Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 250 - Important NPCs and Review of the NPC Core

Episode Date: March 30, 2025

Not all NPCs are created equal, or at least they shouldn’t be created that way.  There are some NPCs who are simply more important to your campaign?  Which ones and how should you treat them?  Give this episode a listen!   #pf2e #Pathfinder #gmtips #dmtips #dnd #rpg #npccore #npc #paizo Resources: Paizo NPC Core.  https://paizo.com/products/btq06x2l

This week on the Taking20 Podcast. Think about anyone who would move through your world and would be larger than life. Various levels of nobility and royalty, celebrities, entertainers, performers, or maybe even famous criminals and outlaws. Thank you for listening to the Taking20 Podcast, episode 250, tips for designing and running important NPCs in your world, and a review of the new book by Paizo, the NPC Core. I want to thank this week's sponsor, Cheese. There was an explosion at the Cheese Factory. There was debris everywhere.

Hey, if you're new, welcome to the podcast. And if you've returned, then welcome back. 250 episodes. I genuinely don't know what to say about that. I had no idea that it'd still be making podcast episodes over four years after I dumped my first five episodes online and hoped someone, anyone, would download it. I want to sincerely and humbly thank everyone who's listened to episodes, downloaded episodes,

and generally just put up with me for the past four years. I have no intention of quitting anytime soon, so I hope you continue to spend a few minutes with me every other week. Speaking of which, I'm always up for ideas for new topics. If you have a topic idea, please send it to me at feedback at taking20podcast.com, and I'll do my best to get it slotted into the upcoming schedule.

Now, important NPCs, when it comes to that term, there are a ton of different definitions of important, but the neat thing is is that I think the tips that I'm going to talk about today are valid for any definition of what an important NPC is. Now let's talk about the types. The first type of NPC that could be considered important are those that are specifically important to your campaign. These are NPCs that may not be important specifically to the world at large, but they are important

for the game you're running. Jenny the Sheriff may only be mildly important even in the small village where she lives, but if she's a major quest giver in this campaign, then she's going to be critically important to the success of the adventure and for the fun of the players. Similarly, in what I will call small stakes campaigns, where you're not battling a world-ending, universe-ending threat, you may just be protecting a small area that the Big Bad is threatening. The Big Bad may not be important in the greater history of the planet, but stopping them is

critically important to the town of Red Glen, for example. These may be people that are barely mentioned in the history books, but they are focal points of the campaign you're running and that makes them important. It's not just quest givers and big bads, it could be any character, any NPC who drives the story forward, or creates a plot point, or spurs the characters into action. In a campaign that I'm running right now, there is the daughter of a mayor who is not important to the town at large, but what she is experiencing, the nightmares she's having, and their cause and effect will drive a major plot point in my campaign coming up in about

5-10 sessions. She's the oldest daughter of the mayor of a relatively small and insignificant town. And sure, yeah, the fact that she's the mayor's daughter carries some weight with the locals, but she's not that important to the world at large compared to say, Elminster, the sage of Shadowdale is in the Forgotten Realms, or Queen Abergail Thrun would be on Golarion. Any NPC that helps the adventure along should be treated as important by you the DM while you're designing and role-playing these characters. And while we're talking about figures like queens and famous wizards, important NPCs could also be those that are important to the world, whether they're important to your campaign or not.

Elminster and Abigail Throon certainly would qualify. Think about anyone who would move through your world and would be larger than life. Elminster and Abigail Thrun certainly would qualify. Think about anyone who would move through your world and would be larger than life. Various levels of nobility and royalty, celebrities, entertainers, formers, or maybe even famous criminals and outlaws. To compare this to modern society, imagine if someone like Taylor Swift or King Charles of Britain or George Clooney walked into a room. They would create a stir. They garner attention by their very presence.

Some NPCs in your world should have that type of effect on people. A world-renowned bard is performing at a local tavern. I mean the locals would probably flock there to hear this famous entertainer. Princess Kara is honeymooning at the local estate with their new spouse. That would cause heads to turn and people would react to this celebrity in their midst when the couple went out to eat or went out to see the local sights. Famous people, larger than life people, can't help but garner attention and affect those around them everywhere they go. They're like a stone tossed in a pond. I mean, they can't help but make waves and ripples.

