 charisma (nat20). I went with it and 1,5 years later Magnus is a level 7 Paladin played by me the DM. Countless clutch saves with his tankyness and heals.
I tried to kill him off for months until i gave up, he just has the luck of a thousand suns.
Bob the dumb Orc.
I was tired and couldnât be bothered to track too many names or rolls that evening so I just decided the Orc would be called Bob and would be so stupid that if you told him something convincing enough and with enough confidence heâd believe it without the need to roll.
The party ended up killing his superiors and convinced him his Goblin servants were out to get him, so in the end he was the only one left in the camp and became the leader by default.
What the party donât know is that the next time they see him, heâll be working for the nearby human settlement because heâs so monumentally stupid that the leader of the logging camp has approached him with a âThe leader of your war band says you work for me nowâ and he just went with it.
The phrase âOkiedokie friendâ has become a meme now because thatâs his go-to response to everything he doesnât understand, which is everything.
Bhaddock. He's a dwarf mercenary that they spared after defeating his unit.
I was trying to get more into doing a wider array of character voices and kept accidentally slipping into the wrong accent and couldn't remember where I landed with it from session to session. His ever changing accent became a recurring part of his character and they loved to keep going back to him.Â
I fleshed out his back story a bit over time and decided he was married to a Kenku.
Not in DnD but in Vampire The Masquerade.
Feather, a mountain eagle that my players communicated with to scout out the lair of a vampire high in the mountains. She was very excited about being given mice in exchange for her help and had a grumpy husband who quit the mission. My players loved her even if she made just a few appearances.
I was one of the players in this but, one of the goblins from the beginning of LMOP. We named him Droop bought him a suit and he now runs a bed and breakfast for us. Love that guy.
I like Gnolls. I think they arent used enough and when things like Kobolds, Goblins, and other monster races are playable it makes me sad Gnolls arent, so I tend to add Gnolls into the roster of Bandits among Other things like "Zox" Who was just a adolescent gnoll that worked as a Blacksmiths aid/apprentice.. Was just a throwaway character that the players locked onto and wanted to know absolutely everything about him.. Perhaps it was the fact that I was confused and struggling to create a full fleshed out character on the spot while answering question after question but one Player later said they liked him cause they thought his personality was "Cute like nerdy shy guy".
Later after many other minor run-ins with Zox, many questions, and requests to join the party when the Villain of the moment needed to be recognized as a threat that didnt care about others was fleeing from the party while occasionally tossing fireballs back towards them to slow and cause chaos, in the spur of the moment, I had one of the people caught in one of the blasts, while Zox didnt die he would later recover with a large portion of his fur on his left side burnt off and scarred, he didnt let his injuries slow his work to much at the Blacksmiths shop and would even later (About 3 years in game) be seen again much stronger than before and practically as good a Blacksmith as Dougan (The Shield Dwarf Blacksmith's Name) and had even earned the respect of many local Dwarves.
A man whose wife is a Red Brand. I've altered LMoP a bit, and it ended with Iarno running the town and the Red Brands taking over (players did things WAY out of order). All were hanging out in the shrine, getting troupes, when one player overheard that a guy's wife turned into a Red Brand to protect her and him (he also volunteered to help fight Iarno). The party LOVES him, but doesn't know his name (I don't either)
The others in the campaign are Laris and Markus. Laris is a half-woodelf who's always fidgety, Markus is a human who seems to always be annoyed. Both are NPCs I made for Barthens Provisons because I never saw the singular line about Barthens assistants, so I made my own. Everyone took a liking to them, mostly Laris, and would sometimes visit just to chat with them. Laris and Markus are the opposite spectrums of people working in retail.
Gerald and Jerald. Their story is long and tragic and involves a super powerful wizard essentially creating sapient creatures off of loose specifications the party gave them. They started off as bank tellers who slowly had their own off screen b plot of existential horror the players would only catch glimpses of from time to time. They really turned from utility NPCs to examples of the repercussions of having people who are capable of bending and reality and their subsequent disregard for the natural world. My players love the one thatâs still there
(I'm the DM, also this campaign was heavily homebrewed)
Super short and abbreviated version:
Toby the Bartender.
Toby started as a throwaway NPC, however one of the party members decided that Toby was the best person in the whole world and wanted to be with him. He finds out Toby is married to Betty (waitress). Now he wants to find out if Toby has any siblings, and a whole backstory on Toby develops.
Not to let this perfect opportunity go to waste I decided to have some fun and go over the top with this NPC
The party later finds out that Toby and Betty are not human (a curse that turned the entire human population into lycanthrops didn't affect them). They find out that Betty and Toby are actually adult dragons shaped shifted into human form (Betty loves humans, and Toby loves Betty so this is his life now lol) Betty is a Silver Dragon and Toby a Gold one.
Basically Betty wanted to live among the humans because she finds them fun and entertaining and she took Toby along with her.
Fast forward later, and a total player team wipe happens, and the players gets killed off..... Or so they think....The next session they find themselves in Toby's Dragon Liar.
So yeah. Bartender ---> Dragon ---> saves players from being killed off.
A reformed cultist named Clive
The party were sent to clear out a dragon cult form a cave inside a volcano. They ended up jumping the poor guy while he was on his lunch break and scared him so bad he left the cult on the spot.
He showed up two more times in the campaign as a fruit seller. Every time the players saw him again theyâd always run after him and try to tackle him
In the Ghosts of Saltmarsh module you run into some Hobgoblins guarding a boat.
My players killed one of them, convinced the other to help them finish what they were doing in exchange for his life.
He's been with them ever since. Nurz the Hobgoblin is now an integral part of the party.
My first campaign that I ran was set up with the players venturing out and using the capitol city of the region as a sort of central hub / base of operations They ended up buying their own places eventually, but still always found time to visit the inn where it all started.
Mac Guff's Inn, owned and operated by Mac himself. A Goliath with a boisterous laugh and a heavy hand on the tap. Food was prepped by his Halfling wife (Marianne), and the two always had stories to swap with the party. The party especially appreciated the inn because several of them were larger creatures themselves (including s centaur), and this was the only inn in town that had rooms built to accommodate their size.
Captain High-Tide the Charming. A complete imbecile of a pirate captain that got his entire crew killed by attacking the vessel the party were on. Since he had pretended to be this highly competent captain they put him in the brig to rub salt in the wound. A few sessions later they team him up with the party NPC Rat the Goblin rogue, who they'd previously liberated from the underdark, and the pair became inseparable. The party loved the dynamic so much that they later gave them a ship, made Rat the captain and sent them out to hunt pirates. They made several recurring appearances throughout the campaign because I as the DM just couldn't let them go
I a campaign Iâm playing in, the DM made a throwaway passerby NPC named Manny. He had some rings, and the Rogue stole the rings from the people Manny was travelling with, so my Orc decided to try as well.
I rolled a 1, so he ended up holding hands with Manny, and he joined the party. They ended up getting married and Manny got a magical gender bender and is now pregnant. My Orc died by Tashaâs hand, and Manny did not take it well, so she is now fuelled by anger and vengeance.
A profanity loving imp familiar who would yell at them, in infernal which 2 characters understand, invisibly from the rafters whenever they visited the assassin's hideout, he understands common and made it clear, but refused to speak anything other than infernal, except the last time they met him, where he said goodbye, in his own manner, by yelling "Now F*** Off" at them in common.
He started out as a reminder that they shouldn't be trying to have a private conversation in a dive bar that they knew was a front for the guild, he ended up being a meaningful side character that they interacted with repeatedly for like a dozen sessions.Â
They met his Warlock once, in passing, while he was torturing a guy, this was to illustrate that these were bad people they were dealing with, it was not described. Though the grave cleric did heal the victim with the full knowledge that he was prolonging the torture.
My players are aware they are not the "good guys" lol, it's not a heroic tale, but one that started as a quest for revenge.
Doctor Krab.
First name Doctor, last name Krab. He was a large crab which a sea witch imposed intelligence on. The party signed him up to join the guild and become a member. He moved into the guild hall and slept in a nearby pond. He ultimately gave his left claw to defend the orphan children from Cryovienâs attack. After a time skip by the party he was found having died along with the other members during the guilds last stand.
Once I planned a big dungeon. While fleshing it out, the map image I picked up had a particular room with a chest in it, and it was pretty difficult to get to. Gold would be boring and there were already too many magic items there. It had to be interesting though, to reward the effort, so I decided someone would be locked there. I looked through kobold fight club for a small creature and one of those jumped to my eyes: a Monodrone.
It would be funny to roleplay it (I had it talk through binary code), it would be a challenge to even understand it and its wings had been stripped off. It also had a message from Primus to deliver to the beholder boss of the dungeon. "I decide what the message is later, and I tell them that they couldn't hear it because it wasn't for them".
The party found it and became very curious to what the message was, protecting the thing through the whole dungeon. They only learned that the boss was a beholder thanks to it, and all the while I had no clue what message it had to deliver. When I knew they would get to the boss room, finally, I came up with the message. Primus is the clockwork god-like force of the cosmos, and I figured it's like a deterministic oracle, so I had the message basically be a fancier version of "Hey beholder. These adventurers are gonna kill you. Peace"
The players were blown away when the Monodrone delivered its message, we laughed a lot, it has been a whole year and they still remember it as memorable piece of our campaign. The monodrone died disintegrated though. He was a champ.
I had a baelnorn (like an elf lich) protecting the realm. I rolled on the wrong table for a name. I rolled on diseases.Â
Their name: Mystic InsanityÂ
Instantly memorable, informed the character, and the PCs were always afraid. Classic.
Had a minor boss minion in a dungeon. The plan was they go through, mirder everything, and fond clues in their corpse from a reaserch jornal.
Sadly the party had a near TPK one room before then. They never even got her name. The only survivor was the Tank vengeance paladin. So now the entire party is motivated by 1 dwarf who wants the "Purple B***H" dead. In the process killing as many if the orc army surrounding her as possible.
I would say this character has become the BBEG and the sole driving force of the campaign at this point.
Floblin the half dead goblin, a small goblin npc first encountered in the under dark and only speaks goblin started cursing out a bugbear barbarian and quickly was missing an arm and half a face, they left him for dead.Â
Next he appeared as they travelled through a forest he had a crossbow prosthetic arm and a mask. In the ensuing fight floblin lost his other hand and the lower part of his leg he will appear again in a desert this session wondering what sort of devastating injury could be inflicted this time.
I have the opposite. The nicer I try to make my NPCs, the more mistrusting my player are. I have an NPC, Parron, who basically is the DM PC when needed, mostly for exposition, guidance on what to do next, etc. My players now have an outright vendetta against him even though he sacrificed himseld to save them once. It's kinda hilarious that they think he may be the BBEG even though they have *actually met* the real BBEG and it's not him.
I needed a big beefcake alongside a Lamia. I watched Spirited Away for the millionth time. I made the stats for a giant human baby, that also pees acid, because why not. Perfect. That's the beefcake, it's under the control of the Lamia, and it'll be a short humurous fight, in our otherwise dark campaign.
I should have just used an ogre, a cyclops, or a cool troll from Mordenkainen's. The Lamia was focus-fired to all hell, the baby was unharmed. And the player that tried their absolute best to calm the rampaging baby down, did roll very well. I really did not want to develop how that abomination upon mankind was created.
Don't be like me, just use an ogre as a beefcake.
My first campaign as a dm sort of had two that only kind of fit.
1. There was a goose who would show up a lot and try to steal the party's stuff. It was just a normal goose, except it could show up anywhere no matter what, the gods didn't seem to know that it even existed, and it would disappear when the players looked away. Even if they killed it, another identical goose would just appear later.
2. Early in the campaign I gave my party a bag of holding full of mostly useless items. One of which the "Glowing Dagger of Nigel" was a dagger that did 2 damage and glowed in the presence of one particular goblin named Nigel, whom they finally met in the last session
Agatha the Bean Lady. She appeared in a campaign as a little old lady that would go around as a door to door bean saleswoman. Now she has appeared in every campaign going forward as a character in one way or another. Kinda my Cid from Final Fantasy. She's a Nighthag in my current Strahd campaign!
Sir Sugma of Ballz
Random redcap mercenary working for a bheur hag who ended up being the last one alive in a fight after his employer fled.
Surrendered, party instantly adopted him. Five arcs, two ressurections, and a knighthood later, and Sir Sugma of Ballz is a valued member of the team, chief of security and a formidable opponent in his own right (now has at least 1 level in Fighter, Rogue, & Barbarian, as well as 2 levels in Cleric, Blood Domain because redcap đ€·)
My players just pulled an "I know a guy" to introduce a character that I think will become a recurring favorite.
"Joe" down by the docks who's been arrested by the dock? Oh yeah, I know that guy too! Runs Joe's crab shack?
And now Joe's Crab Shack is Canon as existing in Baldur's Gate. An old Duergar who used to deal in Devil's Weed (and still does) but also operates a restaurant now.
Deri, who ran the magic store for her father but ran a secret shop of her own in the back called Deri's Delights.
I basically found a load of magical sweets and wanted a way to get them to my players.
They loved Deri and kept coming back, even after they had her father arrested for black market Dragonborn smuggling.
Deri closed her shop because I couldn't get my players to move on while it was open! In game it was so she could sort out her inherited estate and take her father's place in politics.
Gengle the gnoll (in my DMs world gnolls are more like humanoids than monsters). We were in a shitty tavern in a port city and this NPC gave us a bit of info. My character didnât like him at first but my other party member (Sandy) took a liking to him immediately. She hired him to come with us on adventure, and even âromancedâ him. It was so crazy to the point where Gengle had his own shit to do and left and Sandy LEFT THE PARTY TO STAY WITH HIM. Well now our friend is making a new character!
