Welcome to the second of many posts that will be focusing on the art of world-building, particularly when it comes to D&D.

(regular content? On this blog? It’s more surprising than you think!)

For this section, we’re talking about turning your world from something with an outline and into a world that appears to be dense, alive and fully fleshed out, and how to do it with very little dense world-building, focusing specifically on Non-Playable Characters.

How do you flesh out a world’s big players?

Remember the pyramid from the first post:

This is where you should start. What major players (NPCs) in the world are trying to change or affect things? What are their motivations? How are they going to accomplish what they want to change? When you break these down into bullets for each character, it give you a really strong sense of current geopolitics that you can hint at, or class systems that exist. Let’s do an example. Pretend you have a regent for a large, sparse kingdom that’s going through a drought. He’s going to be your minor Big Bad Evil Guy (BBEG) to reveal a greater threat later on. Set up some paper or a digital notebook to say something like this:

• Name: Gerrad Hornswallow, Regent

• Ultimate goal: provide for his kingdom by bringing prosperity into it

I like to always start with an ultimate goal because it’s a very concrete thing that is anchored in affecting the world and plot, rather than starting with some fluff description or details about his class, or the history of kingdom. But wait—is that really his goal? And is it really his kingdom? Let’s add some more flavor to it:

• Name: Gerrad Hornswallow, Regent

• Ultimate goal: Prove to the people that he’s better than the real [missing/MIA/etc] king

  • Sub goals: provide for his kingdom by bringing prosperity into it

  • Sub goals: steal people to work the fields

  • Sub goals: steal produce/machines to work the fields

Now we’ve got a character with some denser motivation, it’s almost reverse flanderization. He can become a tragic character, depending on what your players do and how you play the absent king. Was he drawn into this path because the king is the real BBEG? Is it because he, like Mary Shelley said, mistook the evil for the good he seeks? Is it because he’s trying to protect the people that the king ignored because he wanted the wealth of the kingdom for himself? Or you could make him more sinister—maybe he killed the king to take the wealth for himself and he’s only pretending to be sympathetic. Maybe he’s possessed by the king to be set up as a fall guy. Maybe the king was killed by a higher power and he’s trying to solve the mystery poorly. 

The point is, you want your motivations to make sense, but play out in multiple ways, which gives your players a lot of agency to change the story without you having to come up with new BBEGs or giant plot hooks and arcs. A great example of this is the Nolan Batman Trilogy—even when he lost his BBEG due to unfortunate circumstances, he still had laid the right groundwork to make a change, which, when rewatching, if you don’t know that the main villain was supposed to be the Joker, Bane fits in rather well to the plot hooks, themes and lines setup in the first and second movies.

Let’s look at how he’s going to accomplish this:

• Name: Gerrad Hornswallow, Regent

• Ultimate goal: Prove to the people that he’s better than the real [missing/MIA/etc] king

  • Sub goals: provide for his kingdom by bringing prosperity into it

  • Sub goals: steal people to work the fields

  • Sub goals: steal produce/machines to work the fields

• Possible quests:

  • Transport some unknown machinery to another place in the kingdom but don’t let anyone know where it’s from

  • Get rid of some dissenters in the town square but don’t kill them

  • Take these files to a volcano and destroy them but don’t look at them

Now we have a bunch of ways to flesh this out the player interaction with this character and multiple ways to play it. Maybe the machinery is stolen but he’s going to distribute it to the village folk. Or maybe he’s stealing it from them and blaming it on bandits or the party themselves. Maybe the dissenters are fake and meant to help him complete his coup. Maybe the papers show how terrible the king was and he’s trying to maintain the king’s reputation.

You could even go as far as to work these into a twist in the story, maybe all the suspicion makes the party think he’s a bad guy. Maybe he’s so charismatic they believe he’s a good guy or that the ends justify the means. This twist could totally work and even make your players shocked without them thinking the twist came out of nowhere or wasn’t earned.

Here’s where you can start working in motivations:

• Name: Gerrad Hornswallow, Regent

• Ultimate goal: Prove to the people that he’s better than the real [missing/MIA/etc] king

  • Sub goals: provide for his kingdom by bringing prosperity into it

  • Sub goals: steal people to work the fields

  • Sub goals: steal produce/machines to work the fields

• Possible quests:

  • Transport some unknown machinery to another place in the kingdom but don’t let anyone know where it’s from

  • Get rid of some dissenters in the town square but don’t kill them

  • Take these files to a volcano and destroy them but don’t look at them

• Motivations:

  • His position of power

  • His wealth

  • The safety of his family

• How is he going to accomplish this:

Now we have even more information about what the players can do to resolve the problem rather than just a straight up fight. The reason we want to do this is because all players are different, so you have to plan out a few scenarios for the type of play they do.

Maybe they’re sympathetic to the man and want to remove him democratically (threatening his position of power) by finding the real king or leading a bloodless (or bloody) rebellion. Or they help an assassin into his home. Maybe a heist is in order, where they can either keep or redistribute his wealth. Maybe they decide to kidnap his family to force him into exile or free his family from their fear of him, causing him to go mad and jump off the castle walls.

All of these could be great quests and ideas for different sessions with the PCs, which we’ll explore in more detail later, but you would put in the list of ‘How is he going to accomplish this:’ section. Make the list long. Make it varied. Make some of them useless and some of them toeing the line of good and evil, especially if you’re going for a twist. 

The reason you want to list all these, even if only a small amount of them turn into actual things the players accomplish or directly interact with, is you now have a list of things to reference and throw away with your NPCs.

