Have any of you used a pop culture character as an important NPC? How'd it go? Who was it?

Have any of you used a pop culture character as an important NPC? How'd it go? Who was it?

I used the Shockmaster in my campaign as a gag just because one of my players has a WWE-tier backstory.

The reveal was worth it.

It's a terrible idea.

My Ventrue in a VtR game had Patrick Bateman as a don't-know-the-word-but-embraced-by-the-same-person-guy NPC. It went terrible. I felt stupid whenever the GM used him.

Whenever I do "fight arena" plot-arcs in my games, I always make sure to base at least one of the opponents on a real-world wrestler or MMA fighter. It usually works OK as long as they're just a minor NPC and not the campaign's BBEG or anything.

My GM has repeatedly has us run into references to Mario and Luigi.

Most recently, we found ourselves in a sewer (it's name a reference to that water-squirting device from Mario Sunshine), where we made contact with engineer Mario and adopted a baby turtle that was clearly meant to be Bowser Junior. Apparently the Bowser expy was lurking in there somewhere, but we didn't run into him, and Luigi would have been called in if Mario got suspicious enough of us.

That same session we ran into star fox, working as corporate security, and Donkey Kong became a new questgiver for us. Samus (Sam A.) was alluded to be working as corporate security as well, though we didn't run into her.

It was pretty wonderful. In my opinion that's the kind of wacked-out gonzo shit that belongs in roleplaying games.

I had Morgan Freeman as a recurring villain in the background of a modern campaign. Rather helped that he was always too big of a deal for them, every battle they decided their priorities were to kill his lackeys and then use their numerical superiority to escape.

Honestly, it's not even a meme at this point, they just coldly factor in where Morgan Freeman is at the time when they make plans, which is at least fairly easy to do. Easier than beating Morgan Freeman at least given he's a higher up in some kind of psionic conspiracy/supernatural creature hunting organisation.

I do the same thing with Bards. I change the names around of course, but I've had Elvis Presley, Michael Jackson, and the entirety of KISS show up as unimportant background characters during carnivals and nobles' parties and such.

>Party has been traveling around the world solving one major potential world-ending crisis in each of the major regions from a campaign setting we've been in for a few years, basically the homebrew setting where I first started DMing.

>Get to the woodsy elfy land, at least on the surface.
>Caste system based around classic elements. Fire are military and enforcement, Earth are menial labor and such, Water are accademics and practical educators, main alchemical/bio-engineering dept, Air are politicians, artists, philosophers. Between the castes are the Guides, picked as cultural and religious sect, never making laws but offering advice that is unwise to reject out of hand, and the Paths caste, messengers and couriers across the nation's territories. Each caste has a handful of races particular to them.

>Because they let this one sit on the bac burner, things are already bad when they arrive. majority of the Guides are dead after a necrotic assassination at a major meeting. Water caste is trying to secede, citing a clear difference of biology for one, different territories (oceanic, coastal) lineage (merfolk in general, but Sahuagin in particular more than the draconic influences up above) and how things are falling to shit on the surface for reasons that have naught to do with them.
Earth caste is organizing a (currently) non-violent resistance movement demanding more fluidity and fairness in the castes, citing talented artists, engineers, thinkers and potential leaders in the Earth caste reduced to menial labor by birth alone. They are supported by the Stone Dragon martial school, among others, but only a few incidents have come up.

I don't think I'd quite call him a pop culture character, but I dropped Crazy Hassan into a game I was running as a throwaway NPC who happened to be selling a McGuffin, and my players still occasionally bring him up and talk about how great he was.

I'm not entirely sure how I should feel about that and, in any event, the most I do (aside from him) is occasionally make some NPC that's a vague reference to someone obscure.

Fire caste is desperately trying to hold things together after the previous chapter of the campaign resulted in a continent-chunking explosion that took out a lot of the forces they'd put on the mountainous boarder keeping the neighbors problems out, meaning they have to handle a potential secession and civil conflict growing less civil by the day while short-handed and looking weak on all fronts because they've been weakened on all fronts.
Air caste is doing jack shit, loafing on their high treetop towers and cliff-side retreats like nothing is wrong for some reason.

