Interesting NPCs you liked

Describe the most interesting NPC you have ever seen in a game, recent or otherwise. You cannot have been the GM of the game, and you cannot have had too great a say in the NPC's details.

I truly appreciate how one of my GMs portrays a certain NPC. She is a wolfgirl (not the one in the picture, who is not even my character) queen regnant of a great and highly advanced nation. Although the kingdom has power and prosperity, its politics are extremely cutthroat. This wolf was born with an unusual mental illnesses that stripped her of all empathy and compassionate emotions, yet left her ability to understand and intuit such things untouched. It was through this innate ruthlessness that she performed many a technically-legal misdeed to rise to the throne, and then performed many more gruesome deeds to stabilize the kingdom under her iron grip.

There is one thing she was always insecure about, however. She was prognosticated to apotheosize into a demigodly figure gifted with world-shaking superpowers. That day never came for her.

Instead, the day came for her only child, my character. Once the crown heir manifested such abilities and began to shower blessings upon the world, the queen grew deeply conflicted between pride and joy for her child, and jealousy and resentment over how her offspring "stole" the power and glory that was meant for herself. Worse, her own child is becoming more popular with and important to the people than the queen herself.

One of the child's many deific gifts was the ability to purge all mental illnesses with a glance, but this did not include any confirmation that the target had any mental illnesses to begin with. Thus, the crown heir unwittingly cured the queen of her lack of empathy and compassionate emotions. At the time, I was completely unaware that my character had cured anything substantial from the queen, let alone something so major.

(Continued.)

Over the following days, she was dazed and confused by a flood of empathy and compassion into her mind, and the queen was wracked with guilt from past misdeeds. And yet she was still queen of a grand nation with cutthroat politics. It was only later that her child realized what happened and tried to comfort the queen. She is still deeply disturbed and unconfident even to this day, but the queen knows that she must stay strong as monarch.

I enjoy how the GM portrays this character as a deeply conflicted mother suffering from a crisis of cognitive dissonance. She is so proud and happy for her child to be a messianic figure helping the world with awesome superpowers, and yet envy and resentment seethe in her heart, for the queen was supposed to be that figure, and the crown heir is proving more popular and important. She rose to the throne and kept the nation afloat with heartlessness, but the burdens of empathy and compassion now weigh down upon her and fill her with guilt, and yet she must continue her queenly duties all the same.

The GM has done a good job of making me care for my character's mother as a person, and I am already quite invested into helping her through this midlife crisis.

What interesting NPCs have you liked?

>She is a wolfgirl.
This is when I knew I should probably stop reading.
>queen regnant of a great and highly advanced nation.
OK, so she's a Mary Sue
>This wolf was born with an unusual mental illnesses that stripped her of all empathy and compassionate emotions, yet left her ability to understand and intuit such things untouched. It was through this innate ruthlessness that she performed many a technically-legal misdeed to rise to the throne, and then performed many more gruesome deeds to stabilize the kingdom under her iron grip.
OK, so she's an EDGELORD Mary Sue.

I stopped reading there, but man, if this is the best NPC you've ever encountered, you need to stop playing with weeaboos and have a game that's actually good. You have no idea what you're missing out on.

The next few paragraphs explain how that breaks down.

hi THF

Cheria. Kind of a DM plot device, but ended up being one of my players' favorite.

>Local Lord is basically trying to bring peace and stability to a city under his rule.
>Lord is basically hiring people to deal with criminals, monster infestations, and similar issues plaguing the city.
>Players have proven capable enough that they're allowed to apply, but the Lord doesn't deal with them personally.
>Players are instead put under the supervision of Cheria, the Lord's spymaster.
>Cheria is... initially kind of a bitch. Acts haughty and condescending around the players, and basically treats them like disposable muscle (which to be fair, they are).
>Players HATE her. Get ragey, tell her she can't do the things they do and basically threaten that they can kick her ass.
>Cheria knows they won't murder her just cos they're pissed though, and basically laughs, says she doesn't need to be able to fight when she's so clever and charming and stealthy ect. ect. and says the brains of an operation never fights anyway.
>Player rage rising, but they swallow it and do some assignments anyway because the pay is good.
>Players gets mission to reclaim a military fort that had been taken over by defectors who were basically using as a base to kidnap travelers and commit banditry.
>Party sets up camp to scout out the base from a distance.
>Despite having kept a watch all night, when they party wakes up in the morning, they find a satchel in their camp that wasn't there before.
>Satchel is filled with potions... and a note from Cheria teasing them for having not noticed her drop it off.

In that moment Cheria went from a character who made the players rage because she hadn't fellated their egos right off the bat to someone who's respect they were starting to earn, even if she hadn't shown it until now. Basically "I know I give you guys alot of shit, but you did good and I want you to keep doing good."

According to my players she's one of the best NPCs I've ever run.

Is that really an NPC? To be honest it seems like something you wrote into your own character's background and kinda forced on the DM as a major plot element.

Well, whatever, posting my own. Verana Ocaran. Originally she just started out as a shopkeeper in the "hub" city of the campaign. I had just grabbed pic-related of a vaguely wizardy-looking character to run a shop that sold random low-level enchanted knickknacks and magic items. Turns out I had a group of players that really liked using that kind of stuff in creative ways and ended up visiting her alot. Questions came up about how she got to be there and I came up with a backstory that her grandmother had been an imperial mage and taught her some basics of magic and lore, enough that she could identify charms and other magical things of value that others might consider worthless junk. She had actually been born into an upper-class family, but rather than be traded off in some kind of political marriage, decided to take her grandmother's books, leave home, and pretty much live her own way.