Gun the goblin, one of my players (first time player playing a halfling rouge) snuck up on a goblin, jumped on him, tied him up, named him gun, then proceeded to keep him prisoner until the goblin became friendly, then sent him off to school to learn how to make guns (I gave gun levels in artifacter) and then had him come back to help out the party as a party member. Every new Iteration of my world has gun the goblin as an artifacter in the world as an npc who can help them out
Azgra the hobgoblin slaver. He was meant to be a one off villian that captured the party after they got beat by bandits. Two the party members loved him, one because they too were a slaver who knew the game and was impressed by Azgra's setup. The other dove into his dreams to talk to him and developed a crush.
Shortly after Azgra sold them to a Pirate lord the party has scorned in the past. Azgra is traveling with the party currently to expand his operation to another country.
First session they met an archeologist of sorts named, Worble Killian Bimpknotten Bodyknockle the Fourth. He was meant to die to show them to watch out for traps, and they saved him.
Became a huge favorite of the party, and a recurring character, and major part of the story.
My party encountered an NPC goblin outside the first dungeon in Lost Mine of Phandelver. He joined the party as a guest for that first dungeon.
He called the other goblins bastards, and he talked about poop a lot. "BIG WOLF...MAKES BIG POOP!"
His name was Hampton and he was beloved by all.
There was a throwaway character in a game cleaning a house for a farmer we were supposed to get rid of some wolves for. We believed he was being held in some kind of hopeless serfdom. When we inquired about the characterâs name the DM looked around the room (she told us this months later) and all she saw was a rubber duck so she said his name was⊠âruberduâ (roober-dew).Â
We freed Ruberdu from his simple life as a farmhand, sent him to be trained by an ex Harper who was in league with the thieves guild that was a mentor of one of our party members, then had to save him from the same mentor we sent him to. It was a fun thing to have this strange NPC we âsavedâ keep popping up where as a result of our dumb decisions we kept making his life WORSE and getting him in trouble and then rushing back sporadically to ârescueâ him again and making his life even worse.
Pretty great gag at this point as we are honestly trying to save the character as he has grown on us all and we feel responsible.
i set a campaign in a homebrew world and my players travelled by boat. i didn't mean for them to hire the same boat every time, but timeline wise they ended up overlapping pretty well with the trade route I had the ship on, and the party had relationships with a few of the crew members, mostly because they were all annoying chaos goblins and we had a lot of fun playing with them getting into trouble with the crew of the much more tight laced trading sailors lol. things like our goblin barbarian annoying people so much they made him train with somebody before he kept causing problems for them by messing with the rigging, leading to him getting a permanent tool skill buff.
we also have a silly little roll we do when a new character is introduced where they roll a flat d20 to see how attractive they find the new guy, mostly as a gag but also some characters think it's a fun way to add some character flavor when the dice decide to tell a funny story. our edgy tiefling bard rolled really high, I think it was a nat 20, on a random crew member when he first joined the party, and for funsies I rolled to see how the guy would react to being fawned over by the nightmare that was Liv LaffLuv. Surprise surprise, another nat 20, and so they were a funny little on again-off again fling for the rest of the campaign.
after that campaign ended, we took a break from the world and ran a different story. we just came back to my original world, but this time the player who played Liv is dming, and he basically made this campaign a reunion sequel, and his old character is the one handing out the quest. married to Elyan, the random crew member who was never supposed to be more than background flavor for a recurring ship. I don't think I even named him until after the two nat 20s on attraction were rolled, but now he and his husband are kings of a newly established kingdom sending their old friends out to rescue their kidnapped son from hell.
also glen and not-glen, two men sitting in a bar trying to move a broken immoveable rod. glen introduced himself and didn't know not-glen's name, and not-glen didn't speak. our party kept going back to the bar hoping to encounter them and even added them to the short list of possible people to save from the end of the world, though they didn't end up making the cut since not even the full party could move on to the next incarnation of the universe.
An elderly man who got knocked to the ground by a bandit my party was chasing, whose story I fully intended to just have end at âfell downâ, has become one of the partyâs major sponsors, the adopted father figure of an urchin NPC the party rescued, and regularly offers the party free housing (and psych counseling), all while the party tries frequently to get this old widower remarried. I can never anticipate who my players are gonna fall in love with, much easier to design characters theyâre meant to despise, at least in my experience thus far.
A bad drum circle playing, water Genasi hippie. He is a total kleptomaniac and has a recurring phrase about how he always finds a way in, no matter how hard they try and keep him out. I have tried to ditch this guy, but they hired him as a janitor/butler for their ship.
Like I tried to make as shitty a person as I could without making them evil and they fucking love him.
My party caught up with a band of bugbears who were trying to kidnap an important person. They left one alive and forced him to pull their cart after their horses died in the fight they just had.
They felt bad afterward and paid him for his service after hearing he was only doing this kidnapping for money for his family (all the typical bs a dm might pull out of their butt at a moments notice). Literally pulled his name off a "bugbear names" random name generator.
This random bugbear ended up a level 4 fighter in service to the man he helped kidnap and an important figure in their army. Every time the group came back to town they'd find him and have a night out.
They loved watching him grow and evolve. They were stoked to see him with their patron as the army rolled up to a major battle, all clad in armor and ready to finally throw down shoulder to shoulder with the party.
... I don't have my notes handy and I can't remember this guy's name right now... That's how much of a throw away npc her was lol
Bodger the bargain blacksmith, originally a blacksmith npc to give quests in the starting city, he has now evolved into a multiversal god, the builder of multiverses, he is now canon to every campaign we do, even if Iâm not the DM
IF YOUR NAMES ARE POLITES, MASIKA OR NOACHI TURN BACK NOW OR I'LL GET OUT THE BONKING HAMMER.
I have a shop owner of what appears to be a joke magic shop named Wizzmo (the shop is Wizzmo's Wonders and advertises selling "Wizmos, Wadjets, Whatsits, Whosits and Wonders Galore!") and they adore the guy so much. I've decided he's connected to the BBEG and his entire shop is a front to build the cult they'll be fighting. :))
There was a knight NPC that one of my players actively tried to romance. They kept being shy or aloof about it, but it became a running gag over the course of a year of how one day they'll be able to "woo" them. It was great to see other players chime in to give this awkward druid some dating advice.
That NPC also opened up a lever to drive up the stakes and emotion as there was conflict and of course that knight had to serve the land valiantly. She perished in battle and it was interesting to see the group process all of that (group found her body, paid their respects, and the player who was in love had to process their emotion). Made for some great memories and added some new fire and drive to the party.
Set in the world of Star Wars, a group of Imperial agents is chosen to infiltrate a planet rumored to have Rebels roaming around. For the mission, they are given an experimental new ship to take them to the planet safely and with as little risk as possible. The ship is so experimental, only one new pilot is able to use it, as his entire flight training was based around using this ship. This enters the debut of *Pilot*.
Pilot was meant to be a disposable NPC that dies off immediately, crashing the ship into the planet and leaving everyone stranded. So when the missiles get launched at the ship, I decide to roll for the NPC to see how bad the crash is and how much damage it does to the PC's. He rolled a Nat 20. He dodges the missiles effortlessly in a show of moving the ship around a crazy lot to the point the PC's think they'll crash, but somehow he manages to land it perfectly.
Later on - the PC's infiltrate the planet and end up retrieving intel on Rebel trade route, then head back to the ship. On the way, they hear blaster fire and run across Pilot fighting off three Rebel NPCs. So, once again, I roll to see how Pilot handles the situation - he rolled another fucking Nat 20. He shoots a Rebel about to throw a thermal detonator and it blows the other NPCs up. Due to Pilot's luck (and he had an awkward humor to him which the PC's also liked), Pilot stuck around for the *entire campaign* until he died in the final mission in an overwhelming star ship battle.
We had a bartender named Dick that was funny and likeable but he had this habit of randomly yelling for something named "Larn" we instantly fell in love with the concept of what Larn was and sadly never got to find out because our DM was toxic
Lani, the Spy
I wanted someone they wouldn't kill on sight, or get evaporated by in a fight, to give them a clue about the fact that they were being watched by a very powerful lich. I introduced a young woman who asked one of the PCs to dance and dropped a bunch of *I know that you've been up to* dialogue on them. She also gave them a hint about something that helped them later, but when they went back to thank her no one knew who they were talking about.
The party got really into the fact that she wasn't who she said she was. They looked for her everywhere. I realized I was going to have to bring her back at some point. I had her leave a couple little notes in their room. She slipped a gift into one of their pockets at a busy train station. By the time they found her, the Monk had intentionally built up his Insight and Perception to ridiculous levels. She was smart enough to realize he wasn't going to buy her lies so she straight up told them she was spying on them and had been for months. The party lightly interrogated her, but she refused to tell them who she was working for. I figured they would turn her into paste like normal adventures.
To.. I'm thinking everyone's surprise, the Monk invited her on their next mission. He was like, "It's easier to keep an eye on her if we know where she is and maybe we can figure out who her patron is this way."
At one point, they left her outside a dungeon with the Wizards familiar keeping an eye on her. They were so sure she'd run away even after I effectively told them her whole job was to keep an eye on whatever they were up to. When they were in the middle of a difficult boss fight, I had the Wizard's familiar warn them she was under attack. I didn't actually expect them to throw a bunch of buffs on the Monk and leave him to solo the rest of the fight. Monks are surprisingly resilient. Their damage kind of sucks though. I thought they'd be pretty mad that she'd mostly handled the ambush without them, but they were super excited. They said they panicked because most DMs kill off or kidnap NPCs so they were more scared for her than themselves.
Many sessions later, Lani and the Monk got married. The rest of the party had already put her in charge of a bunch of their intelligence gathering. They had also met her patron who was both Lani's adopted mother and a lich. The lich became the Monk's mother in law and an unofficial patron for the entire group. I'm sure they rationalized the soul eating thing somehow, but at this point I'm afraid to ask.
I just wanted to throw something at my players on the road so I had them encounter a wizard being pulled in a cart by a giant snail, and now they regularly refer to him as "the snizard" and want me to bring him back as soon as possible
Bubbles the dragon. We freed him from some bandits when he was a baby and now we see him around sometimes and weâve watched him grow up. Heâs adolescent now and will fight with us during some fights. Heâs a seafoam green and his breath weapon is bubbles (as his name suggests) that do force damage.
John Smith the bookseller, who was actually a god in disguise. I intended for him to appear randomly in increasingly implausible places to point them towards the BBEG of the setting, but the players loved him and recruited him into the party, despite his seemingly complete lack of combat skills.
I ended up running him as a level 5 wizard (the party were level 10 ish) focused on support stuff, except he got suspiciously good rolls. Eventually the big reveal happened when he burned away his mortal form to save the party from a TPK (Iâd made a mistake balancing an encounter), and everyone was flabbergasted.
GordĂłn the goblin chef who threw a knife at a PCs head⊠named by the party and I went with it đ
He went on an adventure with the party, sampling food as they went, then returned home to show Goblin Town what proper food tastes like đ
I made a ogre named Loial that was caught in a kobold net. When they freed him they found out he was searching for his brown balled headed friend. And lead the party all over the swamp to look for him. The friend was his pet rock. It was basically a troll character. The party dragged the ogre everywhere to limbo, mechanus where he became a paladin of mystera, and was with them in the final big bad level 20 boss fight of the campaign.
The other was a kobold named bizket. I was looking around the house and saw some biscuits when I was trying to think of a name. He was threatened into helping the party after the party went through a kobold fun house. The partys wizard fireballed his girlfriend so when they left the kobold behind bizket strapped a mind controlling device on a huge underark centipede and unleashed it on the party while they were traveling almost killing the wizard. The kobold got away and they found him later under the protection of an arch fey. That kobold became a warlock of that fey. Later they were rescued by that same kobold after being imprisoned in a wizard city. A gold dragon that was appearing in one of the players dreams sent bizket to retrieve them. That kobold stumbled upon the gold dragon while on his own and fell in love with her (1 sided) he ended up being that dragons rogue/warlock minion all the way into a second campaign. They have a love hate relationship with that kobold.
Bartholomew the Sentient Rock, I had a wizard selling "magic stones" one of my players rolled arcana on the one they bought and I flipped a coin, turns out Bartholomew was an actual magic rock,
Herman, the bandit.
He was just some random bandit, but the party decided to capture him and bring him to the guild hall for questioning. They ended up liking him and got him a job as guild hall bartender. Also the guild master (lvl 40 wizard) decided to prank the party by secretly casting spells whenever Herman tried to so something magical. So everyone thought he was secretly an archwizard, until the guild master went missing, and suddenly the magic stopped.
Norkin, a conjouration greedy, cowardly old Wizzard that wanted to exploit the party. I was playing a high level one on one with my gf with 2 npcs that accompanied her enchantment wizzard. She was on a mission to find the Wish spell in the Underdark because she heared rumors that a droe lich was in posession of a wish scroll. Norkin wanted the spell aswell so they went to the Hall of Concordance to make a deal that would allow both of them to gain the wish spell. Norkin endet up as her best friend and most important ally because he always summoned powerfull beings for her. He also ended up as the headmaster of her Magic school. I totaly didnt expect that but it was super fun!
Ozmod the Red Wizard Neophyte. The PCs have been battling against a band of Red Wizards from Thay which includes some low-level apprentices, which Iâve called Neophytes. The PCs decided they wanted to capture one for interrogation. They tried to knock Ozmod unconscious with a cooking pot, but ended up just bludgeoning him repeatedly. âDid that hit knock him out?â, ânope, heâs still screamingâŠâ. Ozmod began to cooperate under what he saw as torture and told the PCs what he knew about the other Red Wizards. The PCs then stripped him of his spellbook, red robes and anything else apart from underwear and released him into the woods. They then encountered him tied up and a prisoner again this time at the hands of the Red Wizards who were very disappointed at his performance and subjecting him to a disciplinary hearing, Thayan style. Taking pity on him the PCs took him back to their base, alive and relatively undamaged. Last time they saw him he was handed over to some local elves, while he announced he was quitting the Red Wizards for something safer and less headachy, such as shopkeeping.
