DMDC 08 - Companion Downtime

Just like in real life, your friends are going to want to make friends with imaginary people you pull from your head. There's plenty of things you can do with that, and not just to break their hurts and deliver soul crushing disasters upon them. Sometimes they just, y'know, hang out. Like real people. These ones just might have scales or cast lightning bolts.

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Transcript

Hey! This is the DM Discourse, a podcast about D&D, focused on the experience at the table from behind the screen. I'm your host Darrell, and today I’m talking about all those NPC friends your players will inevitably make, and what you can do to flesh out those companions your party invests their time and emotions with - and not just to break their hearts.

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Greetings journal! It is I, Xichtanil, dragonborn extraordinaire merchant of the Undersea and Lands Above! The sun has set again on another day of my great adventures, which you are fortunate to be collecting the events of!

It has been about a half week since I met Master Sq’Gee, Master Olrune, and Master Pedwar on the docks of the Crosswamp Tavern, and the excitement has never stopped! Even when we first left the dock we met some homeless birdfolk, and even the accursed yuan-ti. Agh! May whatever fool wizard who mixed together their cursed kind be forever cursed himself! Thankfully my trio of friends were able to easily dispatch these fiends - what skill they possess alongside the fortune to run into Xicthanil himself, the renowned trader that I am.

And we have even taken on new members of our ships crew, which we have taken to calling the Ycnan per Master Pedwar’s carving along the bow. Master Antonio is apparently a famous guitarist (although I have never heard of him) and Mistress Cht’Hoo is some kind of… talking bird? She is strange but has a kind heart too big for her stature. She resembles an owl but is fully capable of speech. An oddity, but they make a good pair of traveling entertainers and will only help grow the fame of our roaming band of do-gooders!

Even one of the local goblins, Brog, has joined our crew! Whereas yours truly serves as quartermaster, the goblin has a knack for navigation upon the treacherous riverroads of the swamp. Plus he is very good at cards.

However, he is not good at persuading the local elves to release me from captivity. Due to a misunderstanding, it seems my wares were unappreciated by the local Wolfmane elf tribe and their tribal leader took me hostage until the master friends were able to return and persuade her to let me go. She is a very harsh lady but I guess she should be - it is hard for elves everywhere, even in the lawless Drifting Isles.

However the magic lady Iliara Starcloak is very nice, plus she even has a name. Xichtanil is well learned and knows that elves without a tribe do not keep a name, but Starcloak does. That makes her brave I think. Plus she did not try to capture me for selling the master friend’s lamia head they found to her apprentice - instead she fired him! Xichtanil made 20 gold pieces, very fortunate for Xichtanil.

The masters also returned from the Halls Under the Hill again, much worse of wear. It looks like Master Antonio was attacked by something that melted a piece of his armor. From what they say, we may be leaving Fenskeep for a while! I am always looking for more great adventures, which you will surely hear about, my journal.

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Your player characters are going to make friends in your game, and in my experience this is true even if they’re vile, sinister people with amoral and selfish goals. It’ll just happen given enough time. One of those imaginary people you concocted from your mind weave will stick for them and they’ll want to keep up with them, check on them, or even bring them along on their adventures. This isn’t like hirelings, where they’re using their own coin to hire a certain class to help them out, or like a DMPC that you could use for your own narrative purposes. Just straight up, one of those rando nobodies they run into town.

If they do this, I think you just received a present, because it ultimately means they are genuinely invested in your world, your campaign, and the time they are spending at a table talking in weird accents. They’ve shown their hand, they are forming that emotional attachment to these characters, and that leaves plenty of creative space for you to reciprocate - it also leaves them vulnerable.

Let me talk about Xichtanil for a second. I think I mentioned him in one of the earlier episodes. He’s a dragonborn merchant with a penchant for getting into trouble. He talks with endless excitement about whatever the hell it is that’s happening to the group, but I never tried forcing him on the players or require them to interact with Xichtanil. If they weren’t interested, he could’ve just as easily left the boat as soon as they got to Fenskeep. But rather than just treat him like a resource or contact, the party actually got Xich involved in their antics.

The story I mentioned earlier is absolutely true: the party came back immediately from the dungeon after they ran into a black pudding in the entrance room of the second floor. The fighter Antonio, a new player, had his first taste of genuine terror in the game when it started to melt the AC of his shiny, expensive armor, and they seemed to be incapable of damaging it for a low level party. I probably tricked them going further into this anyway. They solved that Door of Seven Stars puzzle and defeated an undead lamia, collecting its head and figuring out what to do with it.

As they made their way back, they knew just the solution: sell it, and who better to help them sell it than their good friend Xichtanil? Surely as such a renown merchant he could fetch a good price for it, right? As you probably figured out, Xichtanil is no good at his profession. He travels in a set of rags and an oversized coat that he stores whatever trinkets he collects that could not fit in his backpack.

