1 WISH
Jumping on the WISH bandwagon...
Describe three NPCs (not major villains) that you really liked and what they added to the game.
(The LintKing and I are scratching our head and thinking about other games.
"What about [Crackerjack]'s game?"
"Nah... in ['Jack's] game everyone else got shot... go figure." Yeah, yeah. I should probably talk more about Pikabu sometime... Nah. She was like a very dense Damascus with a gun and an immense crush on Alex Cassel. Erm. OK, maybe there are only surface similarities.
"Jeff's game? The guy with the stealth car."
"Lucien was it?"
"Too cliche.
"What about Dirk?"
"He mostly ran Paranoia."
"I remember Pierre of the Fork, but he was an PC."
"Was there anyone in the Mechwarrior game?"
"Um...Santiago. I was kind of an NPC."
"No, it's no good. We shot everybody."
"What about Em's game?"
"I wasn't in it long enough. There were those people who kidnapped me and I never knew who they were."
"You shot them, you say?"
[Have I ever mentioned to any of you, my dear faithful two readers, that we're a little bit... um... rough on the countryside when we game? Countryside. Yes.]
"And I never really got to know anyone in Roger's game. I trampled them."
"Yes, you did. I shot them, but I had like a 22 with a crossbow.")
As a GM I have a bit of a distinct advantage when talking about NPCs. ["At least, you would if you could think of one who hadn't been shot." -- the LintKing] I have, erm, lots of them. ("Some even without holes." "Yeah, so name three." [sigh])
Llewella in the LintKing's Paths of Blood, Ways of Stone game was really neat. Not only was she Jinx-Jobina's mother, but I remember what had originally intrigued me about her: the story of how she was kidnapped by the lamias of the desert of Rebma, and how she came back...
...wearing snakeskin boots.
Heh heh heh.
I really liked the ingenuity and pure grit behind her, even if she was likely to kill my character (or Malcolm, my character's cousin) for the flirting. She created a shorthand (so to speak) to talk to the Spiderfolk, whom she had a child with (and who worshipped her as a Great Mother.) I liked her even more hearing some of the secrets behind her powers... like the necklace she (and her guards) all wore of eyes, rumoured that she could see through them. [In the LintKing's words, "She probably could, but it was just a rumour."] She was also an elementalist of a strength that probably lubricated (is that the word I'm looking for?) the insertion of Epoch's version of Llewella for G&G. After all, she's mean, and green.
Charl, King of Amber. Charl is the second son of Dworkin and the Unicorn. He can teleport ten feet in any direction. Not nine feet and six inches, not eleven feet, but ten feet, exactly. He has a magical slingshot, and was gifted with a set of bracelets of invulnerability (one of which was given to his wife, Shannon, in the marriage ceremony.)
Charl is a little bit alien. He came onto the scene as a boy, determined not to make the same mistakes as Oberon did. He tries so hard to be human. He observes them carefully. He imitates their ways. He follows his heart. He once asked the fellow with the 300 point Strength and a magical hammer to, "Hit me as hard as you can." He blinked, but he didn't cringe. He went through the ceiling. He teleported back down...after a bit. ["There were just those few seconds of everyone standing around... 'You vaporized him,'" mentions the LintKing.]
He's grown up. He's starting to be a real King, but he doesn't want that to take away his essential liking of people. He thinks people are neat. I think he still thinks he's going to grow up to be a person someday. [Well, except for that bit about turning into a Serpent, but that's another plot entirely.]
Lolth. No, not that one, but named after that one. Lolth was, erm, Eddy's familiar. Which really should say it all, but that's just Eddy's ego coming across. He's a whole 'nother story entirely (and not mine to tell.) Eddy was a sponsored mage meaning in the world of Aipotu, his powers came from his deity. In this case, Sall'Ket, Lord of Plots and Games, of whom no more will be said, other than it left Eddy a raving paranoid lunatic with an engaging personality. (After all, he was our favourite raving paranoid lunatic.) [How would you handle a god who, if you happened to take the same route home twice, showed up behind your shoulder with his finger pointed at you, winking, "Bang. You're dead."]
But I'm talking about Eddy, when I should be talking about Lolth. Eddy's like that.
Ahem.
Lolth, as a spider spirit was granted as a protective guardian for Eddy's home. (Spiders, after all, are sympatico with plots, weaving their intricate traps and webs as they do.) As the mages of the world enhanced their creations with passion, Eddy's monomaniacal efforts quickly strengthened her into almost a sidekick, if not chief cook and bottle washer. She was, however, at heart, the voice of reason, if you can count a delusion as an anchor to sanity. I think I liked the perversedness of a creature granted life by a deity she refused to recognize.
Hmmm. Sounds familiar.