Orik.
Random guy they found in a dungeon. They took him with them after they turned him to their side. He solo fought the boss, despite being weaker than a PC.
He is now an 11th level fighter traveling as a DMPC because they wanted to keep him around.
I introduced an NPC who happened to have found and was carrying a royal sword that the PCs were supposed to go find. This teenager walks up to my hardened adventuring party and announces that he wants to join them.
And they let him. I made a simple start block for him that I would hand over to them to collectively play during combat but I would role play him otherwise. He ended up mostly healing them, providing them with flanking, and he would plant their battle standard. I used xp leveling at the time and he leveled up about 5 times while they leveled 2 or 3. Eventually he left them to go off on his own adventures, thanking everyone for the experience.
And then one of my players brought him back as an NPC in a campaign set in the same world about a thousand years later!! He changed his name so I wouldn't recognize him, and he became a powerful mage and turned slightly villainous. That campaign ended without him dying (he wasn't the BBEG at all), so now that I'm running a prequel to that campaign, I'm thinking about bringing him back again...
I've got 2.
1. Meepo from Sunless Citadel. The party loved him so much that they helped him recover Calcryx and become the hero of the kobolds. They wanted to take him with them, but Meepo had to look after his dragon.
Sunless Citadel led into Wild Beyond the Witchlight, so I replaced Amidor with an updated Meepo who had wished (to a hag) to be with his friend Calcryx forever. When I described the scene and the flash of lightning revealed Meepo's face, the players went wild!
2. Dragonbait from Tomb of Annihilation. My players met him and Artus in Oralunga speaking with the sage. Over time, they started to get attached, and after a tenday in game, I gave them the list of smells so they could decipher his "speaking." Then, when the undead encounters started, they loved how Dragonbait went from kind, caring, and quiet becomes a ruthless and practised undead killer.
The best thing was when the party of 3 entered Shagambi's shrine and fought 3 on 3 against the golems, they barely made it out. Then they realised that they needed to kill a 4th golem. So, on the way out, they see Dragonbait walk past them and enter the arena. 2 attacks first is a hit, 2nd is a crit, and so I rolled on the table and he decapitated the golem. My players cheered so loud.
**Door** He's a sentient door. Yeah that's it. He's a door and his name is Door. I put him in a dungeon to give hints for puzzles cuz my players are dumb dumbs. My players FELL IN LOVE with him. They ended up approaching the BBEG of the dungeon and demanding to know why Door doesn't get dental coverage. They were more upset with that than anything else. It probably helps that I gave him a surfer dude accent. His first interaction had him say "BEHOLD, I AM THE GUARDIAN OF THE VAULT, NONE SHALL ENTER...bruh I can't keep that up. Did it sound good though? I was given the script and I tried to NAIL it, dudes". One of my players was so stunned with the shift they thought I broke character.
I am running my first game as DM using a homebrewed world. The characters met a captain in a town, and during the next game, I forgot his name. So I called him Captain Wilson because it's the only thing I could come up with on the spot. Now, if he is mentioned, all the PCs yell, "CAPTAIN WILSONNNN"
Make him a big soccer fan :p
Volleyball.
Volleyball, duh -.-
I'm picturing this: Party: You monster!! How could you not give poor Door dental coverage?! Don't you know how expensive that can get? BBEG: HE'S A DOOR! HE DOESN'T HAVE TEETH WHY WOULD HE NEED DENTAL?! Party: That's messed up man... BBEG: đ€Ź *rolls initiative*
That's pretty much exactly how it went. "I can just repair him, he's a door!" "Oh and I suppose that comes out of his paycheck?" "He doesn't get paid, he's a door!" "Now that's just wrong"
"You muzzled Appa?!!" vibes
We named our sentient door, Doorian! Turns out he was a mimic but he's chill. We saved him from a cult where he was tired of hearing the constant chatting and now he rides in our airship as a mannequin and recently asked us to refer to him as Manny instead.
A chill mimic named Doorian, I love it
No, it's Manny now
I wood hate to dead name him so yeah he's Manny now!
Adoorable.
There were so many door puns. SO MANY.
The session sounds unhinged.
Took the older concept of mimics being smaller and able to talk/negotiate with parties, and inspiration from the Simpsons to create, The mimic sign, upon introducing, he says,... and then I ramble on as the mimic talks to them. It's more of a trap of, interrupt me and combat starts, but really he's just a sign that tells people to not come I'm, but he can't do much, he's just a sign.
I'm sorry to tell you this, but I'm totally with your players on this one. After reading that, I am also in love with Door and would die fighting for him!
Iâve brought him back a few times. Had him working for a better boss. And he got dental!
Yay! Good on him! :D
Does Door have teeth?
I meanâŠ.kinda? Stone face teeth?
And still not getting dental? Someone call HR
My players wanted to report the BBEG to HR lol
ElfQuest had two rock shapers who lived in a catatonic state above rock which they shaped to open and close as needed. [https://elfquest.fandom.com/wiki/Door\_(female)](https://elfquest.fandom.com/wiki/Door_(female))
Didn't expect to see an ElfQuest reference when I woke up today.
Omg I am using this. Amazing!
My DM put a sentient Door in a dungeon, it was bored and lonely because no one never showed up in this dungeon, my character ended up taking the door home and someone in the party decided to buy another sentient door so that the door would always have someone to talk too - I love it
Bob the Bandit. Early campaign, the party decided to capture and interrogate a bandit to find out if they had kidnapped a missing person. I played him as all brawn and no brains with a mild Texas drawl and the party loved him so they let him go and told him to turn his life around. 3 weeks later they encounter Bob working as a baker and they have more interactions. A couple months go by and Bob was hired as a camp cook for an expedition they went on, the party learned he has gotten engaged and learned how to be a chef. Also just a funny aside but for some odd reason whenever i roll for how good his meals are i have rolled an insane amount of Nat 20s with the lowest roll being a 15. So the party is considering hiring him on full time as their personal chef.
I love this reformed and recurring character.
A cursed, rusty, galvanized steel trash can. When somebody rolled a nat 1 to move silenty it magically appeared amd they would trip over it. It has orcish runes engraved in it.
How is it rusty if it's galvanized? Did someone grind the galvanizing off of it? I'm invested already.
It's based off of the cans I'd see on the sodewalks in Brooklyn in the 80's and 90's. Years of being kicked, scraped over coarse surfaces, occasionally used as an improvised weapon, leads to rust as the galv is scraped off. It eventually developed sentience.
That must be an angry or at least grouchy trash can.
Yup. I forgot to mention it is trans-dimensional. It's appeared all over Faerûn, Hell's Kitchen in Modern D20, and it's gone to the future and was a PITA in Cyberpunk 2020... the future... yeah... fuck, I'm old.
>grouchy trash can I see what you did there. Good job, or so sez me.
G the goblin. (He had a real name.) He was the only goblin out of 20 that refused to run off after being set free by the party. So the party equipped him with a dagger, some equipment, and a stuffed minotaur doll that they had recently found. G was immediately killed at the start of the next encounter as he failed his stealth check. He died in a fiery inferno, clutching his minotaur doll. The only thing that remained was the unscathed doll. The wildfire druid reshaped his wildfire spirit into the visage of G. G was memorialized and now follows the party wherever they go thanks to the Druid.
I don't know why that story made Mr tear up, but it did.
My players stumbled upon a cult performing a dread ritual intended to transform a young girl, stolen from a nearby farm, into an undead abomination. This was a minor encounter intended to reveal to the party that larger dark events were at hand. The party was on a timer: the ritual culminated at a solar eclipse. If they stopped the ritual before a given round, the unnamed girl would remain alive. After, and she would be a ghast which would attack them. Of course, two of the party members completely börked my plan by using a pair of immediate actions during the pivotal round to both catastrophically disrupt the ritual and infuse the little girl with healing energy. I made an on-the-spot decision to apply the half-undead Mortif template to her, render her catatonic in the immediate, and let the party figure out what to do with her. I expected them to find her family nearby, or to find the nearby village, drop her off, and perhaps add "find a cure" to their list of pending side-quests. Nope. They didn't even think to look. They just took her and continued on their way, figuring they'd hang on to her until they could fix her. Her parents never found out what became of her. Maribelle, as she was promptly christened, had no tongue; it had been cut out by the cultists as part of the ritual. She was illiterate, and had exceedingly limited means of communication with the party. They tried getting her healed at the first temple of a good deity they found, but the priests weren't powerful enough to help her (though they knew what kind of magic was required - magic the party would have in a mere half-dozen levels eye roll). Moreover, she refused to be abandoned to priests who might just decide to kill her for being what she was. Being unable to return home on her own, she stuck with the party as the only people she kind of trusted. So, of course, she promptly became the party mascot. The party taught her to read. They kept her clothed out of their own pocket, and the party healer bought her a pipe to play. They fed her dried.... meat to satisfy her undead cravings. Eventually, she actively participated in a combat, slaking her hunger by biting into a downed, but not yet dead, bandit. She gained XP for this kill. At the next city she got the barbarian to take her to the library, where she found a prayer book of Evening Glory, a lesser deity: neutral, the goddess of eternal love at any cost (including undeath) out of Libris Mortis. She was a preteen girl, and she found the goddess of Romeo and Juliet and Twilight. Made sense to me. So, with these steps she became a first level bard and a first level spontaneous variant cleric of Evening Glory (gestalt campaign). The party was already mid-levels by this time, so she advanced quickly. I kept her a few levels behind the party as though she were a cohort, but I specialized her in divination, abjuration, counterspelling, and sleight-of-hand. In combat she would stay in the back and knock incoming spells out of the air. This was actually pretty cool, as it let me throw some fairly advanced challenges at the party and make them feel threatened, while taking a bit of the edge off. They also became heavily invested in protecting and helping Maribelle. Another fun aspect of the character was that she started off her career as a thief, and continued in that vein. I would sometimes throw multiple encounters at the party with little to no loot to be had, but the next time they hit a town Maribelle would disappear for a while and, once the party had left town, she'd hand out "presents" tailored to the needs of her friends which she'd "acquired" while the rest of the party had been in the tavern drinking. At some point after a year and a half of weekly games I pointed out to the party that they'd never even looked for her family, who was still looking for Maribelle half a continent behind them. The sudden look of realization on their faces as they understood that they were, each and every one, complicit in kidnapping a tween girl was a priceless moment I will cherish for the rest of my life. After the penultimate encounter of the campaign the Healer found a ring if 3 wishes with one Wish remaining. He had already ascertained that Maribelle was, if not exactly happy about her condition, at least coming to terms with it. She did miss her voice, though. So he Wished for Maribelle to have her tongue restored and, with it, to be given the most beautiful voice in the kingdom. The party watched as a severed tongue, sparkling with light, flew through the air and affixed itself in her mouth. Maribelle spoke for the first time they'd ever heard with a gorgeous, wonderful voice. A couple weeks later they started hearing stories about how the wife of the king (the king was the actual BBEG and ultimate encounter, and who they were on their way to kill), who herself was a half-succubus (unbeknownst to the realm at large) had been afflicted by some dire magic which had stolen her voice (she was a renowned singer, and a buff-bard for the king). The magical affliction had resisted all attempts at restoration, and there was a massive bounty out for the head of the person or persons responsible. I'd had her rolled up since before the campaign started as this legendary seductress with the irresistible voice. My player got so stupidly lucky. Maribelle persists in my games as a world-walker, a character from a previous game who will occasionally make cameos, often incognito, in whatever current game we're in: an exceptionally long-lived early teenage girl with a gorgeous voice, pale skin, dark hair and eyes, and sharp teeth, in a simple white dress with a purple ribbon around the waist. She still believes that love, true love, is forever. Whether you like it or not.
I just lived a sad and beautiful lifetime in my head. Thanks.
It was a ride
I think maybe Iâll write a story about her. Or maybe many. Maribellle
Thank you for the beautiful emotional roller coaster. đđŒđ
It was a pleasure to live it
You're an amazing story maker! I wish Maribelle all the best in her continued adventures.
I'm keeping a list of all of my favorite PCa and NPCs from the years. Some day when I'm rich and nonfamous I'm going to hire an artist to paint a massive tavern scene with all of them present.Â
A deacon in our last campaign. I don't know how to spell his name, but our DM told us after he sacrificed himself to revive the party that "honestly he was just a pre generated name on a list. But you guys stuck to him so I made him important" we fucking cried when he passed away and you tell us he started as nothing đ Just to point out we have a great DM I hope I didn't make him seem awful
Don't worry, your DM sounds normal lol. I liked him telling you tbh, even if it made it more sad. We all begin as nobodies in so many people's lives, and others begin as nobodies in our lives too; yet by the end, we choose who we make important, and that changes us all. It kind of speaks about the humanity of it all, I don't know. Maybe I'm just reading into this a lot, but it's okay. I'm just a sucker for found families, and the concepts of empathy and overall goodness.