By doing this, you flesh out a whole political system without having to elaborate in great detail, especially if the players never ask the Thieve’s Guild how they feel about the regent. You can also have NPCs mention events without giving further description, either out of fear or pride or because they’re deus ex machina killed before revealing more information. This allows the players to draw their own conclusions and thicken the plot without you having to do much work. It also helps you parse out who should be a major and who should be a minor character. 

One of my favorite moments in all gaming is when you’re first given the option to kill a Little Sister in Bioshock. This is a key game mechanic and the first decision comes just 20-40 minutes into the game. If you’ve explored every nook and cranny or breezed through every area, you’re still given a very difficult decision to make when you have the least amount of information (most of it based on the opinions of people and very few facts) about the world. You have two conflicting voices—one that says you should save the girl, because it’s the right thing to do and because they’ve already been treated inhumanely. The other voice says you should kill her, because she’s too far gone and you need all the help you can get if you’re going to survive. At this point, you know next to nothing about these characters, their motivations, their ideas, even if you can trust them, and they’re asking you to decide a life. It’s an insane amount of power to give a player and it works beautifully. You either end up being grateful you didn’t kill her, queasy if you did or grimly determined that this is an acceptable loss. And all with characters you don’t know.

There’s also no shame in having a few two dimensional characters in a big vast world, or starting out with them. You can have some easy, straightforward ideas where the players have to go do the thing and it’s a complete story. No one has ever gotten upset that the one-off quest where they went and dealt with a trade scandal by the docks and it didn’t elaborately tie into the regent’s plans. You don’t need to know the deeper motivations of the dentist who steals Nemo in the movie and we don’t need to have a deep understanding on why he chooses to steal fish in order for the movie to have meaning and character arcs and emotionally satisfying moments.

Sometimes, a pipe is just a pipe.

How much is too much?

Tolkien did a great thing when he invented Lord of the Rings. I love Lord of the Rings. But it is TERRIBLE for coming up with D&D ideas. He wrote a history book on the world that is hundreds of pages long about people that never appear in the main stories. The dude wrote several languages for funsies. While teaching about linguistics. He also got paid to do it! (You should also really read the story of Diana Wynne Jones because her dealing with him in his lectures is fantastic).

You (likely) do not get paid to make D&D characters and worlds. So don’t try to build out every single item in the world. It’s cost ineffective and as I mentioned before, the chance of your players stumbling upon it without you railroading them is slim.

You should instead follow the rule of imperfect knowledge. If your character starts to get too smart for the world, you should stop or tone it down. Trying to make an all-knowing character is not only boring for the players, because it makes their actions ineffective, but it leaves you open for lots of plot holes and confusion. You can have an insanely smart character but don’t give him or her all knowledge ever; Abed from Community is a great example—he has perfect knowledge of the tv world, but his application of it to the imperfect real world leads to a lot of conflict that works well. 

It’s a lot of planning to make an exceptionally dense cast of characters not only work but have distinct personalities so it’s tempting to make them very rigid in their abilities and knowledge. Imperfect knowledge cuts you a lot of slack.

From these character outlines, you should be able to make rules on how people react. The same way that someone’s clothing colors or status changes how people treat one another in the Handmaid’s Tale, you should be able to develop rules for how people interact and treat one another in this world that will make the interactions with he players fresh each time but consistent. You’re essentially going to the video game school of NPC-Making, where each character has pre-programmed rules in how to react. This way, when your players throw something weird at you, as they are wont to do, you’ll be able to formulate a response that’s fast and in character.

[/actual advice]

Of course, this is all just what I find personally works. I always want to avoid pigeonholing a character into a plot just because it seemed cool at the start. Endings for characters that don’t match what they’ve become are some of the most unsatisfying things I’ve found in stories. Consider fan fiction, a whole genre of writing focused on rewriting stories and endings to be more satisfying. When I’m writing out a character, I try to think: would readers or listeners be happy with this character’s arc? Would they be angry in how it ended but understand why it would happen? Would they want to try to stop it from happening again in the future if they were upset?

One of my players has a character who is the bastard-turned-legitimized son of a noble. I purposely started my characters in the semi-lawless area of the Storm Lands, a place that is a breeding ground for mercenaries, pirates and ripe for adventure because I wanted the first session to be more or less setup for the newbies to understand how the game works and for them to form as an adventuring party in a low stakes situation befitting their level one-ness. 

What became a running joke and a funny moment for the party was every time that this character tried to use his noble signet ring or status to intimidate or persuade someone, they would have the opposite reaction because there are no nobles or love of nobles in the Storm Lands. People chose to live there because they ignore noble birth in that land and they reacted accordingly. This became even better for the party because then if he failed any rolls where he might have noble birth advantages, it started layering in a lot of groundwork for his character just based on failed dice rolls. 

I’m excited to see how he builds on his imperfect knowledge of all things noble, how he reacts when they get into areas where nobles are more known. Or areas where he might need to perform acts to prove he’s worthy of the title.

Because of exercises like the one above, I was able to come up with a simple caste system for magic users in a specific kingdom, a specific event that affected another kingdom that most people would know of, and detail the various relations between a lot of different groups of people. Do I know the specifics? Not at all. But I do have a series of rules that I can then apply when the party gets there. They’ll probably, depending on the caste, treat the son of the noble well. Unless, of course, that noble family has a history of hating magic users. Or maybe they are patrons of them. We’ll just have to find out, together.

A good character should make them want to lean into the story, rather than not lean away. Having clear ideas of who these people are goes a long way into making a better and more elaborate world that takes very little effort.

[/Personal Story]

Anyway, that’s enough of a block of text for the day. Feel free to comment below if this helped you more easily design key NPCs for your campaigns and start to flesh out your world with a wide variety of characters that can make things change.

<3,

Steph