Friday Fun: Let's Share Weird NPC Ideas

[aramis erak]

A teleporting NPC in Traveller with a PSR 15 but ONLY Clairavoyance, teleportation and LR teleportation. He can show up on a ship in jump even. Other than that, he's Pilot 2, Brawling 1, Pistols 1, Engineering 2. I usually faked him to CCCAA6 for Atts. He started as a PC... ruleset was MegaTraveller, but he's much the same in MgT or CT; for TTNE, add 1 to all 4 skills, and initiaitive 4. Never ported him to T4, and he's prohibitively expensive in GT (he can jump up to 2 Pc in a single LR Teleport...) The Clairvoyance is so he can visualize his target.

 

[aco175]

The PCs just traveled to the feywild and met the NPC owlin soldier, Sir Hoots-a-Lot. They did not really take to him. He just returned with his sidekick spriggin names Thumper, so we will see.

The other campaign found all the pieces to an animated sword that can become a henchman if they can put it back together.

The favorite of the campaign mostly for comic relief has been the exploding skeleton cat named Skelly-Cat. It is a magic item, but the players seems to never have it do anything except chase things and do cat things, but it is a skeleton.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I made the mistake one time of using a funny voice for a character’s Awakened animal sidekick.

…Elvis.

I had to maintain that for more than a year.

 

[Bill Zebub]

I didn't create this NPC, but while running

Spoiler: official adventure info

The Sunless Citadel, timid little Meepo the Kobold

served as guide/hireling to the party, and he ended up rolling the most extraordinary string of crits any of us had ever seen. Transformed by his experience, he returned to his tribe with newfound confidence...and ferocity...and went on to become a powerful warlord and long-term ally of the PCs.

 

[DrunkonDuty]

In my urban fantasy game one of the players decided she wanted a small dragon companion. I think she was thinking something like Lockheed. She saved up the points to purchase it and we played a short silly adventure in which she met The Amazing Kevin.

Kevin is indeed a small dragon. But he speaks in a (bad) Michael Caine voice, wears sparkly cuffs (no sleeves, just cuffs), and is more dodgy geezer than cute shoulder dragon. He sometimes works as a stage magician but lately gets by playing the shell game and cheating at cards. They met when the PC had to save him from some disgruntled punters in a back alley just outside of a night club.

Meanwhile inside the nightclub another PC was winning a bet with a mysterious one-eyed stranger. This is how this PC got a a raven called Midnight. Midnight can talk, but never does. She sits upon the PC's shoulder throwing side eye on everything. The PC (and honestly, I think the player) is now genuinely unnerved by her.

 

[Edgar Ironpelt]

My "Brotherhood of Rangers" game has a few NPCs with a reputation but that the PCs haven't met.

Grandma Cuprate: An ancient female copper dragon. "Be nice to her. She's a friend of Captain Grey [the high-level head of the Brotherhood]"

Kimio and Imi, an ogre-mage couple who, from the traces they've left behind, are into kinky bedroom games where they play at being "good." In the first near-encounter, the PCs found three "marital aid" books in their bedroom (Paladin’s Guide to Joy, Piffany on Pleasing Men, and Nice Nookie)

In my older Etan game (TFT):
Sgt Edward Lizardman, the defacto head of the city watch of Robono. Captain Sir Peter Peabody, the nominal head, is a nonentity.

Tom Too, the crow familiar of Old Master Tom, the archmage of Robono. Noteworthy because wizards (almost) never have familiars in that setting/under that rule system.

Cyrano de Burgerorc, an orcish swashbuckler with the soul of a poet and the nose of a roc.

[edit]
Eaglestar, a deliberate clone of Robin Hood who turned out to be the third best archer in the Million Kingdoms. (The best was a PC: Dami the Mad Archer. Second was an elf NPC named Ida Trueshaft.)

 

[Richards]

In coming up with an NPC healer for the party in a previous campaign, I took the fact that that particular game world was going to have a sporadically-opening planar gate to Gamma World to make a literal "healbot" - and thus was born MARCI ("Medical Android - Red Cross International"), a female-shaped humanoid robot programmed to provide medical attention to Pure Strain Humans only. As we only had one human PC in that campaign, she would originally only attend to that PC's wounds (assuming the elves, dwarves, etc. were all mutants), until he learned he could order MARCI to classify the other PCs as humans. As a robot, she followed orders given to her by humans, so the other PCs were designated "human" in her databank, and from that point on she healed whoever in the party needed it.

Johnathan

 

[MGibster]

I made the mistake one time of using a funny voice for a character’s Awakened animal sidekick.

…Elvis.

I made the leader of the dwarves in one of my campaigns Christopher Walken. Or at least he was me doing a bad impersonation of someone doing a bad impersonation of Christopher Walken. I still hear demands to bring him back from time-to-time.

I had an NPC for a Cyberpunk 2020 named Sharkey. He was the owner of a local chain of seafood restaurants in Night City called Shark's. Think Long John Silver's but not as healthy. Through a combination of bio-sculpting and cyberware (sharktooth grin, artificial gills, skinweave, a snout, etc.), he resembled a shark. Sharkey was a fixer specializing in human trafficking, weapons, drugs, smuggling, and wetwork who occasionally hired the PCs. He's always invite them to one of his restaurants and feed them a big basket of fried "seafood," fries, and hushpuppies.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

I made the leader of the dwarves in one of my campaigns Christopher Walken. Or at least he was me doing a bad impersonation of someone doing a bad impersonation of Christopher Walken. I still hear demands to bring him back from time-to-time.

I had an NPC for a Cyberpunk 2020 named Sharkey. He was the owner of a local chain of seafood restaurants in Night City called Shark's. Think Long John Silver's but not as healthy. Through a combination of bio-sculpting and cyberware (sharktooth grin, artificial gills, skinweave, a snout, etc.), he resembled a shark. Sharkey was a fixer specializing in human trafficking, weapons, drugs, smuggling, and wetwork who occasionally hired the PCs. He's always invite them to one of his restaurants and feed them a big basket of fried "seafood," fries, and hushpuppies.

 

[Reynard]

In designing NPCs for my super con game in a couple weeks, a friend and I came up with The Defenestrator: a villain who could turn any window he could see into a portal through any other window he could see, in either direction. He is usually hired by other villains for break ins, but sometimes he works as an assassin.