Three Notes Make a Chord

This one's about NPCs.

I've been using published materials in the games I run for about two years. Dungeons, modules, hex/point crawls, pamphlet adventures—you get the idea. Before then, everything was home-made. For decades. So this has been a new experience, and an incredibly fun one.

But I can't help feel something is missing. Granted, this is often intentional. The majority of these games I've sat behind the screen for could be categorized with one or more three letter abbreviation ending in SR. The games, and the things people make for them, leave a lot of blank canvas on purpose. My overactive imagination loves that. 

Many of those blanks, I can fill in at the table. The one piece of the canvas I like to work on beforehand is NPCs. Sometimes you'll crack open a module and they'll just be a stat-block, maybe a defining characteristic or a single facet of their personality. They are hardly ever fleshed out in a way that facilitates speaking extemporaneously as them while portraying an actual person as complicated as you or me. 

In other words, they tend to be one note. Which can be okay—good, even. After all, a guard checking the PCs' weapons at the gate doesn't necessarily need to be a complicated character. But what about when I want a level of depth that one note doesn't provide? 

I make a chord. Which is to say, add two notes. What are those notes? Whatever is missing that will help me improvise dialogue as a dynamic character. This isn't about creating memorable characters, that's for the players to decide. If anything, it's a tool for an improv scene. 

There are two things I want in my three note chords. One is a mannerism. What sets them apart from another NPC I've played, what sets them apart from myself just speaking to my friends? The other thing is drives. Plural, as in two of them. Two desires, whether material or cerebral, that cannot be achieved simultaneously. Dual north stars that will inform how I act and what I say that I can toggle between.

Since this is an exercise in practicality, here's an example of an NPC I played:

Hiwa: She/her. Late 20s, brown skin, short black hair, dressed in fine Belarran clothes, always drinking wine. Drives: To sabotage House Zabala, to defy her aunt. 

This was at a noble's dinner party, hence the ever-present wineglass. There's my mannerism. I mimed holding it, I paused to drink from it, it was great. Then there's the conflicting drives. Her aunt was the head of a powerful guild, a noble-by-way-of-wealth, and House Zabala was the guild's greatest rival. So I get why she wanted to sabotage House Zabala, but I don't know why she wanted to defy her aunt. Maybe she resented the position she was put in, maybe she had a thing with a Zabalan noble. Whatever her internal conflict was didn't matter when it came to roleplaying as her. The important thing was I had two modes I could flip between. Every time the players spoke with her, even mid-conversation, she could feel the obligatory tug of duty or inversely decide she was a young woman there to party. 

She got quite drunk as the night wore on. Her plays at political maneuvering became sloppy and obvious, and rebelling against her aunt took precedent. By the end of the party, she was shielding her eyes against any light and complaining about every loud noise that rattled around her throbbing skull. Well and truly wine-drunk in the worst way. Would I have come up with all of that on the spot without a chord for her? Maybe, but probably not.

Naturally the session revolved around a murder mystery that the players solved quite brilliantly. But that's not the point of this story. There were 10 NPCs between the noble partygoers and their harried workstaff. The players interacted with all of them, could tell them all apart (even if they didn't always remember their names), and never quite knew what to expect when I opened my mouth because they couldn't peg these people as one-dimensional. 

It was our most memorable session of that campaign, one we all still look back on fondly. And for me, it wasn't just fun. It was easy, because I found a tool that works for me. 

I think about NPC chords every time I see one with a single note. I can't say I've been great at fleshing out characters in the supplemental material I've been using in recent years, but that's going to change. I'm about to start a Shadowdark campaign in The Gloaming from Cursed Scroll vol 1. So if you'll excuse me, I think I'll go make some chords.