Party arrives and starts trying to piece things together, starts off with Air to see why the shot-callers are going all Let Them Eat Cake.

They find the leader of the Air caste, Linak, is some kind of posh winged Elf Bard who's been busy organizing a big festival to celebrate the turn of seasons and weather patterns that go with it. Party can clearly see he's up to bad shit and decide to let him get away with it anyway (despite one of the party members literally having a grudge against bards because this one killed his parents but left his half-elf ass alive since he hadn't done anything wrong when his folks broke caste-line laws of lineage). Sort of a "We should probably put a stop to this but let's see how far it goes" notion.

Linak proceeds to summon Yan-C-Bin, elemental prince of Air. BiggY-C wrecks everything and the party fights him off, first boss fight down, and the half-elf artificer gets his revenge story.

Moving on, they proceed to try to figure out what the hell was going on there aside from "Oh hay why not?". They travel to the Elemental Plane of Earth, which is manifested as a black hole but they're high enough level to stack "impervious to planar effect" stuff enough to survive briefly and talk with the Prince of Earth. He tells them that the four Princes are trying to get to their world to claim a great power source, the Elemental Eye.

The Prince of Earth also states that he expects he will be the last to arrive, but that he will none the less be the one to claim the Eye for himself, knowing that patience will be the virtue to win the day. The party figures that's fine so that they don't need to worry about it until after they've dealt with Fire and Water then since Air's already beat.

They return their home plane...to find that time does funky stuff when you're near a black hole. A few weeks have past and the Water Caste somehow got it in their heads that since the Air Caste did it they could do it better and have summoned the Elemental Prince of Water. Queue second boss fight with the coastal/undersea city now over-land because the tides have been drawn out, the party then goes and freeze-bombs Prince2's ass so that he can't release it all in a world-killing tidal wave and will melt slowly and safely back into the water level.

Meanwhile the over-arching campaign plot device's manifestation in this region states that the Elemental Eye is not an Object or Artifact, but one of the few entities held in containment despite the numerous breaches of its holding facilities. They then sort out that Tharzidun, the god of elemental destruction is actually baiting the Princes into the world to die and suffuse it with their essence so that he can break out; two of which have already fallen for it with the party's help.

So with that having gone bad, and the Water Caste's Iggy leader pretty much getting kicked out and beaten for his incompetence, they proceed to go try and hash things out with their more cooperative allies of late, Nem Wellers, the leader of the Fire Caste and Akwame, Leader of the Earth Caste.....or they would have if Nem wasn't apparently on the rampage in the form of a colossal pyroclastic dragon. They manage to subdue the beastial form and shunt her to one of the lower planes, then the party's Anti-Posession Inquisitor rips the Elemental Prince out of her; turns out that seeing his budies fail made him think he better jump the gun, so while Water and Air had been sweet-talking the caste leaders into gathering their forces into giant rituals to summon them in truth, Fire just split himself into a dozen Elder Elemental Monoliths instead and bum-rushed Weller's mind in posession, figuring that an angry rampaging dragon ought to set things on fire nicely. They were right, but with a team effort they got her head clear of the Prince's presence, and managed to crush the manifestations one at a time safely on some other plane of existence so that Tharzidun couldn't get free, or at least not as much as he'd have liked without a hell of a lot more legwork first.

That should have just left Earth, but the party recognized that there were still things going on that didn't make sense; Earth caste getting more violent despite their leader doubling down to try to cut that shit out while the Fire Caste was getting orders to start suppressing violently in the fashion of burn it down and we'll arrest the ashes. Finally the PC's ask "Why are you giving x orders?" "I'm not" "Then who the hell are your caste's messengers?!" "Our caste doesn't have messengers, we rely on the Paths caste, all of us do."

"Why the hell haven't we heard about them!? Who's their leader? Shouldn't they be here?!"

"....I don't remember." Nobody did.