Imagine you're just your average leather worker and an elven acrobatic troupe is passing through, and they're performing in the town square today. If you had even the remotest inkling of an interest, I'm sure you would go see it, at least for a few minutes. Especially in villages and towns or areas where not much happens most days, a famous individual or group like this would draw a crowd. The third type of important NPCs evolve organically during the game. These are the NPCs that turn out to be important to the players, the characters, or both as you roleplay and adventure in the world. These are fun because you never know who the PCs are going to latch on to. The party goes to the end of the Prancing Pony and you've prepared a ranger character who's sitting in the dark corner all spooky looking. He's all kinds

of interesting and you're sure the characters will at least try to find out about him. Meanwhile the characters latch onto some random schmuck sitting at the bar. You're struggling to come up with a name and a backstory and an accent for this random farmer. Meanwhile the ranger is sitting in the corner waiting to lead the adventure on the next important direction. Your brain is screaming, damn it, stop paying attention to Lenny the farmer and pay attention to the true heir to the throne who went out into the wilderness rather than live a life of luxury with the elves. For Pete's sake he's Isildur's heir, come talk to him would you? Meanwhile the halfling of the party looks up and says, so Lenny where are you from?

Some bitch! Uhhh, I have a farm by Buckleberry Ferry, I grow turnips and carrots if I can keep the rabbits out of them. Suddenly the party wants to help defend Lenny's farm from the wild rabbits that are attacking it, and you've got to come up with an adventure for that shit. Meanwhile Strider sits untalked to, alone, waiting for the opportunity to speak to the PCs and keep the adventure going. Like it or not, for good or ill, the PCs have latched on to Lenny for some ungodly reason he's important to them. This puts you in a bit of a conundrum behind the screen.

The adventure that you planned had nothing to do with freaking Lenny. Strider is going to lead the party to Rivendell and the Council of Elrond to form the Fellowship to destroy the Ring and so on and so forth. So what should you do when the players and or characters decide that this relatively unimportant NPC becomes important to them? Well, you've got options. You could always shut them down. Hey everybody I know you really like Lenny, but I promise you he has nothing to do with the adventure as it's written. Can we please move on to someone?

Oh say like the dark brooding figure in the corner. Most players will completely understand, especially mature ones, that hey, oops, we latched onto the wrong thing and the DM is correcting them or at least trying to get the adventure going in the right direction. But some players could feel like their choices have been invalidated by you saying this. Lenny was important to this PC for whatever reason. Maybe Lenny reminds them of a relative or maybe they're falling madly in love with a turnip farmer who lives close to the fairy. I don't know. But you absolutely can say to the players out of character and around the table, hey everybody can we move on from Lenny? But that

might leave a bad taste in some of the players mouths. One alternative to doing that, a technique that you can use is to suddenly make Lenny the heir to the throne of Gondor. You shift adventure from being focused on the dark brooding character in the corner to Lenny, who instead of running from his responsibilities and becoming a ranger, he ran from his responsibilities to become a turnip farmer. You call an audible at the table and shift the focus from Aragorn to Lenny to keep the venture moving. One of my groups a long time ago adopted a kobold named Thwackwhistle. The place where the kobold had lived had been completely wiped out by the PC's by the way,

and the party decided to adopt him as a pet slash mascot slash hireling. Thwackwhistle helped take care of the cooking and camping and doing some of the boring non-adventure type duties while the party went out into this dungeon to collect this gold and that treasure. They paid that kobold pretty well, enough that it didn't take long for the little guy to stop trying to escape. He realized that if he stuck around this really weird group, he could become rich beyond his Coboldy dreams.

