Awesome NPC’s… from nothing?

[Ed_Laprade]

Ah yes, the surrendered monster mook who stayed with the party to stay alive and helped whenever he could. I've seen that more than once too. (And, of course, at least once the party was betrayed by one of them.)

 

[Deuce Traveler]

I had a half-elf rogue/cleric that was a henchman NPC to the BBEG in a 2E game, and was part of a group hired to take the PCs down.

Well, the short of it was that the characters won the battle and the sole half-elf NPC survivor started to escape with boots that enabled him to move twice as fast as normal. The PCs chased him down a series of doors, but the NPC cast a glyph of warding on the first door, which made the PCs overly cautious and allowed him to escape.

This of course meant that the PCs now REALLY wanted to kill him. I started having him show up or be mentioned somewhat regularly, and eventually the NPC started moving up the BBEG's organization, sometimes opposing the characters, and sometimes secrety helping the characters so he could move up the ladder some more.

Eventually he took out the BBEG and took over the organization itself, which set-up the final confrontation against the PCs...

 

[the Jester]

I'd say that most of the memorable npcs imc started up as either a line or two in my notes (maybe a stat block, if the npc is a bad guy that surrendered) or a character that I had only a vague notion of, and was surprised when the pcs sought them out.