Introducing a Lore heavy NPC

I know this should be DM 101 but I don't know what to do...

I want to introduce a Recurring friend/foe NPC but the story of whether it is Good or Evil is a long one and I don't know how to unveil it to the players. I have thought of the characters receiving it in three chucks, "The History", "it is Evil" and "it might be Good" so instead of one long block of information I have three long blocks of information

any suggestions on how to unveil something with a lot of history and have the characters decide what they consider Good/Evil successfully would be appreciated...

I'm not quite sure how you're intending to download the information, but here's one suggestion: when the PCs (and the players) learn about this NPC, they also learn about two other NPCs/monsters/gods with which the new NPC has relationships (eg allied, enemy, worhsips, killed, etc). And those two relationships push in opposite directions - one suggests to the players that the new NPC is good, the other that the new NPC is evil.

I'd let the players take the next step - responding to these conflicting reveals in whatever way they want - and then download your next chunk of backstory in the context of those responses.

The overall principle that I have in mind in giving this advice is that players want enough backstory to enable them to enage meaningfully with the situations the GM is putting forward, but they don't want the game just to seem like the GM is writing his/her own novel that the players then have to read and/or play through.

exactly my point, I don't want to just be talking to them for an hour because 1) I don't wanna talk that much 2) They won't listen/remember 3) it won't be fun for anyone

I don't have much of an idea how I'm going to give the information to the players so I can change whatever I need...

adding other NPCs isn't what I had in mind but it might help

I'd suggest the answer is fairly straightforward: the NPC is none of those things at this moment in time.

As far as the PCs are concerned and their point of view... the NPC is only whatever they experience him to be. All of the backstory/history/morality you've designed for this NPC does not exist until the point where their interactions actually reveal any of it naturally.

So you have to ask yourself... what possible reason is there for this NPC to download an hours worth of information to the PCs? If there is none (because the PCs just don't ask/care about it)... then they get just as much as they DO ask/care about. If that means they miss out on 55 minutes of additional detail? So be it. And if that 55 minutes would have helped them to determine whether this NPC was good or evil? Oh well!

If you have this NPC running his own machinations in the background of the campaign and the PCs don't pick up on or care to pursue any of the seeds you might put out that illustrate what he is doing... then so be it.

It's for this reason that many DMs write and blog about not getting "too attached" to your NPCs or what they are doing. Chris Perkins on the D&D website has articles in his Dungeon Master Experience column talks about this quite a bit. Because you can't FORCE players to care about your NPCs. And downloading an hour's worth of information to them is certainly doing that. And in fact... more often than not the players will actively REBEL against your ham-handed attempts to make them care about this specific NPC, because most players don't like the idea of being forced to care in one direction over another.

If you make this NPC is interesting enough and compelling enough in just 5 minutes worth of interactions with the PCs... then you don't need to worry about the other 55 minutes worth of detail. Because your players will WANT to follow up on it. And then you can dole out the information slowly over time. But if you try and MAKE them care by giving an inordinate amount of detail right off the top... you're going to end up with the exact opposite result than you want.

"Show don't tell" applies here.

What are the top 3 things you'd like the players to learn/experience about this NPC? Be specific and concise. Then look at each of these things and think how you could show that...what kind of encounter or scene could revolve around that? What kinds of interesting choices might it present the players? If a bit of information will be told in exposition, consider the speaker, timing, and overall feel of the situation (and limit it to 1 minute).

If you give some more (concise) details we can give better feedback.

Omegaxicor said:

adding other NPCs isn't what I had in mind but it might help

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I should have been clearer - I was having in mind that these would be existing characters/monsters that the players already know about.

Just an example: when the PCs encounter your new NPC, they also learn (in some appropriate way) that (i) s/he was once an ally with the PC's patron, and (ii) s/he has been working in conjunction with a mind flayer. Is the NPC good? (Ally of patron.) Is the NPC evil? (Working with mind flayer.) Was the PC once good but has now been corrupted? Was that corruption due (in part, in whole) to the mind flayer's mind control? This sort of approach makes it fairly easy to set up the moral ambiguity and uncertainty that you want, because it leverages parts of the gameworld and the backstory the players are already familiar with (their patron; mindflayers).

Another example from my own game: when the PCs encountered Kas: (i) they already had his sword, which one of them was wielding without knowing what it was, and which another was burned by when he touched it because that other PC was a bit of a Vecna sympathiser; (ii) Kas was trying to kill the woman that the PCs were trying to resuce; (iii) there was at least some evidence that the woman the PCs were trying to rescue was a necromancer, and all the PCs hate necromancers; (iv) the PCs realised that Kas had an alliance of some sort with the Raven Queen, who is the patron god of two PCs and revered, though not exclusively, by a third. These different considerations generated uncertainty, and a type of open-ended possibility, about how the players (and hence their PCs) would respond to Kas.