You never know when the way you roleplay an NPC will cause the party to adopt them or treat them as way more important than you ever intended when you were preparing the campaign. They feel there's a connection there, or they feel guilty for something they've done, or for whatever reason they just adore this two-dimensional character that you barely even had a name for when the game started. Instead of invalidating their choice by bumping the party to the right path, you adjust the adventure such that the NPC that is more important to them becomes important to the story as well. You just have to remember the change that you made and make sure you change the character appropriately on

down the line. Don't do what I did once and replace a local prince with a noble matriarch and describe the actions by the wrong NPC in a future session. I forgot that I had originally designated Prince Cornelius in my writings and I accidentally said Lady Foxglove. So in a future session at a social gathering, I accidentally stuck with Prince Cornelius instead of Lady Foxglove, describing something that had happened

only with the party and Lady Foxglove. I had to do a little bit of scrambling and the party deduced that they were the same person the entire time. Lady Foxglove had somehow taken the identity of the Prince. Now what I probably should have done is immediately stopped and said, hey guys, I accidentally said Prince Cornelius when I should have said Lady Foxglove, but like a bad comedy movie, I just kept doubling down on my mistake until it

wound up merging two very different characters together and revealing a noble-born person who was leading a very complicated double life with the help of a lot of illusory magic. I mean, it worked out and all, the players loved it and she became one of their favorite nobles to interact with at that point and always sought her out whenever they returned to town, whether she was herself or acting as the prince. That's a long story to say that if it all makes sense, don't be afraid to shift the focus of the story to the NPCs that the PCs have gotten attached to.

Another quick fact about important NPCs. Don't make important NPCs agreeable all the time. NPCs have goals and motivations of their own, and interesting NPCs have goals that are in opposition to something. Opposition to what? I'm glad you asked. Their goals could be in opposition to the PC's. The party wants to save the town, this NPC wants to watch it burn. The PCs want to find the doom scroll of adabashi, so does this other NPC. The party wants to slay the dragon, Adabashi, so does this other NPC. The party wants to slay the dragon, but the NPC doesn't want that to happen.

This conflict will help drive your story forward. What is this NPC willing to do to burn the town, find the scroll, hide the location of the dragon? This NPC, by having goals in conflict, becomes an automatic antagonist to the PCs, but they'll have their motivations for doing so. Another great conflict is between two different NPCs, both of whom say want the PCs to side with them. The Earl of Whistlefarts and Sheriff Goobersmak are both running for mayor and want the PCs' help to do something legal. Or maybe, kinda, sort of barely not legal? The PCs can't help both of them because the other one will be upset no matter which side you choose. Voila! You have a conflict

between NPCs that can become very important to the story. Okay, moving on from important NPCs in general, let's talk about Paizo's new book, the NPC Core. The NPC Core is a chock full 242 pages of content. It's available in bookstores and from paizo.com in hard copy form for about $70, and from Paizo in PDF form for about $20. I'll put a link to the book in the Paizo store in the episode description. In the interest of full disclosure, Paizo did provide me a copy of the PDF for free, but if you've listened to me for a while you know that that does not color my reviews at all,

and I try to give you an honest assessment of the product. You might remember from episode 248 that I wasn't all that impressed with Guns gears remastered because it was kind of light on content. Well, Paizo made up for it with this book. The NPC core is a great resource for fleshing out your world and those who happen to live in it. The book contains three major sections the NPC gallery, Ancestry NPC section and then an appendix with various tables and lists. In the NPC gallery there's about a hundred and sixty pages of NPCs. Stat blocks are

given for various categories of NPCs at multiple different levels. As an example on page 52 begins a section of NPCs called explorers. It starts with a lowly torchbearer, a level zero creature that can do a little persistent fire damage when they crit. Continuing on, there's the forager, the natural scientist, the poacher, the chronicler, which is a level 3 creature who can use any scroll of second rank or lower, regardless of tradition. That sounds really neat by the way, I'm interested in trying that one. Trackers, guides, mountaineers, a tomb raider.