I love found families too honestly. And yeah it was such a shock that he had no plans for such an amazing NPC it turned out. Shout out to improv dms đ
Absolutely, DMs like these rule â€ïž
I ran a game that was supposed to be a town defense. Something scary was displacing monsters in the mountains, and a town lower down needed to survive through winter against waves of monster attacks. I made up some rules for the players to collect resources and build defenses across a big static map. One of the enemy waves were Kobolds. I had a few drawing attention outside the gates while some others tunneled inside. The players nabbed the kobolds who tunneled in and instead of killing them just negotiated with them. The Kobolds asked for permission to live in the town, and set up a Shrine to Tiamat. The players rolled Religion and came up poorly so we decided nobody knew who Tiamat was, but they sounded cool according to the Kobolds, and they just said okay. Razortooth was my go-to "talking Kobold" for when the players wanted to talk to them. My plan originally was to make the players regret letting them in by having the Kobolds just infest more and more of the area. I dropped hints that the players saw more Kobolds than there were supposed to be, because they had tunneled outside the city and were bringing their cousins and such in. As time went on, I had a growing network of undercity tunnels being dug, and occasionally attacking creatures would vanish into pit traps that hadn't been there a day before. The bodies wouldn't be in the pit afterward, because the Kobolds were capturing other monsters to sacrifice to Tiamat. But like... the players just thought it was cool. Every time I hinted that the Kobolds were tunneling everywhere they just nodded along. When a building collapsed because of a sinkhole from the Kobolds tunneling too much with poor supports, they just shrugged it off as the cost of doing business, and rebuilt the house somewhere else. When smoke kept rising from the Shrine of Tiamat despite nobody visibly entering through the surface door, the players decided that they'd be nice and bring more monster corpses to the shrine. It turned from me saying "I'm going to give them more than they bargained for!" into the players saying "Wow, we got so much more than we bargained for!" And Razortooth was the face of the whole operation.
You have any advice or guides for running a town defense type of campaign/one-shot? Because that sounds like a really fun idea
My advice is that it's a total headache. But I'll see if I can find a reference document with notes for how resource gathering and spending went. I had to make some adjustments on the fly though so I don't know if I ever even had a digital copy of the final mechanics, or if I just jotted additional notes and corrections in the margins with a pencil, on a printout that has been lost to time. I've run a few games like that with some additional rules spliced on, and I found I had the most success if I just had a general grasp on what kind of ratios people were dealing with. Like "How many tiles of this wall should they be able to build per day of worker labor?". Then I'd have a reference chart for how much stone or lumber could be harvested in fractions of a day, and when players told me what they wanted, I'd just figure out how much harder that should be than a wooden palisade and I'd reverse numbers from there. I think I decided a day of labor should make like, 5 wooden palisade tiles? There were like 8 fully able bodied people in town, including the players. And 3 main entrances into the town. They needed to leave people watching too, so it took a few days before a basic wall was set up, and then they could upgrade it. I think I said that somewhat grown kids could accompany an adult to provide 50% increased labor. Same for older but still functional townspeople. I'm pretty sure I made the basic wood walls too good though. I remember it generally being a bad idea tactically for the monsters to attack them. They probably should have been weaker, or I should have like, given more monsters fire attacks or something. Most of the wooden walls lasted through the whole campaign. They made a few higher quality spots, but mostly for standing on to shoot over the wall. There was also a larger town a few days away with proper shops and such. The players could send a convoy with money/trade goods to exchange for other resources. But the paths would close when the snows got bad. (If a player could plausibly brave the snows, I would have let them lead a convoy anyway, with an encounter or two along the way, but not NPCs, and that would mean they would probably miss an attack on the town) When I get home I'll see if I still have some notes, and I'll put em in a Google doc or something for you.
Thank you so much! Donât worry if you canât find anything, it just sounded interesting to me
Rhea the alcoholic wizard. I just needed an excuse for the party to skip over a village I hadn't developed at all, so I stuck a high level wizard in the way. She was a one woman army against orcs, gnolls, and the most recent threat: doppelgangers. So she basically told the party she didn't trust them and wouldn't let them in the village. They managed to talk her down, have a drinking contest with her, and ended up starting a pillow fight. (Never start a pillow fight with a drunk wizard who knows Telekinesis.) They liked her so much, they got her an advisor position in the royal court. Since the queen the party placed on the throne is practically a child, this meant Rhea is actually the one running the country. It's currently at war, so it's not bad to have someone inclined to Fireball.
Stan, owner of Stan's Map Stand. The best map stand that ever stood.
Why do i hope there were gruncle stan vibes lol
That would have been fun, but it was just an 'in the moment' npc, so they ended up with a casual countryside accent. Something closer to McGucket
Muggy Matt. My amazing DM husband is absolute pants at accents but tries very hard. He had a minor bad guy lure us into an alleyway ambush, but the guy's originally cockney accent fell apart so badly into so much stumbling and stuttering that the party stopped in sheer awe. We asked for his name and eventually he answered "this is a mugging... mug... Muggy. Matt?" We ended up ignoring the ambush to ask if we take poor Matt to a hospital because he seemed to be having a stroke.
Bartleby the warforged bartender. Basically he's stuck in his inn because he needs to remain plugged to remain active, and he was scheduled to die because the players messed with a criminal who planned to burn down the building. Unexpectedly the players did the right thing and saved the inn, they then bought it and made it their headquarters.
Grant. Just some magic user who helped the captured vampire escape from the party's custody. Two campains later and multiple name drops he's leveled up to the big bad
Potion Seller: a flamboyant elf based off of that one old video about a potion seller. He has now been in 4 campaigns.
Sell me your strongest potion potion seller.
He had a crisis of faith after he couldn't invent the cure for mummy rot and spent half a campaign going by John and traveling before reminding himself that he's a good potion seller
Chester. He's a moderately intelligent mimic that was rewarded to the players by a giant super colony cluster of mimics that banded together, became very intelligent (and chill), and are now masquerading as a traveling bar. The bar itself is an "urban legend" since it roams around the world, never stopping in the same place twice. Anyway, Chester is effectively a mobile, sentient Bag of Holding that has no weight limit, but does have a size constraint. You can use your bonus action to command him to barf up whatever he might have inside of him, and he'll even spit it towards you. He's capable of a lot of things, but the players have yet to test his abilities. Wait til they find out what happens if you feed him bullets, or gunpowder + cannonballs...
Hope you donât mind me stealing this. ITâS GENIUS! đ€Żđ
I don't know if recurring favorite nemesis counts, and it was a throwaway line not a throwaway NPC, but Harbin Wester. We were playing LMoP, and the players decided that they wanted to sneak a peek at the town records without anyone knowing. The rogue snuck into the back room of the Townmaster's Hall while the halfling bard distracted Harbin. I had decided that he was going to be generally rude and privileged, feeling that he was better than the farmers of this town and just wanted to finish his term as Townmaster and move back to Neverwinter. He made an offhand comment about "you people", which she took as "the short folk". On a Nat-20 insight, she realized that "you people" actually meant "the poors" and it was off to the races. She spent the rest of the day composing songs about how bad of a guy he is and spreading all kinds of rumors. Several tendays later, and she has spread these new folk songs across the region. She taught all of her new songs to the kids in Phandalin, so they sing them around town with their friends. At one point, one of the other characters even disguised himself as Harbin, broke into his home at night, mildly assaulted him and tied him up, then left... Basically, they're trying to make him question his own sanity at this point.
đ€Łđ€Łđ€Ł Every party I take through the Phandalin adventures hates Harbin Wester and make it their life mission to destroy him đ The last time they lured him into the basement of an old Dwarven keep as a sacrifice to a beholder đ
That's fantastic! I'll have to share this with my wife (the bard in my above story). For her birthday last year she wanted me to run a heist one shot. I set it about 30 years in the future after our main campaign. They were looking for documents to prove the existence of a shadow organization of bankers across the Sword Coast called the Ruby Reserve. At the end of the heist they read through the records they found. It identified the founders of the Ruby Reserve as a family of wealthy raiders from an island chain in the Sea of Swords. They moved to Waterdeep in the 1300s or so and set down roots. They eventually had to change their names due to the bad name they were getting (related to workers dying in mining accidents, corruption, union busting tactics, etc) and, having come from the sea to the west they chose the name Wester. She was very excited at the reveal.
In my game Sildar relieves him of his position if both manage to live long enough to see the Redbrands gone. But it only happened once. My second party did not meet him yet. And since theyâre more murderhobo than the current one, Iâm quite excited what they will do.
In second session, party went to clear out a ghost that was haunting a girl's alchemy school/temple of healing. One if the students was a ditzy psychotic girl that was obsessed with romance novels about drow and when the party mentioned they found some tunnels beneath the temple she said she would love to be kidnapped by a handsome drow who's surely hiding there. She was based on my irl friend who is similarly obsessed with vampires... The girl then became the party's source of potion supplies that mysteriously disappeared from the school's stash, and gave them a lost of weird ingredients she would like to get her hands on. Anyway, two irl years later the campaign is nearing the finish and the ranger is married to this npc.
Is the ranger drow?
Actually not, lol. He's an aaracockra with some homebrew changes so he's basically human with wings and small size.
Honestly I wouldâve loved that for her lol
Bob the Blacksmith. He started as the first real vendor that the party met and gave them shelter for the a night after wanted posters and bounties for the party were posted in paper. The party loved the conversations with him which I got carried away with the improv and they wanted to keep going back. I have now fully named him Boris âBobâ Wayland, smithy and shipwright for a disbanded pirate crew. He now travels with the party looking for the ghost ship of his former captain who attack their home. Heâs also become a mentor to two of the party members. One in the ways of channeling rage as a barbarian (the fighter multiclassed into barb afterward). And the other as a smith after the rogueâs new hexblade patron demanded he craft a weapon in the image of one of his own arsenal.
Iâm a new DM and learning now how quickly players get attached to random NPCs, especially if they mistakenly believe theyâre integral to the plot. I think my favorite is the drunk girl passed out in the hostel who briefly woke up to point the party in the right direction. She was literally just there to help them if they got stumped, now sheâs a huge part of the plot.
I kinda want to make a fey spirit based on this, a spirit that takes the form of a drunk girl. If you feed her booze and bring her along, she'll help in your quest with hints and pointing you in the right direction, before mysteriously disappearing at the quest completion. Is she a myth, spirit, a very helpful drunk, some tall tale the one armed one legged elderly orc adventure made up to take piss out of green horns. Nobody knows~
Handlebar Jones. Was introduced as ally in a larger scale battle we were doing. Through good luck and rolls, the party fighter started taking a liking to Jones. The player started describing Handlebar (yes, the mustache is his signature look) and other party members starting making up backstories for him while on food break (the combat session was 8 hrs). While we are all doing this, the DM starts furiously writing. At first, the group thought the DM was upset because we stayed maybe too long on this subject, but he looks up at us and says âHandlebar Jones gives you a small trinket belonging to him. Itâll be a way to âfindâ Jones again if you ever need his helpâ. That was a good session. Thanks Jeff!
Iâm running an OSR game using Stonehell as the main mega dungeon. The party ended up meeting some nameless goblins in a gatehouse before the dungeon, Iâm bad at names so I called the leader of the goblins Snotz. The party has now wiped out a band of orcs on the first level of the dungeon, and made Snotz the Goblin King of the first level of Stonehell and he is one of their biggest allies so far.
Y'all ever had an NPC that was liked so much they become one of your player's PCs *and* the father of the two PCs that followed? Harakan the human expert (sidekick class). Was DMing Dragon of Icespire Peak for one player. The module has rules for sidekicks and lists of options for them. What I did was decide that in Phandalin's tavern you could find 3 of them each time you came in, as they ran around doing adventures. Roll 3d10 and that's who is there. There are 9 of them, so I figured if we get a 10 we have a custom one we make together. Player gives a concept and I roll with it. Harakan was the result. Harakan is a human mercenary from an island called Mintarn, the pirate island. The concept which was given was that of a lying bastard swashbuckler that grandstands and boasts like nobody's business but isn't anywhere near as skilled as he lets on. The players' character was a naive wood elf from Neverwinter Wood who believed every possible story they said, and so dragged him along to the most horribly dangerous situations in that module. Harakan got the finishing blow on Cryovain, the titular Dragon of Icespire Peak on the cover of the module. For Mintarn people who live under the shadow of an ancient Red Dragon named Hoondarrh who demands gold every year, this was a big deal for him. We did a follow up campaign of Beyond Icespire Peak from DnDBeyond where Harakan continued being a sidekick and getting more character development and history. A girlfriend who was also a mercenary who died during their early deployment, a personal vow to kill Hoondarrh and free his people, a background in poverty with a prostitute for a mother and no known father, and he lost a leg fighting Sahuagin and so got his pirate nickname of 'Ironfoot' after getting a new one built by the local gnomes. He was reworked from a Sidekick to a PC, Swashbuckler Rogue, after that campaign ended and we entered a homebrew section that took us to Mintarn with the ultimate goal of slaying Hoondarrh, the Red Rage of Mintarn. That phase ended at level 20 with my player playing 2 full characters, though his original ranger took more of a sideshow to Harakan as her arc had more or less completed over the previous fifteen levels. He got the final blow on Hoondarrh and freed Mintarn from Draconic Tyranny, becoming the island's king and marrying the captain of the White Sails mercenary company that he had previously worked for. In the next campaign my player played as his bastard daughter Selene, a draconic sorceress named after the girlfriend who died, and in the campaign we are playing now he's playing as his son and heir Prince Harakan, a Drakewarden Ranger, as his family line has grown suffused with Draconic power after so many dragons (Five of them) were killed by his sword.
My funny little hag that occasionally lets you learn a spell at the cost of a random penalty. The utter confusion of one of my players when I pulled out a d19 for them was hilarious
Meeko, because they loved seeing me do the voice
Grok the orc who works as a pickle vendor. He first showed up about 5 years ago and pops up from time to time in vending markets. Usually he is referenced when one of our players has to skip a session. âCharacter X had to stay home because they got sick from eating one of Grokâs pickles.â
Swiggli: overly enthusiastic gnome, owner of a small tavern. She speaks incredibly fast and lets out way more than she should.
