Favorite NPC?

[Limper]

What is your favorite NPC You've made or experienced as a player? What was their hook? What was their gimick?

I'm working on some game notes and am looking for some differing ideas.

[Xavier Lang]

Intelligent weapons are my favorites as a game master.

I like them because they are helpless without the PC's if you want them to be. If you don't give the weapon the ability to fly, etc... it has to have a PC to achieve its goals.
They don't have to be good or evil they can have more specific or esoteric goals.
It is easy to leave them out of the scene if you want to as they don't take up a chair and can pretend to be equipment or regulated to just equipment when you want the spotlight only on the PCs.

An intelligent weapon can have abilities that it uses when it wants to, not when you want them to be used and is more resistant to threats and coercion than an NPC might be.

Having a weapon that can animate its unconscious or fallen owner can be a lot of fun and useful ace in the hole if you screw up a fight and the PC's might die because of something you did, not something they did.

Potential Downsides -
Depending on your point of view, a intelligent weapon could be considered to always be "on watch" at night. This can be nice for a small party that needs the help but it can also be a crutch.

If the weapon doesn't scale in power with the party it can become comic relief only.

Your stuck with it in your campaign until the end if the PC's decide to keep it. They are much harder to remove from a campaign.

You have to make sure the weapons advice is mediocre to bad reasonably often so the party doesn't depend on it. I've screwed this one up before.

[Space Cadet B^3]

Hey, I had a heck of a lot of fun roleplaying what a character's mentality would be like to have a personality fragment sharing his head with him, I thought you did a great job with it.

[IllusionJunkie]

My favorite that I've ever made (and would love to use as a beginning PC sometime) was in a Vampire: The Masquerade Campaign.

The NPC was a "motherly" Setite training the PC's as proteges within the city. She set up several situations to give them access and chance to reap huge benefits by doing some naughty things. She never really let them in on this fact as it needed to be their choice.

Within the first month or so I beleive they were dealing drugs and comitting diablerie. :D

[Pigs in Space]

I really love evil NPC's that don't want to hurt the party - in fact they are evil _to the core_ but are also opposed to the BBEG that the party are actually trying to fight.

My case study: Ishnarak the Erythnullite Gnoll Cleric. This guy lived in a massive orcish fortress, they were nice and evil, but the PC's were off trying to stop demons entering the world. Ishnarak was in a position to sell them some of the best gear they could get their hands on... and also would buy evil items off the party that they could not use, based on alignment.

I think they sold him a Tome of Infinite Darkness or some shit... and somehow justified it. This propelled Ishnarak to epic levels, and cuased the paladin to be abandoned by his god. But he had money and didn't need to do that "tithing" crap anymore...

ah, corruption. Good times.

[Limper]

Ahhh leading them down the path of moral ambiguity.

[Janos]

A powerful succubus posing as a Sorceress. OOC we guessed who and what she was, but IC we had no idea what a succubus was capable of, and hadn't encountered demons yet. She traveled with us for most of Slaughtergarde keep and my character got intimate with her. She performed all sorts of useful little tasks for us; including loot runs (she would take our loot to town to sell, show up wearing nice clothing and new jewels, AND give us all that we asked her to bring back). Message duty, charm duty, etc. She was a great team player. Eventually she helped us win all the fights and turned on us in the last battle, charming and making several PCs fight. She succeeded in charming the whole party and fled through a demongate with the key to the gate that we were trying to destroy.

Later on, my character's half-fiend son showed up to cause trouble (raised on a plane with a different passage of time).

After that we found a helm of opposite alignment, captured her, and slapped it on her. She is now the wife of my character, making amends for her evil deeds, and both of them are attempting to stop their son.

After that we found a helm of opposite alignment, captured her, and slapped it on her. She is now the wife of my character, making amends for her evil deeds, and both of them are attempting to stop their son.

[Keeper of Secrets]

Whereas I do not have a favorite, per se, one of the types I like is the helpful but mouthy. You have someone who is either a sorcerer (which the party needs) or in a supers game some kind of snooty butler who the characters kind of like but takes the opportunity to lecture them, bicker with them or troll their conversations. It is a nice opportunity for role playing with friction which can prevent ugly PC vs PC arguments from breaking out.

[Scarbonac]

One of my favorites is a character named Tianna; She is loosely based in equal parts on a Quebec stripper, Priss from Blade Runner and Helen Hunt. She was a Danseur (or more accurately Danseuse), which is a secret organization of assassins IMC, who ply their trade under the guise of being entertainers.

Her specialty is breaking necks via Savate.

Another of mine is a Giff Marine named Zogam, Trooper Zogam; verrrry British, crazy loyal, and of course, loves guns and explosions. He attached himself to one of the PCs who claimed to be the "Captain" (the group went along with iut cos they needed his knowledge of smokepowder and firearms).

He's a loveable bruiser.

Then there's Bajang, rogue Zombie Master, who had plotted to take over my version of The Isle of Dread - not just evil but vile as well; he managed to posses one of the PCs and almost turned him to the Dark Side (cos B. needed a new body after his previous one was kaflooied by the party and his former tribe of genial savages).

He managed to escape being permanently destroyed by jumping into a kopru (sort of an aquatic degenerate illithid), and left his PC host with a cursed appearance (forked tongue, serpent eyes, talons) as a partial revenge.

He now plots deep within a volcanic hotspring. :cthulhu:

[Dacke]

One NPC I had hoped to use more (but I moved away before I had the chance) was an Inspired telepath from my Eberron campaign. I used him twice. First time, he was trying to create strife by assassinating the daughter of the Thrane ambassador to Sharn (via proxy, of course - he is a telepath after all). The PCs stopped him, but he got away.

A few months later, he appeared again, but this time with some information helpful to the PCs. When asked how he had gotten it, I got to use one of my favorite Bester lines: "I'm a telepath. You do the math."

[Ancalagon]

At the moment? Captain Mills Dickinson

He's the commander of a carack class light cruiser in the Imperial army (a star war campaign I'm running). He's too much of a maverick to be entrusted with an imperial star destroyer, and he's been relegated to the "lesser" task of hunting pirates and smugglers - a task he greatly enjoys. Much more challenging than bombarding cities and planets, after all.

The players are afraid of him because he's smart, helpful, polite, and very manipulative. He last invited them aboard his ship for tea, commenting that he had "delicious scones and large turbolasers". In their previous encounter, he had installed a tracking device on the PCs' ship (a light freighter) and followed them to destroy a small rebel base. The PCs helped the rebel escape by helping destroy the small screen of fighters the light cruiser had launched ahead.

So the PCs accept the invitation fearfully, and are congratulated by the captain for their excellent under-cover work. However, he's concerned that their "total" devotion to their cover could be... misunderstood... by some imperial authorities. He notes that he's hunting pirates at the moment and that he's short on fighters, so surely these patriotic sons of the empire wouldn't mind proving their loyalty assisting him by playing bait? After all, if their ship could destroy TIE fighters so easily, surely it can fend of pirates until the cruiser arrives!

Ah, the look on my players face was priceless :D