Okay, seems a little on the nose, but whatever. Gamekeeper, hunter, and finally the level nine expedition leader. Now that section is not just stat blocks though. Within that section on explorers there's a table of features and hazards by terrain type, additional exploration equipment that could be available, and a table of example map prices should the PCs want to buy one. Not only does that section give you potential NPCs, but additional gear and knowledge to drop them into your game. And by the way, Explorer is just one section of NPCs, there are 19 more. Also in that section is an update on rules for a special type of monster called Troops. These are variant on the swarm type monster that's existed in D&D and Pathfinder for a

long time. Compared to Pathfinder 1E, Paizo's nerfed Troops just a little bit, requiring Troops to be made up of 4 segments each occupying four contiguous squares, and all segments have to share at least one edge with another segment. It makes their potential shapes less wonky than one-e and a little more limited. Troops are great for what I will call mob fights. When I say mob, I don't mean like mob is in shorthand for monster, but mob is in a large group of things. A collection of people with torches and pitchforks, horse stampeds, a herd of gelatinous cubes. Hang on, that really

sounds fun. Like a giant herd just all of them together. Hang on, I've got to write this down. Sorry to my Sunday group and you're really not gonna like me after next session. The section contains examples of various troops and standard NPCs of various levels. What's interesting is that the vast majority of NPCs are shown as typical human stat blocks. But you may be saying, sure Jeremy but I need a dwarven baker not a human one. Good! The second section is helpful for you because it gives you a quick ancestry adjustments you can make to all the NPCs to make them, for example, dwarven instead of human.

If you wanted to make that forager dwarven, all you have to do is replace the human trait with a dwarven one, add dwarven language, add a clan dagger, drop the speed to 20 feet, and add dark vision. Bang, you have a dwarven forager. There are similar rules for androids or catfolk, Tingu, Ko, orc,

and so many other ancestries. But I have to admit that most interesting part of the Ancestry NPC section are the unique stat blocks for various ancestries like dwarven smiths, elven demon bane warriors, or maybe your party could meet a kobold earth diver who studies the geology of the areas near their home. In the appendix, the third section of the NPC core, there are additional ideas for creature companions and eidolons. The highlight of this section to me are the themed spell lists. If you want to set an occult NPC spellcaster apart from their peers, you can give them

a pre-built list of spells that match a particular theme. Like a mentalist who specializes in charm, illusion, and mind control spells. Or a pyromancer who wants to burn all the things including probably themselves. Could you build these lists on your own? Oh absolutely sure, but it's nice to have all that work done for you. this section, there's a collection of sample organizations and their goals from the Bellflower Network Who are trying to secretly undermine? Cheliaks's tyrannical rule to the Pathfinder Society a group of archaeologists historians explorers and world wanderers as Per usual the artwork is second to none

I can't heap enough praise on Wayne Reynolds and the bevy of talented artists that Paizo employs. There's no AI artwork here that I can find. It's all gorgeous and appears to be handmade. And I think it's obvious at this point, I enjoy the NPC core and I feel like there's plenty of useful information here to justify the price, especially the PDF version. It really is a no-brainer. If you run a Pathfinder 2e game, then this book would be invaluable to you. To misquote the book Animal Farm, all NPCs are equal, but some are more equal than others. Some NPCs will be more important to your game, the story, the world, or the PCs themselves.

Take your time and make sure you realize which of these NPCs are the important ones and then flesh them out more than your rank and file tavern goers. Use the fabulous book NPC Core to help you flesh out those characters and if you do, I'd be willing to bet that you and your players would have fun doing it. Hey, again, you get topic ideas for me? I'd love to hear them. Besides sending me an email, you can always reach out to me on Facebook,

Instagram, or on Blue Sky. Just search for the Taking 20 podcast on any of those. In two weeks, I'm going to give you, my beloved DMs and players out there, the most effective solution to resolve problems around the table. But before I go, I wanna thank this week's sponsor, Cheese. After that explosion at the Cheese Factory, most of the cheese was happy,

but let's face it, some of it was blue. This has been episode 250 discussing important NPCs and a review of the NPC Core by Paizo. My name is Jeremy Shelley, and I hope that your next game is your best game. The Taking20 podcast is copyright 2025 by Jeremy Shelley. The opinions or views expressed by guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the host. References to game system content are copyrighted by their respective publishers.