On 29 June 2015 at 10:30, Richard Aiken <raikenclw@gmail.com> wrote:
On Mon, Jun 29, 2015 at 5:11 AM, Timothy Collinson <timothy.collinson@port.ac.uk> wrote:
Sometimes I need a dozen or so NPCs who the PCs will (hopefully) interact with in a little more depth than 'shopkeeper', 'customs officer' etc.  Perhaps a small community with people of various ages.

When I used to run CT, I got plenty of NPC from the simply expedient of keeping the dozens of "failures" which the players rolled up during chargen, in their constant search for the "perfect PC."

LOL!

Brilliant idea.  If only I had players...

I wonder how amenable folk at TravCon would be to replacing a normal adventure slot with four hours of char gen?!

The trouble is I'm sad enough that I sometimes think the easiest way *is* just to generate them using the full rules, but about half way through the 2nd one of any 'set' I need for an adventure I start to think 'there must be a better way than this'. 

About the only regret I have regarding 'Into the Unknown' (aside from the loss of my daughter's credit for the diary and colleague's credit for the sign language images) is that the villagers are so briefly described.  I'd have loved to do a fully fleshed out load of them.  But there were 75 (IIRC).  And to be fair, on none of the occasions that I've run the adventure have I needed more than what's written.

tc