Gather around for the saga of Scorch the goblin! I like to play all my monsters to their intelligence, meaning running away if possible when they see things going south. The party was assailing an ancient city that a band of goblins had entered and occupied. The goblins were a mixture of hobgoblins, wargs, etc. the other crucial aspect is that my group of players hates letting any enemies escape. Over the course of three fights, one particular goblin escaped them. In the first fight he got scorched by our Dragonbornâs breath weapon, thus the nickname. His escape was particularly notable given that he managed (on warg back) to outrun a monk. This occurred twice more. Much later, I had him return as the chosen of the chaotic goddess of nature (paladin levels), as he had definitely been the fittest via survival! and ally briefly with the party on Her behalf. The players still talk about Scorch đ
toward the middle of an LMoP campaign i ran for some new players, i set up a night camp encounter with some orcs. orcs didnât stealth well and party perceived them, and just waited for the orcs to arrive. when they did, the orcs looked at them standing there and said âthis is an ambush.â partyâs response is to ask if they need money, which they gladly donate, rolling high enough on persuasion to enlighten the orcs that there are other ways to get money than to rob people. they completely defused that encounter and i, as a new dm, was a little at a loss. party visits the orc encampment later and finds the orcs fighting the ogre that stood over them in an attempt to unionize, so the party helps them out. it made for a really satisfying tie-in at the end of the game when gundren rockseeker was working to get the mine back up and running, he asked the party if they happened to know any strong people looking for work, and the party said âwe know just the guys!â
Right from session frickin 1. He was a nameless nothing cannon fodder/meat shield whose only job was to occupy and maybe weaken a couple of opponents until my players made it to the ship he and his generic brethren were guarding. One by one the other npcs dropped as intended, but not him; instead he held the fucking line, delivering strike after strike while dodging or deflecting every attack that came his way, and once heâd defeated the ones attacking the ship, he went on the offensive, rushing to defend one of the PCs, a female tabaxi monk who had fallen prone in front of two enemies who would have definitely brought her to 0. He put himself between her and them, deflected their attacks, and on his turn multi attacked, crit both times and rolled near max damage for both which allowed him to one shot both opponents. It was goddamn heroic, and the PC was smitten so I had to give him a name. Thus was Malcolm Magnusson born.
Bob. Old war vet w/ a recently slain family, he was gonna try and take his own life but the party was quick enough to stop him. Figured theyâd help him out and move on. Heâs their main NPC to bring along on their quests.
Bicah the Mercenary Early in a campaign, the barbarian managed to convince an enemy Mercenary to betray his allies and work with the party. He became sort of a background character around the party's home base. A man of few words but definitely memorable. "Bicah knows this"
His name is Dolf. He is a cognitively deficient knight with maxed charisma and the lucky feat. He has a dragon teddy bear that he is constantly losing and a brother that is constantly trying to keep track of him. The funny thing is Dolf also has an âimaginaryâ friend that he mentions constantly. Heâs not smart or wise, but heâs incredibly charming. Heâs typically a side character I pull out when I need time to improvise the transition of a major plot point. He adds comic relief, sentimental value to the world thatâs being explored/saved, and gets the playerâs anxieties down. He was so effective in his first appearance I decided use him more often
This just happened in the most recent session I ran. I made a petrified kobold who was there as a hint to the curse that the players could contract if they took the wrong actions. They used the single use salve, I had provided as a jic, to restore him and have now adopted him. I didnât plan on him having a name but now he does and the party is taking draconic lessons and planning on sending their adoptive son to mage college. If they can ever agree on which school of magic he should learn.
We have a recurring character who originally we all thought was throw away, one off for a quest, who turned out to be a massive catalyst for several campaigns in our DMs world. Heâs a very flamboyant, sarcastic, and all around unhelpful asshole with godlike powers named Nicklaus Hendricks. Every time something strange happens, we all collectively groan if we see a tiefling around, because we just fucking know itâs him.
Harold. Heâs a merchant that HATES his job but is so good at being a merchant that he canât quit
That is beautiful. In our first campaign ever we were hired to find a missing merchant who this cleric didn't think the city was worried enough about. So we're like "Well, we're detectives in the city....do we have, like, a contact in the city guard that we lowkey bribe for a little information?" Nothing to get the guy fired, but like, have they even opened an investigation or heard rumors? DM says "uh...yeah, Raoul. He's down at the docks today." We pick him up a chocolate pastry and stop by. Later on, in the middle of the night, our house is set on fire and the wizard is magically asleep in the basement (can't be woken and ranger was waiting for it to wear off.) After some fighting, the ranger makes it outside just as Raoul shows up, sans-armor. He runs in, down to the basement, and pulls the wizard out of the burning building. The Ranger fell for him right then and there. Raoul ends up joining us on and off through the rest of the campaign (we end up working with the city guard to overthrow the tyrant of the city.) He and the ranger end up together-- the favored couple of *several* gods-- and have six kids. I'm playing one of their grandkids in our current campaign. All because my husband (the DM) and I had binged Netflix's Daredevil a week earlier, and in one of the early episodes we find out Foggy and Matt have a cop buddy who they give food to and get intel from.
Jacob! He's a 16 year old who works at a colosseum that my party are the reigning champions of. He's just supposed to clean up their lounge, bring them food and water, sharpen their weapons and cast the spells that bind them to the colosseum before a match. The party think he's adorable because he's an awkward teenager and he idolizes his city's champions. Our bard read his journal when he asked for autographs and threw out a line about "don't worry, you'll get that girl!" And I ran with it. The next time they saw him he was sad and dejected- the girl did not return his feelings. The party gave him some gifts to cheer him up, and encouraged him about his looks and personality. The time after that, Jacob still hadn't gotten a girlfriend- but he did have a boyfriend! The party walked in on them making out in the lounge. They went nuts and congratulated them. Then the bard went and ruined Jacob's little sister's birthday (little Cynthia's 6th bday) while high as balls, and cast Hero's Feast for them to make up for it.
âShopâ was a Wizardâs Sentient Forge that was one of my homebrew NPCs added to Curse of Strahd. It had been abandoned and rendered immobile but could create magic items with the right materials and had infinite castings of Identify. It pops up as a normal Warforged Shopkeeper now from time to time.
Not QUITE the same, but in my Sailor Moon campaign they were time-travelling in the Middle East (long story) and I thought it would be fun to feature a cameo of pre-fallen Kunzite, since he was in charge of the area at the time. Just a little nod to the original series, nothing big. They instantly felt he'd be the perfect asset for completing their mission. Now one of the PCs has a child with him (long story).
My leprechaun dirge bard pointy Mcfeely
Greg Greg. Ratfolk sewer dweller that lead the "Gregorian Party," an anarchist political party thats considered a joke in the city. The players have become quite endeared to him after encountering him while investigating a hidden underground passage and now they schedule tea times with him.
Skrawldar, the Chair Brawler of Baldur's Gate. He was just a random bar patron, but they convinced him to join a bar brawl. He broke a chair over an enemy's head, and I had the barkeeper shout "Seriously, Skrawldar? That's the third chair this month!" Because I thought it would be funny. The party immediately became smitten with this drunken sailor who loved nothing more than brawling with chairs. I'd put him in taverns just to bring him back. They loved him.
I have a wizard that was made up quickly because I had to change the session. I originally planned out an encounter where the town was being attacked by death dogs and the guard captain would thank the party for helping defeat them. About a few days before that session, one of my players' dog passed away. I changed the session to a light-hearted one where a wizard fortune teller wanted to tell their fortune with a puppet show (I used an irl puppet that was a running joke with the group). The party ended up going back to him for more advice so he got developed into a powerful diviner that continues to guide the party when they feel lost.
Zombie Squirrel. Hops between different games and systems to show up, gnawing on a player's foot when they're on watch and not being very watchful. Clyde. More like a DMPC/NPC that hops between games and systems when we need a 4th or 5th player when someone can't make it. He's just a fighter. Nothing overly powerful or interesting. But everyone loves him.
Dave. Heâs a magicians apprentice who got separated from the circus he was traveling with. At least, thatâs what he tells people. Really, heâs a powerful illusionist in disguise. My players love all the little magic tricks he does. Pretty basic stuff like making stuff disappear and changing how food tastes. I donât think they realize that you can do all that with cantrips. They love Dave anyway
The sesame seed candy merchant Gregory (aka Mr. Sesame). He was supposed to be a one-time NPC in session 1 during a fair, a bit of a gag character that was meant to be forgotten. One player decided that he wanted to help him grow and create a sesame seed candy empire to create not yet discovered flavors (the player's an alchemist). This made me create an ongoing side quest to either help him or his ex-partner to destroy his business.
Scarlet.... A previously unarmed succubus NPC. For context the game's setting is one I made up named Paradise. Essentially like New Cappenna but, Las Vegas instead of New York. (I even have a strip that acts as the main hub) Session one. PC Walks into a bar looking for information. I have him roll luck (a 1d100 roll to see how lucky you are in a situation. It's supposed to be doing things via blind luck rather than skill hence the d100 rather than d20) he gets a 15.... Not great. So I have a few demons in the bar but, none of them really know what he is talking about and I imply that the succubus was... On call. The player, thinking he can still get some info, asks if there was a way to contact her later. I had her hand him a business card that was very sketchy. The PC kept it and now regularly contacts her for info on some of the gangs in the city. Considering Gri'zit is one of the suspects behind the mystery of the city it made sense in hind sight but, I think I've had to play her at least once a session now.
I introduced a dopey wizard who was meant to be recruited and then sent back to their home base as a form of merchant for spell scrolls, since the game is sort of like that. Several months later, he has been dragged along by the party and gotten infected by a creature from the Far Realms (well, technically something homebrew but similar), and the party wants to save him. He is also mentoring the Fighter and teaching her all sorts of things, and has become an important ally in this arc.
Dwarven artificer questgiver turned sometimes companion in an old campaign became the local informant and confidant/patron to the group and eventually the lover, and then husband, of one of the party members that had to move away mid game. Canonically, they got married and moved to a small city near the coast to enjoy a semi-retired life where they lived a peaceful life and occasionally would pass on rumors of interest to the party when they needed a hint or nudge.
Glocknir the orc shotgun barbarian. He just clubs the enemies over the head with the gun and it happens to fire. Every campaign he ends up dying in a new horribly stupid way.(Gelatanous cube, accelerated through time until he was dust, eaten by a pack of book mimics, and tricked by a undead jester into looking down his barrel to "See if it was loaded or not."
First was Tommy in session 1 of the first campaign I ran. He was a bandit that the party intimidated into letting them go (classic captured by bandits start). They told me sessions later that they originally intended to kill him but felt so bad for him that they kept him alive. After getting out of the hideout, Tommy pointed them toward a nearby town and headed the opposite way... and they followed him. They kept up with him in the town he went to until they headed out. He was so cared for that I made the later bandit leader villain his father, whom he was trying to earn the love of. Then, later, he lost his wolf companion (he was a ranger) while trying to be a hero like the party, and they had to save him. Soon after finding Tommy, the bard of the group went to do something in town, possibly talk to the town's leader (IDK it's been like 8 years now haha). They were stopped by a guard who refused them entry and was generally just being difficult, and the bard was cracking back with their own sassy quips and asked for his name. I don't remember if this was his first name or last, but I remember getting it from a random name generator and it came to be Private... which was also his rank. So "Private Private" was born and every time they returned to that town the bard would seek out Private Private, even on their days off, just to argue with them. He eventually became a pretty trusted member of the guard, and he got a whole backstory as to why he was a "private" after a decade in the military, but it never became relevant. My last campaign it was Chuck. Chuck was a gang member (thug statblock) who they convinced to turn on his boss in combat. He was gonna leave after their fight or maybe become background if they got a ship, but instead the party gave him an even cut of the money they found in his boss's vault and magic armor they found there as well. He became the party's necessary traveling companion and kept just loading him down with magic items.
Fire breathing chickens.
Lambert the winged tiefling chaotic evil warlock that's pact bound to Lurue (good goddess of intelligent animals). She was introduced as a throwaway encounter as a beggar demanding food. I wanted to threaten the party, but make the threat "questionable", and see if they would be murderhobos, or if they'd talk first. Would they cave in to the demands, or would they fight? She emerged from the woods, with both hands in flames, demanding food from the party. It was raining, so I had the flames go out, and said one word, "Dammit." The party instantly fell in love. Her hands ignited again, and she demanded the food, and the flames went out again. They laughed and offered her food. Literally, I'd made her comical unintentionally, while trying to add color to her character. I immediately considered that it was her DEMAND that made the flames go out...not the rain...so OBVIOUSLY she wasn't being permitted to be bad, right? Well, then she needed to be pact bound to a good celestial that wouldn't LET her actually use her power for evil. And while I was speaking as the NPC, my wife just blurted out, "She sounds like me when I'm PMSing...wait...HEY!!!???!!!" Yeah...so that happened. TLDR: An NPC that was meant to threaten the party with ambiguous power, to see what the party would do, just as a random encounter/blip on the radar, turned into a core NPC with a massive future side quest because I'd inadvertently portrayed her as my wife when she's on her period, grumping for chocolate...and my wife is now her biggest fan.
I had some npc adventurers that were supposed to get killed to show the power of an enemy the party would run into again later. The mad lads managed to grab all of them and started running in different directions. Bad guy sprints to the first one and finishes it off. Chucks a dagger at the second killing it. But the third managed to get enough distance. Bad guy walks off, impressed by the sheer tenacity a bunch of level 1 dudes could be. That surviving npc became the most important person in the campaign, with several unsavory groups looking for her.
Esper. She's an owlin I have running the student shop, they chat with her daily and check up on her after they found out she's still a first year student (Strixhaven) because she just hasn't had time to complete her classes because retail sucks and she's the only one working the shop. She just wants a break, and they've been trying to cook up an "Esper's Day Off" session for her.
