Final part of creating our NPC, Weasel Bob. We’ve gone over his motivations and we’ve gone over what he looks like. Really, I think that’s all you need to do to get an NPC with some depth into your game. The players are going to appreciate that level of work, but it’s possible that the NPC will continue to grow over time and eventually mean a lot to the PC’s. If you get to that point, you want to start to think about how you can create story hooks with the NPCs.

So, the easiest way you can do that is to threaten the NPC’s family or something that the NPC loves. And with Weasel Bob, we know that he’s motivated by money. Or that he wants to get money for some reason.

The first, obvious spot would be to focus on the business. Burning it down, having it robbed of some particularly unique items are definitely good options. I think that a theft makes the most sense because you end up with the players still having a long term reason to keep Weasel Bob happy, to do more business, plus get back this item that will be important to the larger story somehow. But if you destroy the business, that might just cause Weasel Bob to drop out of the game, which would be a shame.

The other spot you can hit an NPC is family. And with Weasel Bob, I’m not sure that he’s married or that he has any kids. But in my version of him, he has some family that is left in a gnome town. His brother and sister-in-law were killed, and he has a niece left who is living with a family friend in a gnome village near the town, probably 4 days away by horse. Weasel Bob didn’t have that money in the gnome town, but he was good at spotting the true value of things, so he set his shop up in a big town where he’d be able to discern what more things are, and he sends money back to the gnome town to support his niece a couple of times a month and goes back to visit a couple of times a year.

There are a number of different things you can hint at to this story with the players, they can come back to town to find that Weasel Bob is gone for a couple of weeks, and maybe that’s when the store is robbed. It would cause the players to wonder where Weasel Bob is going, and probably lose some trust in him, but if they still like him, then, you can drop something happening to the niece, make the players feel bad and get a ton of buy in, because the players are going to want to do something better for Weasel Bob. I also think that there’s another story hook, and that’s what happened to his brother and sister-in-law. Because maybe they weren’t killed, maybe they just went missing or were presumed to be killed, but their bodies were never found, you can now create a story out of that.

So, while Weasel Bob might not have a wife and kids, there are ways that you can still interact with the idea of family or those close to him, so I think that having the niece there provides nice story hooks. Now, you don’t need to fully flesh this out, but it’s something you can think about when creating an NPC. It’s useful because you can start to work towards things. If you want, you can do two quests with Weasel Bob, the first being to find the item that was stolen from him and get it back, and start to hint that Weasel Bob leaves to go somewhere to do something he considers very important. Then you can drop the niece bombshell on the players and make the players have to deal with something having happened to the niece. Finally, you can loop back in what happened to the parents to the story. Though, you can really deal with the parents at any point in time as long as you don’t give away that they are Weasel Bob’s relatives. The reveal that the PC’s have met two gnomes named Mabel and Arthur when Weasel Bob finally tells them about his brother and sister-in-law, that would be a fun moment.

The main thing to get out of this, is that you can pretty quickly flesh out NPC’s and when the players have an NPC that they like, you can use them as quest givers and pull them into the story, and the players are going to be more apt to take those hooks. It’s not something I’ve been amazing at always, but it’s something that I hope to do more and to develop more in the games that I run.

So, what do you think of Weasel Bob, how would you use Weasel Bob? And how do you create NPCs?

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