I’m an avid reader of mostly fantasy fiction. I toss in some mild Sci-Fi (not the crunchy, nor space-opera kind), occasional urban/modern fantasy, a few weird speculative fictions, and funny biographies. I am also a writer. I’ve been blogging since LiveJournal (I just got a spammy email congratulating me on 19 years at LJ), and I’ve had a few short stories published. As I mentioned in my first post, I’ve also published a few adventures over at DMsGuild. I went to college for Astronomy and came out with a degree in Creative Writing. (My high school English teacher was not surprised.) I still miss astronomy though, living in a city with too many lights.
I love the characters in these stories. I’ll read overly long epics (<cough>Sword of Truth</cough>) because I love the characters. Or stop reading a series if I hate them (<cough>Game of Thrones</cough>). I always start my stories by creating an interesting character to write about. The last big story I was working on, I created the ten main characters in DnDBeyond, just to work out who they are. Characters drive story, for me. I’m less of a world-builder and more of an examiner of people.
So, having a ready made world in the Explorer’s Guide to Wildemount and Critical Role was perfect for me. I don’t want to have to create nations, religions, and economic systems from whole cloth. I’d rather focus on the people, and how they’re living within those systems, or outside them. That’s what we do as players, and I am, most of the time, a player. That’s where I’m comfortable.
In working on this campaign, that also seems to be my comfort zone. After watching many, many, many YouTube videos on how to run a DnD campaign. I have centered myself around the philosophy of Guy’s videos, How to Be a Great DM. He has a set of videos around making the world work for you, and creating autonomous NPCs. By deciding your NPCs’ OGAS (occupation, goals, attitude, and stakes), you can just have them living in the world, and know how they will react if the PCs interact with them. He also points out that as a DM, you can’t really plot because it’s not a Story, it’s an interactive Game. Your NPCs have goals, so they make plans to reach those goals, and you’re there to facilitate the interactions of your players’ characters with those plans. I like this way of looking at it.
This has left me to focusing highly on creating a plethora of NPCs for my players to interact with. From tavern keepers, to shop owners, to little goblin kids on the street, to big bad cult leaders and their various followers, to an old man on the road who just wants to stop the chaos. Creating these characters first helps me to then create the questlines that might occur if my PCs interact with them.
For my BBEG, creating the characters helps me create their followers. I figure out who the leader is first, then figure out who is around them, who they need on a day to day basis, and then who is drawn to follow them. This helps me create the entire web of antagonists from the top down, giving me ideas for NPCs, and therefore questlines at all levels of the campaign.
One member of my group gave me The Game Master’s Book of Non-Player Characters by Jeff Ashworth for Christmas (we got back together for one game before Omicron sent us scrambling back to Discord). I have only gotten through one section so far, but it helped me create five new characters and several minor questlines. Looking forward to getting through the rest of it and making a lot more NPCs for my players to interact with.