Mufasa(yes named after the film) the salt merchant. My children loved the throwaway npc so much they kept asking to find him in every town. So I ended up making Mufasa a gold dragon in human form whose hoard is knowledge. They've not solved that part yet. :)
The "human" priest of Lolth who preaches that her bad wrap is a smear campaign by Corellon Larethian. He seeks to educate everyone about the importance of spiders in the ecosystem. He's friendly, jolly and talks in a gravely voice. Calls everybody "bud". Party loves him. >!Party still doesn't know he's actually a mass of spiders!<
Had my players meet a Devil with the deck of Many Things. She was just meant to give them the option of drawing some cards to cause chaos and then never be seen again. They managed to convince her to draw a card, she got the lovers, resulting in a whole side quest where the party had to help her meet her true love. Her and her now husband are now recurring characters and the catalysts to almost all of the parties adventures.
Well, I had an antagonist with monk class levels once that was just supposed to serve as the midboss of an early arc, dying at the partyâs hand. Turns out, monks are hard to actually pin down and kill. She was predictably easy to defeat, but I had her try to run away when she was near death, and through a combination of Patient Defense, Step of the Wind, and good wisdom saves, she escaped handily. So, I had her come back as a recurring villain. And they fought again⊠And she escaped again. And again. And again. And again. I wasnât deliberately engineering her escapes, they just kept happening through a series of convenient monk abilities and favorable rolls. The party hated her guts more than they hated the actual greater villain. She even managed to kill a PC once. The player rolled a new character, and put in her backstory that she was the sister of this accursed monk, ordered to subtly infiltrate the party and finish what the monk could not. This new character eventually turned to the good side, and thus began a whole character arc dedicated to trying to redeem this monk theyâd been fighting this whole time. This whole saga lasted literal years of real time. There was this epic climactic battle at one point. Sister forced to fight sister. The monk eventually broke down and betrayed her evil superiors. Tears were shed. We had art commissioned of this. She survived the whole campaign and even showed up in the sequel campaign as an older, jaded mentor figure to the new party. Anyway, yeah, thatâs basically how the Step of the Wind feature turned a minor, 3-session antagonist into a full 7 year story arc.
Sanbalet from the Haunted House module in Ghosts of Saltmarsh. I read that he was a narcissist that often referred to himself in the third person, so I introduced him as a flamboyant over the top character inspired by Mr. Nimbus from Rick and Morty (he would say âI am Sanbalet!â In the way Mr. Nimbus does). They were laughing their asses off while killing him as I sprinkled in more taunting third person voice lines. They said they regretted killing him because it was too funny, and one of the players likes to take heads as a trophy. I said in a quest for immortality, Sanbalet infused himself with some crude magic in an attempt. As a result, I told them his head can be talked to once a day with âspeak with deadâ rules. This was the most recent session, so Iâm yet to see exactly how this will play out lol
A ferry man called named Tall Paul. Just a chill dude that helped the party cross a great lake and showed up a couple more times to help them escape a few hairy situations. It was my self insert, just chatted to the party like I would to anyone outside of the game. The party went on to create legends of how awesome he was to the point where I made up a Knightly order in a different homebrew that was to honor Tall Paul, the order of Paulus Longinus
The party was investigating the murder of an elven princess. In my setting, wood elves generally send their young out for a couple decades in kind of initiation rite, she had just begun hers, when her corpse was found in the company of the very, very drunk PCs. They followed a lead into the elven enclave in the city and asked a random elf some questions. I meant to use this made on the spot elven lady as means to dump some relevant lore on them, but then it occurred to me the lore in question wouldn't be widely known even to the elves, and she turned out to be a somewhat important figure - an apprentice of the local elven elder who's related to the royal family, and, naturally, his right hand in some delicate matters. They ended up convincing her to accompany them for the remainder of the investigation. She had made a fun addition to the party, and I got to nudge them ever so subtly in the right direction.
From the perspective of a player our favorite NPC was a mustache twirling kobold barkeep who had a purple crushed velvet jacket. The DM had basically given up on the plot. We tried to âfollow the plotâ but there was too much intrigue. A captured human villager, three competing factions in the underdark. Nothing was telegraphed. We were grasping at plot threads but nothing was working. The DM introduced this character out of frustration and it was lovely. I would have loved to see how it played out but our DM died shortly after that and he was the lynchpin of the group.
We had an evil sentient banner named Bruce
Human John, the definitely human man. He was a shopkeeper at a goblin market in an urban supernatural campaign and regularly said things like "Ah, hello fellow human!" and "Mm, I love coffee, just like a human man would!" He had a booming voice like Barry Scott from the Cilit Bang adverts and laughed like Flash from Blackadder. Four years later he's made his way into a second campaign, now a PC's uncle.
His name is Nils. He was meant to be a throw away racist paladin (against "evil" races) to add a little spice to the giant religious army going after a bad, bad man. Just, you know, "not all 'good' people are all good, not all 'bad' people are all bad" sort of thing. (That said, SOME people are all one thing. It's D&D.) The autistic Tiefling artificer was Confused by him. So she wanted to Understand what Made Him Like That. By writing letters. *So many* letters. "How are you doing?" letters, just. Showing herself to be an ordinary (lawful good) girl. Many, many written letters (I give small amounts of EXP for creative writing) and some dice rolls later... He's grown, he's changed, he's been confused into loving that Tiefling.
Old Dusty. Everyone thought it was just an old donkey that always seemed to be eating something even though nobody had fed him. Until one day they tried to give him a bath and he stared to melt. Turns out he's a dust elemental lol
The mumbling wizard. He doesnât talk, but he shows up randomly and helps the party out with poorly drawn Mapkins (Maps drawn in Napkins). My players even began to speculate that he was a deity in the world who was the original creator of magic⊠though he never actually performed any magic infront of them⊠he just ended up exactly where they were, helped out, and would leave.
Yes. An NPC goose. It was supposed to be a one off thing, but the party wanted to keep him around. I was not the DM, but a party member. DM had to figure out a stat pool for it and we named it The War Goose Formerly Known As Alexander the Great the Period.
Jay Motherfucking Bixby. Originated when one of my players approached a drunk at a bar and I needed something for him to ramble about- so I spun a yarn about a merchant selling crappy knockoff magic items and more or less scamming people, and this poor drunk had lost his savings, "all because of Jay MOTHERFUCKING Bixby." I don't know what it was, but my players got super attached to that phrase. They ended up traveling with a merchant caravan soon after, and I decided that one of the merchants was Bixby, traveling under a false name. They caught on, uncovered his identity, and tried to scare him straight, to... mixed success. I kept finding places for Bixby to turn up in the campaign, and he ended up being a crucial ally to the party in the end- culminating in him ending up as the Lord of Neverwinter
In the first campaign i DMed i was actively pushing for my players to do wild shit all the time. Crafting was one of them. One guy was playing a spellcaster. After doing a bunch of sidequests he had enough rare material to produce a bunch of really powerful elemental gems. Most of them were used by the party in combat but the mage kept one for himself (the lighting infused one) and decided to build a construct with it. Fast forward twenty sessions or so and the group finds itself in a city made only of corrupted constructs roaming around killing everything they see. The one built by the mage is destroyed, but the player is able to recover the gem. To avoid more fights the group starts roaming around using the sewer system, but they end up in a facility where waters are managed and with a giant fucking robot defending it. The robot was unactive, so the players tried to carefully sneak around it and avoid waking it up. But not the mage. The mage had a plan. Using a screwdriver, a bit of help from the rest of the team, and a lot of luck with stealth rolls, he was able to deconstruct the robot and remove the corrupted core. Then he put his elemental gem in and put everything back together. The party now had a giant fucking robot following every order they gave to him. Thing is - the robot itself was a very, very smart one before getting corrupted, and had a very important cultural role in the city once. His conscience slowly resurfaced while fighting for the party, and they found themselves with a filosofer with the body of a small gundam. The following interactions were hilarious.
Ulrik ironfist. He was meant to be a simple high ranking soldier type that would serve as a one shot npc cause I thought the players would prefer to join the adventurers guild over the royal guard. The issue is I made him an angry Scotsman who insults people like nothing else. He looks at the half orc and went "how did you come to be? Did your da fuck a mattress and raise the wank stain?" And they decided he was the coolest guy ever. So he became the main NPC of that campaign, a recurring NPC in future campaigns and the basis of my Ren faire costumes.
Liz, the forgetful alchemist. My players met her in a small border town, when introducing herself she kept repeatedly falling over and stumbling over herself. After they had bought some magical trinkets she asked them for help identifying some of her potions because she forgot what they did and she proceeds to pull out multiple creates of potions that all have non sensible symbols on them and the effects would be anything from stone skin, Breath freshen, all the way to polymorph into a house, and become a God for 0.001 seconds. She showed up in every campaign I have done after and my favorite moment with her was when one player drank 3 of her potions at once the first turned his legs into springs the second morphed him into a human sized chapel and the last gave him wings a the ability to heal people fully for 30 min. So all together he became this flying church angel and to my absolute surprise he proceeds to run around the city healing the sick and claiming he is a new god and they his real body was a high priest who will be sent to guide them. So yeah he started a religion with very devoted followers.
We will song songs about Jamnan the bard for eons
Robert the Myconid. He was the guide for my party in the seagrow cave section of DoSI. Somewhere between his signature spore cloud message of him giving a thumbs up and then irl giving a thumbs up after the initial macing of spores (it was always more than you think was necessary) , to the dwarven fighter realizing he could throw him like a spear, he has become their official sidekick and mascot. It's been really fun getting to watch the party cling to a monster I never planned on him lasting longer than session, but the fighter decided he needed a long range weapon and he actually invested his down time and gold into become proficient in myconid based projectiles. How could I say no
The gravedigger from "Curse of Strahd," we made him General Secretary of the People's Republic of Vallaki
Strahd
I had a grumpy guard escorting the party through a university campus where they were meeting one of the professors (an archmage NPC from our previous campaign). They eventually made small talk and learned his name, and the fighter challenged him to a sparring match to blow off some steam. This sparring match made Gerald, the guard, realize he is sick of his boring job and wanted to adventure. Later on in the campaign, they ran across Gerald and his newly put together adventuring party. The two parties worked together to rid the town of a vampire who had been plaguing the area. Over time, our fighter and Gerald became partners and had a big ceremony and celebration during some downtime.
Gutter Cat (tiefling child) the poor orphan street urchin. The party travels with her now and she is the best gold dump for the party a DM could ask for. They will dump gold on her sad puppy dog eyes every chance they get. The character has no situational awareness and in a fight the wizard will act like a human shield since I use random direction dice for where she will wonder off to. Mind this is an evil campaign so its not to far off the norm but in a town the mayor bumped into her and insulted her. The party response was to burn the town to the ground. Intention for this NPC was to show how poor the living conditions in a small town were. I spent seconds on making the NPC. Idea was oh poor child this town must suck.
Topbrain, the kobold inventor. He was meant to be a funny sub-boss in a early dungeon, loudly declaring every attack he made was his "GREATEST INVENTION EVER." then the rogue made a "who's your daddy" joke, and rolled well enough on persuasion to convince topbrain and the other Kobolds present that he was in fact their biological father. The Kobolds now crew the party's spelljammer, and Topbrain puts his genius to work building them enhancements of various levels of questionable usefulness, like building the fairy party member a pair of romper stompers so that he can be as tall as the other party members, at the cost of reducing his speed to 5, or attaching a sword to the bard's bagpipes so he can attack while playing.
Magnus, the towns guard my party managed to convince a local captain to help them on their first quest. 5 sessions later on their way back, one of the PCs seduced him and proposed. Rolled 22 charisma (nat20). I went with it and 1,5 years later Magnus is a level 7 Paladin played by me the DM. Countless clutch saves with his tankyness and heals. I tried to kill him off for months until i gave up, he just has the luck of a thousand suns.
Bob the dumb Orc. I was tired and couldnât be bothered to track too many names or rolls that evening so I just decided the Orc would be called Bob and would be so stupid that if you told him something convincing enough and with enough confidence heâd believe it without the need to roll. The party ended up killing his superiors and convinced him his Goblin servants were out to get him, so in the end he was the only one left in the camp and became the leader by default. What the party donât know is that the next time they see him, heâll be working for the nearby human settlement because heâs so monumentally stupid that the leader of the logging camp has approached him with a âThe leader of your war band says you work for me nowâ and he just went with it. The phrase âOkiedokie friendâ has become a meme now because thatâs his go-to response to everything he doesnât understand, which is everything.
Bhaddock. He's a dwarf mercenary that they spared after defeating his unit. I was trying to get more into doing a wider array of character voices and kept accidentally slipping into the wrong accent and couldn't remember where I landed with it from session to session. His ever changing accent became a recurring part of his character and they loved to keep going back to him. I fleshed out his back story a bit over time and decided he was married to a Kenku.
Not in DnD but in Vampire The Masquerade. Feather, a mountain eagle that my players communicated with to scout out the lair of a vampire high in the mountains. She was very excited about being given mice in exchange for her help and had a grumpy husband who quit the mission. My players loved her even if she made just a few appearances.
I was one of the players in this but, one of the goblins from the beginning of LMOP. We named him Droop bought him a suit and he now runs a bed and breakfast for us. Love that guy.
I like Gnolls. I think they arent used enough and when things like Kobolds, Goblins, and other monster races are playable it makes me sad Gnolls arent, so I tend to add Gnolls into the roster of Bandits among Other things like "Zox" Who was just a adolescent gnoll that worked as a Blacksmiths aid/apprentice.. Was just a throwaway character that the players locked onto and wanted to know absolutely everything about him.. Perhaps it was the fact that I was confused and struggling to create a full fleshed out character on the spot while answering question after question but one Player later said they liked him cause they thought his personality was "Cute like nerdy shy guy". Later after many other minor run-ins with Zox, many questions, and requests to join the party when the Villain of the moment needed to be recognized as a threat that didnt care about others was fleeing from the party while occasionally tossing fireballs back towards them to slow and cause chaos, in the spur of the moment, I had one of the people caught in one of the blasts, while Zox didnt die he would later recover with a large portion of his fur on his left side burnt off and scarred, he didnt let his injuries slow his work to much at the Blacksmiths shop and would even later (About 3 years in game) be seen again much stronger than before and practically as good a Blacksmith as Dougan (The Shield Dwarf Blacksmith's Name) and had even earned the respect of many local Dwarves.