So the party starts looking into it and discover that Maddie has some kind of divine blessing that's made her nigh impossible to track, magical, mundane or otherwise, and that the moment the concept of her leaves your consciousness you're going to forget about her. There's a few minutes of will-saves as they scrawl on hands and notes and faces until they've got enough of a system to have a conversation and follow up on it, tracking down Maddie and all dozen or so of the body-doubles she'd had molded into copies of herself and mind-warped to have her memories and persona, as well as tracking her backstory to a grove temple to Tharzidun. With his agent out of the way, and the Fire Prince dispersed on another plane entirely, the world was probably safe from this confrontation, both in mortal aspects and Elemental Outsider power-plays until the Prince of Earth planeshifts himself right the fuck on top of the over-arching plot-device's location. (Not as a black hole, just a manifestation of himself more apt for a terrestrial world.)

I had a very obvious Johnny Bravo expy show up one time. It went great, since the party went along with him for a while.

The Prince of Earth states that he is just there to collect the Elemental Eye. The party looks down at the plot-device, then back at the Prince, then back at the device, and then asks both of them to wait a moment while they double-check their sources. A couple teleports later they discover that the Plot-Device manifestation wasn't what it said it was and sure as hell wasn't supposed to be talking from this segment on its own; Tharzidun, held contained, trapped, and unable act save through proxies that were dead or wished they were now.

The party is a bit skeptical at first of how the Prince is planning to take the Eye seeing as it is an ancient god of destruction rather than some artifact or the like. It replies that it will place it in a near-light-speed orbit around its true self, allowing only infinitesmal fragments to reach its surface at a time and slowly absorb it over the course of countless aeons until it is all gone and the Prince of Earth rules the planer Elemental Axis. The party finds this to be an acceptable solution for the problem of having an ancient deity of destruction on their planet and leave the Prince to eat a mountain-side in which it was contained before planeshifting back out.

Four princes handled, Tharzidun in a box put in another box that will slowly eat it alive, and hey we only lost half of 3/4s of the population with the Earth Caste suddenly having a lot more weight to their arguments for better treatment and less stringent caste regulations and restrictions. Wellers is being pretty cooperative at this point, both by party support of a colaboration and because the Air Caste are looking to her for leadership in light of the whole mess. All parties involved grant the Water Caste their independence because hell with those fish-fuckers who didn't bother to help with any of this and damn near made it ruinously worse; there'll be a few coastal cities still for those who didn't have their heads up their asses.

So, in the end the story came down to Ma-Ti trying to manipulate Wheeler, Gi, Kwame and Linka into summoning their powers to combine them into Evil Captain Planet to destroy the world in pure elemental chaos and the capitalistic magic-crafting poluters who just wanted to flood the free market with magic items and get bitchin' guns and air-ships from the technological nation that formed up in a magic-dampened landscape.

In my Dark Heresy campaign they were in a scummy middle hive bar. The guy they were asking questioning was Samurai Jack. He spoke politely and eloquently, wore pristine white robe like clothes, had a straw hat, and was drinking tea.

Almost all creative writing is derivative of your influences. Everything you write about generally comes from something you've enjoyed or has had an impact on you. So lifts from other shit is bound to happen.

But as in like, a direct lift and place? I put a Koichi Hirose equivalent with Act 3 in my 5e campaign. Stands dont exist or anything, except for him, so it was fun to have an NPC like this fuck with the characters.

I made him an elf with a different name though, of course.

>Slaine from 2000A.D.
>Almost the entire plot of the Fourth Ninja World War from Naruto
>Countless comic book characters whenever I play M&M
>Robo-Cop but with Metal Gear Rising level augments
and a hell of a lot more lesser examples

In the campaign our GM was running we had travelled into the past to the early 20th century where we ran into Teddy Roosevelt, he became one of our npc party members and we fought off time travelling vampires. It was pretty awesome actually.

Ionnus Cenus is a goto god of combat in many of my worlds. Mainly because my players at one point wanted him in, so I had to oblige. And it turned out pretty well, so I keep adding him in.

With how I do gods, he's probably pretty powerful at this point.

The primary BBEG of my game is the Murder /k/ube

My players have no idea what it is or why it's there.