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Message: <blockquote data-quote="howandwhy99" data-source="post: 6271372" data-attributes="member: 3192">Good points here. I agree an NPC who may potentially direct the PCs isn't necessarily part of a plotted adventure. In fact, we might stop thinking of them as hooks too.In a sandbox campaign everything the players can interact that is game-related should be able to be generated beforehand. It sounds like this adventure isn't a campaign, but like a convention one-shot. The players must go to the cult of the dragon and their whole time will be spent there beating the adventure. In that case, Ducarde isn't necessary at all. Make an explicit list of module objectives for the players to achieve for the tournament and have them listed from in game perspective. "A representative of the king meets and declares such and such before sending you off to this here place..."If you allow players to interact with the NPC, then they must be built of game content. Of course this means question and answering, but goods Dacarde has on hands to offer them for sale too and all the rest. At the actual adventure site, where the actual game is to take place, everything about everything that is related to the classes should be defined. The make up of rocks, the design of traps, what NPCs know, how monsters behave, the course of future events for the finite space and time the adventure covers. This doesn't mean you can't simplify greatly. Most of game design in D&D is knowing how to cover vast amounts of detail in a small number of statistics. In the case of "named NPCs" we're talking about the actions of core figures in the adventure. Do the linkboys and torchbearers get names and knowledge and can have their 3d6 stats rolled? Yeah, but that's easily aggregated and all the non-module related stuff can be ungenerated for DMs to include from their specific home campaign. That's a like a tournament adventure. Players can be drawn into tournament adventures in home campaigns just by playing in a starting adventure within an interconnected game setting. For example, the PCs might start in Hommlet and exploring a moathouse, but the nearby activities of the Dragon Cult have begun to reach the ears of people in town (hence easily discovered by the PCs) due to trade traffic. Maybe some members of a nearby Temple of Elemental Evil have sent out feelers to possibly learn and recruit these cultists? Maybe wandering monster cultists are recruiting in a nearby hidden town called Nulb? In a campaign these connections exist. Ducarde is tied to the City of Verbobonc, a game structure which at some point must have generated if the PCs head that way. He is a representative of the current leader there and therefore enough of the city must be created to know what that means. As to his role in the adventure, he might be look to recruit locals to help with his own quest to wipe out the Dragon Cult, something that may or may not be openly spreading as a rumor, and something he plans fully to supervise safely from town. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" /></blockquote>

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