Longlived Throwaway Encounters

[Stormborn]

The PCs were working for the local spymaster, gathering information. He didn't trust his own people, 'cause he was afraid there was a mole. Eventually I decided that it didn't make sense for him to always come to the PCs, he would send a trusted flunky on occassion.

Said Flunky turned out the Will Corbie, his second in command and adopted son(kinda). The bard hated him, the female swashbuckler loved him. Now, several months later, what was supposed to be a once or only occasional NPC is a party memeber.

Sigh.

 

[Rodrigo Istalindir]

Once, I had a 1st level party get ambushed by a bunch of goblins. They defeated them (barely). I had planned on having two surrend so the party could take them as prisoners and learn a little about what was up ahead.

Of course, I forgot to check to see if anyone in the party spoke 'Goblin', and of course no one did. They managed to get a little info by gesturing and communicating in broken Common. The two little buggers managed to ingratiate themselves with the party, and the characters, convinced that bad things would happen to them, took them under their wing.

Upon returning to town with a fair bit of swag, they decided to buy the local tavern to use as a base of operations and maybe to make a little coin or get a little information. They named it 'The Grinning Goblin', and had Flinch and Fidget (as they'd named the goblins) working tables and providing a little entertainment.

 

[rkanodia]

The first session of my Spelljammer campaign included an NPC by the name of Tombunckle Gauss. Tom was a gnomish scientist specializing in electricity; his ship, the Irrefutable Logic, was powered by giant space hamsters on treadmills and his electric arc projection pistols were quite deadly (though not terribly safe to have in a rainstorm!) A grumpy old man with a caustic tongue, he was just a sort of flavor character, who I thought might show up again once or twice if the PCs liked him. Well, he turned out to be a great foil for the brash young spelljammer captain, and the PCs were so sad that he ran off in the second session that I brought him back during the third and he stuck around until the game ended

 

[Macbeth]

BardStephenFox didn't even mention the pan salesman in the current campaign. We were travelling to hunt some bandits for a local lord, and we saw a caravan approaching. We eventually spent a good amount of time assuring ourselves that they weren't bandits, and we even bought a frying pan from them. One of our players still carries the frying pan, just in case it comes in handy...

In a game I run, my players were lying low in a halfling village, and they got amazingly into making this little viallge better. The half sea elf fighter taught the children to fish, the monk started to learn how to farm, and took to wearing straw caps if his own making. They helped with the harvest, found the 'talking' frog in the well (actually, the frog wasn't talking, as the PCs found out, there was another explanation), trained the town's meager guard a bit, all kinds of stuff.

Which made it all the better when the people the PCs were hidding from burned the village to the ground. The PCs actually tried running through the full amry attacking the town, just to save the elderly mayor.

I guess this isn't quite like most of these, since I had wanted the PCs to feel sorry for the town. I just didn't expect them to get THAT involved with a few halflings in a middle-of-nowhere village. Until the army arrived, there was nothing with a challenge rating greater then half the party's level anywhere nearby, and the PCs are still looking out for those halflings.

 

[arwink]

Garth was a woodcutter the PC's found underneath a magic tree that put people to sleep. He was there to be rescued, to provide a little muscle in an encounter or two, then head off to find his family.

By the end of the session the PC's discovered his house in ruins, his family missing, and Garth was now an NPC ally that worked with the halfling psion. Over the years the quest to find his missing wife and son took the group on several adventures, and Garth managed to survive two near TPK's through luck, happenstance, and a habit the group had of putting him on guard just outside the blast radius of fireballs. He's served as a henchmen for three PC's in his time, and still occasionally appears in games as a warrior searching the planes for his missing family.