It didn’t make sense to keep a rotting lamia head on the boat, so they took it to the closest thing they had to a magic shop in Fenskeep, the tower of the Goldenfire Order. It functions as a cabal of local magic users, essentially teaming up just to regulate their own businesses more than control the town - at least, that’s the front Iliara Starcloak presents. We’ll come back to the order and Starcloak in the future, but for now the party just wanted to talk to Timbor, her apprentice manning the front desk. With Starcloak herself busy and none of the other superior members present, the party was able to swindle him for a few coins. At the time it was just a good jest for them, but it ended up costing Tim rbor that job for buying essentially a useless body part. There’s no necromancer in need of it, so it was about as useless as a trinket Timbor could buy. You don’t need to worry though, he eventually did get his job back.

Your players don’t need to present for your companions to have their own adventures though. Given that hawking wares is Xich’s usual job whenever they’re at port, he thought he’d try his luck with the nearby elf tribe, the Wolfmanes. This was my players’ second encounter with an elf tribe, but arguably went better. Xich had strained the tribe’s patience. I can’t remember if it was for trying to sell them something important or just being a nuisance, but at some point Chieftain Wolfmane had him strung up and captive until the party came to get him.

When the party arrived they got another dose of how weird I enjoy making elves. None of them have first names in their tribe, at least not ones they share to outsiders. They also just share their tribal name as their surname. The idea of the individual is, mostly, lost to elven culture because of how they view it has historically troubled them. If you recall from earlier, the elves in my setting has a curse that eventually turns them into demons if they succumb too much to their… something, I’m still working on it even now.

Neither of these scenarios is to illustrate the only ways you can get your friendly NPCs into trouble, but just know that there’s definitely things you can do to tug at the player’s heartstrings. Find the ones they like, and put them in unfortunate circumstances if you so desire. I guess they don’t always have to be unfortunate - the NPCs could have good times too.

It’s also good to be receptive to signals your players send about characters they’re interested in recruiting. After Sq’Gee retrieved their boat from the goblin excavators, he made it clear that they were welcome to join so long as they didn’t cross them. One of the goblins, Brog, the first one that they encountered, took the cleric up on this offer - and it proved genuine. Brog knew from the getgo that their melwa leader Mido was up to something, something dangerous that he didn’t want to be part of.

So now they had a navigator for the boat, one who would be invaluable in an aquatic based setting. He’s also ended up being the coolest head of the bunch. Brog tends to look at these from a detached, logical perspective. He isn’t heartless, but he’s had a life under someone else’s thumb - people much bigger, much stronger than himself. He’s against trying to push his luck, because he doesn’t want to risk the position that he’s in.

He’s also ended up working as a good foil with Xichtanil, one that I hadn’t planned either. Essentially they can now provide differing perspectives to the group, if they are without any leads to work with, but they’re not entirely separate. They both care about the well-being of the crew, and as the months of play went on they started to form a genuine friendship between themselves, and not just with the PCs. It’s good to let your players establish relationships with the NPCs, but don’t forget that the NPCs can also interact together. It may be a bit weird having to put on a few different hats within the same conversation at first, but once you get the hang of it you can start providing conversations that can bounce between a bunch of different characters, showing their own bias an opinions between each other. Probably useful for running a solo campaign? That reminds me, I have done solo campaign stuff and should probably talk about that as well at some point - but that’ll be another episode.

But for now, going back to NPCs, they can be as lively as you want them to be, and develop them as much as you care to. This only works all the better as your players get invested in them as well, and they become standalone characters that the party wants to follow up with or keep a genuine connection with. It turns, “hey let’s go see if the guard captain, maybe he has a quest,” into “hey let’s go see the guard captain and ask how his wife and kids are doing.”

It’s not always about the NPCs they bring along on their adventures. There’s probably going to be a resident or two in each town they care about, and while the party’s away things can change. Time passes, they aren’t just going to sit at the shop doing nothing throughout the seasons. For my current campaign, they took a shine to the resident weaponsmith, Iozef Nevski. I don’t really know what’s appealing about a guy who sells you swords, but they liked him all the same - it may have had to do with him coming from the same part of the country as Antonio.

So I started planting the seeds for his cliche mysterious backstory - a fake name he works under, dangerous shadows stalking his shop in the night, wary reactions to hints that the party dropped. None of it was especially planned early on, but I figured so long as I started sending the players those signals, it would culminate into fleshing out that NPC down the road - and it did, as you’ll surely find out.

Alright I’m going through all this and I think I’ve said all I’ve got for now. Let your friends make friends with the characters they like, then flesh them out to get them to like them more. It’s going to give you great story opportunities, and the party further investment in your campaign.

Thanks as always for listening. If you have any thoughts, feel free to email me at dmdiscoursepodcast@gmail.com or reach out to me on Twitter @DMDCPodcast. Appreciate y’all out there and as always take care, and have a great week.