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Message: <blockquote data-quote="TarionzCousin" data-source="post: 5410108" data-attributes="member: 31304">I had an NPC merchant who ate dinner with the PC's, hoping to hire them to guard his caravan. It would have been a boring job, and he offered them far too little coin to do it. His main purpose in the game was simply to give the PC's some information about the world outside of their community. But during dinner he occasionally tucked food in his belt pouch. Of course a PC noticed it.They spied invisibly on the merchant in his room after dinner. He was feeding a ferret and talking to it and calling it by name: Nibbles. Obviously, they thought, the merchant was a wizard and the ferret was his familiar! Initially, that was as far as I had planned. But when the PC's failed to notice the obvious plot hooks, I took my ordinary flavored NPC and converted him to a Plot Point.When that merchant disappeared, everybody figured he had just gone with his caravan--until a couple days later when his ferret was found in the inn's kitchen. It turned out to be an ordinary ferret, but Speak with Animals led the party to believe that the merchant had been kidnapped (or assassinated). The NPC merchant was eventually found dead. The PC's seriously debated bringing him back to life--they would have needed to sell a couple of their magic items to afford it--but in the end they kept Nibbles the Ferret as a pet instead.</blockquote>