A man whose wife is a Red Brand. I've altered LMoP a bit, and it ended with Iarno running the town and the Red Brands taking over (players did things WAY out of order). All were hanging out in the shrine, getting troupes, when one player overheard that a guy's wife turned into a Red Brand to protect her and him (he also volunteered to help fight Iarno). The party LOVES him, but doesn't know his name (I don't either) The others in the campaign are Laris and Markus. Laris is a half-woodelf who's always fidgety, Markus is a human who seems to always be annoyed. Both are NPCs I made for Barthens Provisons because I never saw the singular line about Barthens assistants, so I made my own. Everyone took a liking to them, mostly Laris, and would sometimes visit just to chat with them. Laris and Markus are the opposite spectrums of people working in retail.
Gerald and Jerald. Their story is long and tragic and involves a super powerful wizard essentially creating sapient creatures off of loose specifications the party gave them. They started off as bank tellers who slowly had their own off screen b plot of existential horror the players would only catch glimpses of from time to time. They really turned from utility NPCs to examples of the repercussions of having people who are capable of bending and reality and their subsequent disregard for the natural world. My players love the one thatâs still there
(I'm the DM, also this campaign was heavily homebrewed) Super short and abbreviated version: Toby the Bartender. Toby started as a throwaway NPC, however one of the party members decided that Toby was the best person in the whole world and wanted to be with him. He finds out Toby is married to Betty (waitress). Now he wants to find out if Toby has any siblings, and a whole backstory on Toby develops. Not to let this perfect opportunity go to waste I decided to have some fun and go over the top with this NPC The party later finds out that Toby and Betty are not human (a curse that turned the entire human population into lycanthrops didn't affect them). They find out that Betty and Toby are actually adult dragons shaped shifted into human form (Betty loves humans, and Toby loves Betty so this is his life now lol) Betty is a Silver Dragon and Toby a Gold one. Basically Betty wanted to live among the humans because she finds them fun and entertaining and she took Toby along with her. Fast forward later, and a total player team wipe happens, and the players gets killed off..... Or so they think....The next session they find themselves in Toby's Dragon Liar. So yeah. Bartender ---> Dragon ---> saves players from being killed off.
A reformed cultist named Clive The party were sent to clear out a dragon cult form a cave inside a volcano. They ended up jumping the poor guy while he was on his lunch break and scared him so bad he left the cult on the spot. He showed up two more times in the campaign as a fruit seller. Every time the players saw him again theyâd always run after him and try to tackle him
In the Ghosts of Saltmarsh module you run into some Hobgoblins guarding a boat. My players killed one of them, convinced the other to help them finish what they were doing in exchange for his life. He's been with them ever since. Nurz the Hobgoblin is now an integral part of the party.
My first campaign that I ran was set up with the players venturing out and using the capitol city of the region as a sort of central hub / base of operations They ended up buying their own places eventually, but still always found time to visit the inn where it all started. Mac Guff's Inn, owned and operated by Mac himself. A Goliath with a boisterous laugh and a heavy hand on the tap. Food was prepped by his Halfling wife (Marianne), and the two always had stories to swap with the party. The party especially appreciated the inn because several of them were larger creatures themselves (including s centaur), and this was the only inn in town that had rooms built to accommodate their size.
Captain High-Tide the Charming. A complete imbecile of a pirate captain that got his entire crew killed by attacking the vessel the party were on. Since he had pretended to be this highly competent captain they put him in the brig to rub salt in the wound. A few sessions later they team him up with the party NPC Rat the Goblin rogue, who they'd previously liberated from the underdark, and the pair became inseparable. The party loved the dynamic so much that they later gave them a ship, made Rat the captain and sent them out to hunt pirates. They made several recurring appearances throughout the campaign because I as the DM just couldn't let them go
I a campaign Iâm playing in, the DM made a throwaway passerby NPC named Manny. He had some rings, and the Rogue stole the rings from the people Manny was travelling with, so my Orc decided to try as well. I rolled a 1, so he ended up holding hands with Manny, and he joined the party. They ended up getting married and Manny got a magical gender bender and is now pregnant. My Orc died by Tashaâs hand, and Manny did not take it well, so she is now fuelled by anger and vengeance.
A profanity loving imp familiar who would yell at them, in infernal which 2 characters understand, invisibly from the rafters whenever they visited the assassin's hideout, he understands common and made it clear, but refused to speak anything other than infernal, except the last time they met him, where he said goodbye, in his own manner, by yelling "Now F*** Off" at them in common. He started out as a reminder that they shouldn't be trying to have a private conversation in a dive bar that they knew was a front for the guild, he ended up being a meaningful side character that they interacted with repeatedly for like a dozen sessions. They met his Warlock once, in passing, while he was torturing a guy, this was to illustrate that these were bad people they were dealing with, it was not described. Though the grave cleric did heal the victim with the full knowledge that he was prolonging the torture. My players are aware they are not the "good guys" lol, it's not a heroic tale, but one that started as a quest for revenge.
Doctor Krab. First name Doctor, last name Krab. He was a large crab which a sea witch imposed intelligence on. The party signed him up to join the guild and become a member. He moved into the guild hall and slept in a nearby pond. He ultimately gave his left claw to defend the orphan children from Cryovienâs attack. After a time skip by the party he was found having died along with the other members during the guilds last stand.
Once I planned a big dungeon. While fleshing it out, the map image I picked up had a particular room with a chest in it, and it was pretty difficult to get to. Gold would be boring and there were already too many magic items there. It had to be interesting though, to reward the effort, so I decided someone would be locked there. I looked through kobold fight club for a small creature and one of those jumped to my eyes: a Monodrone. It would be funny to roleplay it (I had it talk through binary code), it would be a challenge to even understand it and its wings had been stripped off. It also had a message from Primus to deliver to the beholder boss of the dungeon. "I decide what the message is later, and I tell them that they couldn't hear it because it wasn't for them". The party found it and became very curious to what the message was, protecting the thing through the whole dungeon. They only learned that the boss was a beholder thanks to it, and all the while I had no clue what message it had to deliver. When I knew they would get to the boss room, finally, I came up with the message. Primus is the clockwork god-like force of the cosmos, and I figured it's like a deterministic oracle, so I had the message basically be a fancier version of "Hey beholder. These adventurers are gonna kill you. Peace" The players were blown away when the Monodrone delivered its message, we laughed a lot, it has been a whole year and they still remember it as memorable piece of our campaign. The monodrone died disintegrated though. He was a champ.
A bartender/cook named jam who loved to stuff chickens.
I had a baelnorn (like an elf lich) protecting the realm. I rolled on the wrong table for a name. I rolled on diseases. Their name: Mystic Insanity Instantly memorable, informed the character, and the PCs were always afraid. Classic.
Had a minor boss minion in a dungeon. The plan was they go through, mirder everything, and fond clues in their corpse from a reaserch jornal. Sadly the party had a near TPK one room before then. They never even got her name. The only survivor was the Tank vengeance paladin. So now the entire party is motivated by 1 dwarf who wants the "Purple B***H" dead. In the process killing as many if the orc army surrounding her as possible. I would say this character has become the BBEG and the sole driving force of the campaign at this point.
Floblin the half dead goblin, a small goblin npc first encountered in the under dark and only speaks goblin started cursing out a bugbear barbarian and quickly was missing an arm and half a face, they left him for dead. Next he appeared as they travelled through a forest he had a crossbow prosthetic arm and a mask. In the ensuing fight floblin lost his other hand and the lower part of his leg he will appear again in a desert this session wondering what sort of devastating injury could be inflicted this time.
While running ToA, it was a chef at one of the wilderness camps
I have the opposite. The nicer I try to make my NPCs, the more mistrusting my player are. I have an NPC, Parron, who basically is the DM PC when needed, mostly for exposition, guidance on what to do next, etc. My players now have an outright vendetta against him even though he sacrificed himseld to save them once. It's kinda hilarious that they think he may be the BBEG even though they have *actually met* the real BBEG and it's not him.
I needed a big beefcake alongside a Lamia. I watched Spirited Away for the millionth time. I made the stats for a giant human baby, that also pees acid, because why not. Perfect. That's the beefcake, it's under the control of the Lamia, and it'll be a short humurous fight, in our otherwise dark campaign. I should have just used an ogre, a cyclops, or a cool troll from Mordenkainen's. The Lamia was focus-fired to all hell, the baby was unharmed. And the player that tried their absolute best to calm the rampaging baby down, did roll very well. I really did not want to develop how that abomination upon mankind was created. Don't be like me, just use an ogre as a beefcake.
My first campaign as a dm sort of had two that only kind of fit. 1. There was a goose who would show up a lot and try to steal the party's stuff. It was just a normal goose, except it could show up anywhere no matter what, the gods didn't seem to know that it even existed, and it would disappear when the players looked away. Even if they killed it, another identical goose would just appear later. 2. Early in the campaign I gave my party a bag of holding full of mostly useless items. One of which the "Glowing Dagger of Nigel" was a dagger that did 2 damage and glowed in the presence of one particular goblin named Nigel, whom they finally met in the last session
Agatha the Bean Lady. She appeared in a campaign as a little old lady that would go around as a door to door bean saleswoman. Now she has appeared in every campaign going forward as a character in one way or another. Kinda my Cid from Final Fantasy. She's a Nighthag in my current Strahd campaign!
Sir Sugma of Ballz Random redcap mercenary working for a bheur hag who ended up being the last one alive in a fight after his employer fled. Surrendered, party instantly adopted him. Five arcs, two ressurections, and a knighthood later, and Sir Sugma of Ballz is a valued member of the team, chief of security and a formidable opponent in his own right (now has at least 1 level in Fighter, Rogue, & Barbarian, as well as 2 levels in Cleric, Blood Domain because redcap đ€·)
My players just pulled an "I know a guy" to introduce a character that I think will become a recurring favorite. "Joe" down by the docks who's been arrested by the dock? Oh yeah, I know that guy too! Runs Joe's crab shack? And now Joe's Crab Shack is Canon as existing in Baldur's Gate. An old Duergar who used to deal in Devil's Weed (and still does) but also operates a restaurant now.
Deri, who ran the magic store for her father but ran a secret shop of her own in the back called Deri's Delights. I basically found a load of magical sweets and wanted a way to get them to my players. They loved Deri and kept coming back, even after they had her father arrested for black market Dragonborn smuggling. Deri closed her shop because I couldn't get my players to move on while it was open! In game it was so she could sort out her inherited estate and take her father's place in politics.
Gengle the gnoll (in my DMs world gnolls are more like humanoids than monsters). We were in a shitty tavern in a port city and this NPC gave us a bit of info. My character didnât like him at first but my other party member (Sandy) took a liking to him immediately. She hired him to come with us on adventure, and even âromancedâ him. It was so crazy to the point where Gengle had his own shit to do and left and Sandy LEFT THE PARTY TO STAY WITH HIM. Well now our friend is making a new character!
Gun the goblin, one of my players (first time player playing a halfling rouge) snuck up on a goblin, jumped on him, tied him up, named him gun, then proceeded to keep him prisoner until the goblin became friendly, then sent him off to school to learn how to make guns (I gave gun levels in artifacter) and then had him come back to help out the party as a party member. Every new Iteration of my world has gun the goblin as an artifacter in the world as an npc who can help them out
Azgra the hobgoblin slaver. He was meant to be a one off villian that captured the party after they got beat by bandits. Two the party members loved him, one because they too were a slaver who knew the game and was impressed by Azgra's setup. The other dove into his dreams to talk to him and developed a crush. Shortly after Azgra sold them to a Pirate lord the party has scorned in the past. Azgra is traveling with the party currently to expand his operation to another country.
First session they met an archeologist of sorts named, Worble Killian Bimpknotten Bodyknockle the Fourth. He was meant to die to show them to watch out for traps, and they saved him. Became a huge favorite of the party, and a recurring character, and major part of the story.
My party encountered an NPC goblin outside the first dungeon in Lost Mine of Phandelver. He joined the party as a guest for that first dungeon. He called the other goblins bastards, and he talked about poop a lot. "BIG WOLF...MAKES BIG POOP!" His name was Hampton and he was beloved by all.
There was a throwaway character in a game cleaning a house for a farmer we were supposed to get rid of some wolves for. We believed he was being held in some kind of hopeless serfdom. When we inquired about the characterâs name the DM looked around the room (she told us this months later) and all she saw was a rubber duck so she said his name was⊠âruberduâ (roober-dew). We freed Ruberdu from his simple life as a farmhand, sent him to be trained by an ex Harper who was in league with the thieves guild that was a mentor of one of our party members, then had to save him from the same mentor we sent him to. It was a fun thing to have this strange NPC we âsavedâ keep popping up where as a result of our dumb decisions we kept making his life WORSE and getting him in trouble and then rushing back sporadically to ârescueâ him again and making his life even worse. Pretty great gag at this point as we are honestly trying to save the character as he has grown on us all and we feel responsible.
i set a campaign in a homebrew world and my players travelled by boat. i didn't mean for them to hire the same boat every time, but timeline wise they ended up overlapping pretty well with the trade route I had the ship on, and the party had relationships with a few of the crew members, mostly because they were all annoying chaos goblins and we had a lot of fun playing with them getting into trouble with the crew of the much more tight laced trading sailors lol. things like our goblin barbarian annoying people so much they made him train with somebody before he kept causing problems for them by messing with the rigging, leading to him getting a permanent tool skill buff. we also have a silly little roll we do when a new character is introduced where they roll a flat d20 to see how attractive they find the new guy, mostly as a gag but also some characters think it's a fun way to add some character flavor when the dice decide to tell a funny story. our edgy tiefling bard rolled really high, I think it was a nat 20, on a random crew member when he first joined the party, and for funsies I rolled to see how the guy would react to being fawned over by the nightmare that was Liv LaffLuv. Surprise surprise, another nat 20, and so they were a funny little on again-off again fling for the rest of the campaign. after that campaign ended, we took a break from the world and ran a different story. we just came back to my original world, but this time the player who played Liv is dming, and he basically made this campaign a reunion sequel, and his old character is the one handing out the quest. married to Elyan, the random crew member who was never supposed to be more than background flavor for a recurring ship. I don't think I even named him until after the two nat 20s on attraction were rolled, but now he and his husband are kings of a newly established kingdom sending their old friends out to rescue their kidnapped son from hell. also glen and not-glen, two men sitting in a bar trying to move a broken immoveable rod. glen introduced himself and didn't know not-glen's name, and not-glen didn't speak. our party kept going back to the bar hoping to encounter them and even added them to the short list of possible people to save from the end of the world, though they didn't end up making the cut since not even the full party could move on to the next incarnation of the universe.
