NPC Interviews

Sometimes an NPC needs more personhood, because they’re talkative, or the players need to negotiate and have an idea of whom they’re dealing with. And the little notes I put under statblocks saying ‘Wants: cakes’, or ‘Mannerism: suspicious eyebrow’, just doesn’t cut it. So I’m thinking of resorting to interviews.

On the Trail of the Snail Lords had something similar. A few more important character had long example conversations, showing how they interrupt people, their little bigotries, and how they speak about their interests. But that module (or ‘campaign’?) babbled too much. It hides its structure among a mess of details, like those conversation snippets. I want to make modules which remain short, in essence.

Interviews could go at the back, in the appendix, as a gift of clarity, rather than muck before the real story. Extra fluff in an appendix feels like it ‘doesn’t count’ towards making a module verbose and waffly. The module ends, and notes appear, perhaps for people who have particular questions, or who want to run the module a second time, and feel happy to read more details.