A third example, from the first X-Man movie: we learn that Magneto attacked Wolverine (and Rogue), and that Prof X and the X-Men rescued Wolverine - implies Magneto bad; and then not long after we learn that Magneto can shield himself from Cerebro because he helped Prof X built it - implies Magneto good, because Prof X has already been established as good. So we, the audience, have a degree of ambivalence about Magneto's villainy (and that will be reinforced as we work out that Magneto was the boy at the start of the movie, a victim of National Socialist extermination policies).

Quickleaf said:

"Show don't tell" applies here.

What are the top 3 things you'd like the players to learn/experience about this NPC? Be specific and concise. Then look at each of these things and think how you could show that...what kind of encounter or scene could revolve around that?

Click to expand...

This is good advice! And I think it lends itself well to the "relationships" approach I'm suggesting.

@pemerton ah, sorry I misunderstood, that might be doable with some rewriting...

@Quickleaf 1) thanks for that, it makes sense but those ideas are difficult to make (at least for me) and 2) if I could give concise details, I wouldn't need help but I will try to think through how to explain and edit this post (or my next one) with more details.

[MENTION=7006]DEFCON 1[/MENTION] I really hadn't thought of it like that, my party aren't that rebellious but the theory is sound.

I have had a quick thought, this may be too little but I can only condense it so far without losing detail...

For those who have read my previous post, the world is coming to an end, noone knows how or why but magic is less reliable (we had no spellcasters in the party BEFORE I decided that, and everyone had their characters), now this NPC is more than he appears, if the party kill him he stays around (they haven't yet encountered him) and he MAY have something to do with the end of the world, evidence to that is another NPC who claims he is Evil and a Mass-Murderer (the party encounter him killing a village, so that is "a little" evidence he is Evil) but he 'says' that he is gaining the energy from people who have no hope of survival when the world begins to end (monsters will be released and if he is really weak and still able to kill the whole village himself, what hope do the villagers have with hundreds of powerful monsters) which really is little evidence that he is Good.

I haven't decided whether he is Evil or not but the evidence is 50/50 (well with one encounter 80/20)...

Omegaxicor said:

I haven't decided whether he is Evil or not but the evidence is 50/50 (well with one encounter 80/20)...

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I wouldn't get hung up on deciding whether he's Evil or Good. I would decide what his goals are and what means he'll use to achieve those goals. Then let the players decide whether he's a threat or if they need to interecede. It will keep your NPC consistent and you'll be freed from having to impart to the players whether he's Good or Evil.

I know that my players would immediately and irrevocably decide that anyone who slew a whole village is EVIL through and through, even if the villagers would subsequently have died in another way. They'd be in no doubt that gaining power by killing is evil, and they'd act accordingly. As Wednesday Boy says, I wouldn't worry about that. And I wouldn't worry about tons of background working itself into the PCs' hands. If they do research, present them with written results, so they can read and refer back to it.

Just recently my PCs went on a long quest to recover the bones of a Saint, because he was important to them and it seemed fun. They have been presented with info several times indicating that this saint was not as saintly as he is now being portrayed, 400 years after his death. In the long run, they didn't care. They recovered the bones, woke an evil pirate's ghost ship, and took the bones to the Temple, which will be putting them on display to their followers.

I knew TONS of backstory about exactly the motivations of each NPC and faction in the campaign; people here helped me create some of it! But the PCs only knew that they'd been hired to get the bones, their hirer was actually ambivalent about the project, and eventually discovered that in the ancient past, their hirer's ancestors actually were the ones who arranged the Saint's assassination (and he was their KIN). Afterwards, the two PCs who were FROM the region decided they'd best leave and stay gone for a few years while the ramifications blew over, so as not to be accused of fomenting civil unrest. The PCs had a chance to read lengthy diary entries by one of the Saint's followers; they instead read the bullet point list I provided, and ignored the rest. Oh, well...

A lot of times, knowledge of what's "really" going on just helps you make the actions of various parties seem authentic; not simple, not failing to confuse an onlooker, but true to the world.

The PCs may never know why the NPC is killing villagers; if they do, they may not let it weigh with them; if they do, then they'll look for other info to back up their beliefs, most likely. And that's when they can find, for example, a letter written by the villain's true love to her mother bewailing the changes in her beloved "ever since... event x...". That's how I handle things, anyway.

@Wednesday Boy Firstly, Nice pic. Secondly, His goal is surviving the coming doom, as for what he will do, anything really...
@Gilladian That isn't how I have DMd in the passed...maybe that is the only way to do this, let the players decide how many small mouthfuls they want.

My players, all of them, have always taken a larger image of Good and Evil, but I understand what you mean killing innocents is rarely Good, to me this might be one of them rarely's

Me lecturing them for hours was never going to work regardless but I dislike the idea of coming up with so much information (which was very fun for me not a chore) and never using it...If there are no other ideas then I guess I will just have to get used to it

Thanks