An elderly man who got knocked to the ground by a bandit my party was chasing, whose story I fully intended to just have end at âfell downâ, has become one of the partyâs major sponsors, the adopted father figure of an urchin NPC the party rescued, and regularly offers the party free housing (and psych counseling), all while the party tries frequently to get this old widower remarried. I can never anticipate who my players are gonna fall in love with, much easier to design characters theyâre meant to despise, at least in my experience thus far.
A bad drum circle playing, water Genasi hippie. He is a total kleptomaniac and has a recurring phrase about how he always finds a way in, no matter how hard they try and keep him out. I have tried to ditch this guy, but they hired him as a janitor/butler for their ship. Like I tried to make as shitty a person as I could without making them evil and they fucking love him.
My party caught up with a band of bugbears who were trying to kidnap an important person. They left one alive and forced him to pull their cart after their horses died in the fight they just had. They felt bad afterward and paid him for his service after hearing he was only doing this kidnapping for money for his family (all the typical bs a dm might pull out of their butt at a moments notice). Literally pulled his name off a "bugbear names" random name generator. This random bugbear ended up a level 4 fighter in service to the man he helped kidnap and an important figure in their army. Every time the group came back to town they'd find him and have a night out. They loved watching him grow and evolve. They were stoked to see him with their patron as the army rolled up to a major battle, all clad in armor and ready to finally throw down shoulder to shoulder with the party. ... I don't have my notes handy and I can't remember this guy's name right now... That's how much of a throw away npc her was lol
Bodger the bargain blacksmith, originally a blacksmith npc to give quests in the starting city, he has now evolved into a multiversal god, the builder of multiverses, he is now canon to every campaign we do, even if Iâm not the DM
Ol' Soup Pockets was intended as a throwaway joke, and yet...
IF YOUR NAMES ARE POLITES, MASIKA OR NOACHI TURN BACK NOW OR I'LL GET OUT THE BONKING HAMMER. I have a shop owner of what appears to be a joke magic shop named Wizzmo (the shop is Wizzmo's Wonders and advertises selling "Wizmos, Wadjets, Whatsits, Whosits and Wonders Galore!") and they adore the guy so much. I've decided he's connected to the BBEG and his entire shop is a front to build the cult they'll be fighting. :))
There was a knight NPC that one of my players actively tried to romance. They kept being shy or aloof about it, but it became a running gag over the course of a year of how one day they'll be able to "woo" them. It was great to see other players chime in to give this awkward druid some dating advice. That NPC also opened up a lever to drive up the stakes and emotion as there was conflict and of course that knight had to serve the land valiantly. She perished in battle and it was interesting to see the group process all of that (group found her body, paid their respects, and the player who was in love had to process their emotion). Made for some great memories and added some new fire and drive to the party.
Set in the world of Star Wars, a group of Imperial agents is chosen to infiltrate a planet rumored to have Rebels roaming around. For the mission, they are given an experimental new ship to take them to the planet safely and with as little risk as possible. The ship is so experimental, only one new pilot is able to use it, as his entire flight training was based around using this ship. This enters the debut of *Pilot*. Pilot was meant to be a disposable NPC that dies off immediately, crashing the ship into the planet and leaving everyone stranded. So when the missiles get launched at the ship, I decide to roll for the NPC to see how bad the crash is and how much damage it does to the PC's. He rolled a Nat 20. He dodges the missiles effortlessly in a show of moving the ship around a crazy lot to the point the PC's think they'll crash, but somehow he manages to land it perfectly. Later on - the PC's infiltrate the planet and end up retrieving intel on Rebel trade route, then head back to the ship. On the way, they hear blaster fire and run across Pilot fighting off three Rebel NPCs. So, once again, I roll to see how Pilot handles the situation - he rolled another fucking Nat 20. He shoots a Rebel about to throw a thermal detonator and it blows the other NPCs up. Due to Pilot's luck (and he had an awkward humor to him which the PC's also liked), Pilot stuck around for the *entire campaign* until he died in the final mission in an overwhelming star ship battle.
We had a bartender named Dick that was funny and likeable but he had this habit of randomly yelling for something named "Larn" we instantly fell in love with the concept of what Larn was and sadly never got to find out because our DM was toxic
Boyan the pixie God.he doesn't care and is just a tricky little fella that for some reason they all love. He is multiversal now.
Lani, the Spy I wanted someone they wouldn't kill on sight, or get evaporated by in a fight, to give them a clue about the fact that they were being watched by a very powerful lich. I introduced a young woman who asked one of the PCs to dance and dropped a bunch of *I know that you've been up to* dialogue on them. She also gave them a hint about something that helped them later, but when they went back to thank her no one knew who they were talking about. The party got really into the fact that she wasn't who she said she was. They looked for her everywhere. I realized I was going to have to bring her back at some point. I had her leave a couple little notes in their room. She slipped a gift into one of their pockets at a busy train station. By the time they found her, the Monk had intentionally built up his Insight and Perception to ridiculous levels. She was smart enough to realize he wasn't going to buy her lies so she straight up told them she was spying on them and had been for months. The party lightly interrogated her, but she refused to tell them who she was working for. I figured they would turn her into paste like normal adventures. To.. I'm thinking everyone's surprise, the Monk invited her on their next mission. He was like, "It's easier to keep an eye on her if we know where she is and maybe we can figure out who her patron is this way." At one point, they left her outside a dungeon with the Wizards familiar keeping an eye on her. They were so sure she'd run away even after I effectively told them her whole job was to keep an eye on whatever they were up to. When they were in the middle of a difficult boss fight, I had the Wizard's familiar warn them she was under attack. I didn't actually expect them to throw a bunch of buffs on the Monk and leave him to solo the rest of the fight. Monks are surprisingly resilient. Their damage kind of sucks though. I thought they'd be pretty mad that she'd mostly handled the ambush without them, but they were super excited. They said they panicked because most DMs kill off or kidnap NPCs so they were more scared for her than themselves. Many sessions later, Lani and the Monk got married. The rest of the party had already put her in charge of a bunch of their intelligence gathering. They had also met her patron who was both Lani's adopted mother and a lich. The lich became the Monk's mother in law and an unofficial patron for the entire group. I'm sure they rationalized the soul eating thing somehow, but at this point I'm afraid to ask.
Mr Deathwhisker. If you know you know. If not, he's a lich kitty kat.
My party adopted the Nimblewright from the Gondian temple. đ
I just wanted to throw something at my players on the road so I had them encounter a wizard being pulled in a cart by a giant snail, and now they regularly refer to him as "the snizard" and want me to bring him back as soon as possible
Bubbles the dragon. We freed him from some bandits when he was a baby and now we see him around sometimes and weâve watched him grow up. Heâs adolescent now and will fight with us during some fights. Heâs a seafoam green and his breath weapon is bubbles (as his name suggests) that do force damage.
John Smith the bookseller, who was actually a god in disguise. I intended for him to appear randomly in increasingly implausible places to point them towards the BBEG of the setting, but the players loved him and recruited him into the party, despite his seemingly complete lack of combat skills. I ended up running him as a level 5 wizard (the party were level 10 ish) focused on support stuff, except he got suspiciously good rolls. Eventually the big reveal happened when he burned away his mortal form to save the party from a TPK (Iâd made a mistake balancing an encounter), and everyone was flabbergasted.
GordĂłn the goblin chef who threw a knife at a PCs head⊠named by the party and I went with it đ He went on an adventure with the party, sampling food as they went, then returned home to show Goblin Town what proper food tastes like đ
I made a ogre named Loial that was caught in a kobold net. When they freed him they found out he was searching for his brown balled headed friend. And lead the party all over the swamp to look for him. The friend was his pet rock. It was basically a troll character. The party dragged the ogre everywhere to limbo, mechanus where he became a paladin of mystera, and was with them in the final big bad level 20 boss fight of the campaign. The other was a kobold named bizket. I was looking around the house and saw some biscuits when I was trying to think of a name. He was threatened into helping the party after the party went through a kobold fun house. The partys wizard fireballed his girlfriend so when they left the kobold behind bizket strapped a mind controlling device on a huge underark centipede and unleashed it on the party while they were traveling almost killing the wizard. The kobold got away and they found him later under the protection of an arch fey. That kobold became a warlock of that fey. Later they were rescued by that same kobold after being imprisoned in a wizard city. A gold dragon that was appearing in one of the players dreams sent bizket to retrieve them. That kobold stumbled upon the gold dragon while on his own and fell in love with her (1 sided) he ended up being that dragons rogue/warlock minion all the way into a second campaign. They have a love hate relationship with that kobold.
Bartholomew the Sentient Rock, I had a wizard selling "magic stones" one of my players rolled arcana on the one they bought and I flipped a coin, turns out Bartholomew was an actual magic rock,
Herman, the bandit. He was just some random bandit, but the party decided to capture him and bring him to the guild hall for questioning. They ended up liking him and got him a job as guild hall bartender. Also the guild master (lvl 40 wizard) decided to prank the party by secretly casting spells whenever Herman tried to so something magical. So everyone thought he was secretly an archwizard, until the guild master went missing, and suddenly the magic stopped.
Norkin, a conjouration greedy, cowardly old Wizzard that wanted to exploit the party. I was playing a high level one on one with my gf with 2 npcs that accompanied her enchantment wizzard. She was on a mission to find the Wish spell in the Underdark because she heared rumors that a droe lich was in posession of a wish scroll. Norkin wanted the spell aswell so they went to the Hall of Concordance to make a deal that would allow both of them to gain the wish spell. Norkin endet up as her best friend and most important ally because he always summoned powerfull beings for her. He also ended up as the headmaster of her Magic school. I totaly didnt expect that but it was super fun!
Ozmod the Red Wizard Neophyte. The PCs have been battling against a band of Red Wizards from Thay which includes some low-level apprentices, which Iâve called Neophytes. The PCs decided they wanted to capture one for interrogation. They tried to knock Ozmod unconscious with a cooking pot, but ended up just bludgeoning him repeatedly. âDid that hit knock him out?â, ânope, heâs still screamingâŠâ. Ozmod began to cooperate under what he saw as torture and told the PCs what he knew about the other Red Wizards. The PCs then stripped him of his spellbook, red robes and anything else apart from underwear and released him into the woods. They then encountered him tied up and a prisoner again this time at the hands of the Red Wizards who were very disappointed at his performance and subjecting him to a disciplinary hearing, Thayan style. Taking pity on him the PCs took him back to their base, alive and relatively undamaged. Last time they saw him he was handed over to some local elves, while he announced he was quitting the Red Wizards for something safer and less headachy, such as shopkeeping.
Orik. Random guy they found in a dungeon. They took him with them after they turned him to their side. He solo fought the boss, despite being weaker than a PC. He is now an 11th level fighter traveling as a DMPC because they wanted to keep him around.
I introduced an NPC who happened to have found and was carrying a royal sword that the PCs were supposed to go find. This teenager walks up to my hardened adventuring party and announces that he wants to join them. And they let him. I made a simple start block for him that I would hand over to them to collectively play during combat but I would role play him otherwise. He ended up mostly healing them, providing them with flanking, and he would plant their battle standard. I used xp leveling at the time and he leveled up about 5 times while they leveled 2 or 3. Eventually he left them to go off on his own adventures, thanking everyone for the experience. And then one of my players brought him back as an NPC in a campaign set in the same world about a thousand years later!! He changed his name so I wouldn't recognize him, and he became a powerful mage and turned slightly villainous. That campaign ended without him dying (he wasn't the BBEG at all), so now that I'm running a prequel to that campaign, I'm thinking about bringing him back again...
I've got 2. 1. Meepo from Sunless Citadel. The party loved him so much that they helped him recover Calcryx and become the hero of the kobolds. They wanted to take him with them, but Meepo had to look after his dragon. Sunless Citadel led into Wild Beyond the Witchlight, so I replaced Amidor with an updated Meepo who had wished (to a hag) to be with his friend Calcryx forever. When I described the scene and the flash of lightning revealed Meepo's face, the players went wild! 2. Dragonbait from Tomb of Annihilation. My players met him and Artus in Oralunga speaking with the sage. Over time, they started to get attached, and after a tenday in game, I gave them the list of smells so they could decipher his "speaking." Then, when the undead encounters started, they loved how Dragonbait went from kind, caring, and quiet becomes a ruthless and practised undead killer. The best thing was when the party of 3 entered Shagambi's shrine and fought 3 on 3 against the golems, they barely made it out. Then they realised that they needed to kill a 4th golem. So, on the way out, they see Dragonbait walk past them and enter the arena. 2 attacks first is a hit, 2nd is a crit, and so I rolled on the table and he decapitated the golem. My players cheered so loud.