Since the players liked her, I started to integrate her more into the campaign as that character who could dig up information on things for the party. Party finds some strange artifact with weird writing, "Huh, I recognize those markings from the old pagan mages in Cyren. I think there's something like that in grandma's books actually, give me a day or two to look it up."

As the campaign continued to go on, I even made her inventory get better to keep up with the kinds of stuff the players needed. Although the players themselves got integrated into this process. When Verana was expecting a shipment of interesting finds and it went missing, guess who was more than eager at that point to go out and investigate what had happened. She had become a contact the players enjoyed helping, who offered services the players were happy to invest in, despite having started out as a filler throwaway character.

Annnd this thread will die before even hitting 10 posts because people would rather retread "DnD Sucks" shitposts for the Billionth time than actually contribute to anything discussions with the potential to be interesting. *siiiiigh*

>OK, so she's a Mary Sue
>nobody is allowed to be important and successful

>OK, so she's an EDGELORD
>Sociopaths are edgy and them rising to power is being edgy

If you took your head out of your ass and read further you would realize it's actually interesting.

>Is that really an NPC? To be honest it seems like something you wrote into your own character's background and kinda forced on the DM as a major plot element.

I had informed the GM that I wished to play a prince or a princess of some kind. The GM quickly took creation of my character's mother into their own hands. As I say in the opening post:

>you cannot have had too great a say in the NPC's details.

The only part I had a say in was that the NPC would be a wolf, but she was going to be some sort of kemonomimi either way.

The system we are playing is Godbound. We came into the game expecting it to be a horrid mess of OSR inanities, and with full knowledge of many of the system's flaws and shortcomings; the game has been meeting every one of those expectations and more.

>You cannot have been the GM of the game

Yeah, if he'd kept reading, he would have learned about such riveting characterization points like 'muh prophesized super messiah', 'muh arbitrary superpowers and 'muh conflicted split personality'. Oh, some of those were for her super special daughter who's even more super special than her because she's a PC? You're right, INTERESTING is definitely the word to use, not cringey.

You seem upset, sir.

"DnD sucks" is inflammatory shit that gets easy replies. The drivel in the OP isn't gonna attract anybody despite the good tread concept.

The OP's example sucks.

Yes, I know. Read better.

It's too anime.

Why are all favorite NPCs here anime girls?

Nobody else has good NPCs?

Kobold refugee in a pirate hideaway. Played the "poor lost critter" card to endear everyone, and ended up joining the party, being conveniently absent during every encounter. She stole all of their belongings one night towards the end of the campaign.

The party doesn't like kobolds anymore.

Curious user here, but why can he have not been the DM? What indicates that he wasn't? Is this a copy-pasta or something?

An old fisherman in a village where I stopped to get some supplies and to buy a fishing rod since the region had rivers everywhere. Traded him a white fox pelt from a fox I skinned and tanned a while back. Gave me a shoddy fishing rod that he made for his son years ago so they could bond, but said son wasn't interested in fishing so it was never used.

Decided to sit by the river with him and fish for a while in a sort of awkward companionship since neither of us was good with words (8 cha), which seemed to cheer him up since he mentioned my character was around his son's age. Caught a fish, though my fishing rod snapped as a result. Fortunately the old man was nice enough to repair and reinforce it for free, making it much sturdier than it was previously. I later used that same fishing rod to catch fish to save the party's rations and even pulled a skeleton into a spike trap with it by catching the hook onto one of its ribs and pulling it into the trap.

Because only 2 people (at the time) have bothered to post anything worthwhile. Also you're on a website that started out as an anime and japanese culture discussion board.

Posting good NPCs would mean people actually play games, which we know 90% of Veeky Forums doesn't do, especially in terms of actually DMing games instead of just sitting around begging to be a player.

It says so in the OP.

I'm still confused, because the post referenced wasn't the OP. Pretty sure shopkeeper Verena wasn't the OP's Mary Wolfgirl-Jesus Sue character.

>Mary Wolfgirl-Jesus Sue character
It's Godbound, what do you expect?

OP post says:
>You cannot have been the GM of the game, and you cannot have had too great a say in the NPC's details.

Well fuck me, that disqualifies every interesting post in this topic then. OPs a retard anyway, so lets just agree to ignore that part.

You're just going to get GMs wanking to their own NPCs that way.

As opposed to what, DMs lying and saying they were a player while wanking to their own PCs? As long as they're interesting or good plot-idea fodder, who cares?

>DMs lying and saying they were a player while wanking to their own PCs
Why would DMs wank to their own PCs?

Lets be honest, who the fuck actually remembered that part after reading the cringe that followed.

This. At least some cool character ideas are better than the 2 dozen tired repetitive shitposts that are clogging up the top spots right now.

NPCs, you know what I meant.

An honest to God "Tim the Enchanter" expy that was done SO right in the style of MAD WIZARD. Most of the shit he sent us to do made little sense until at least five to ten sessions after he did it. Like when he made us steal all the blue things from a certain city. This made a deity blind to that city so that he could make goblins. Butler goblins. They buttle the hell out of him and we got our own manservant, Claude the Upright. We had the best meals and so on from then on. When we got a fortress he was made Seneschal and dude did he make that fortress GROW into a real city. Just for us stealing all the blue out of Yol Ulesh.

Eh, it wasn't that cringy to me. What makes you say it's cringy?

See
Also the fact that the topic was "talk about cool NPCs" and the very first example posted transitioned into "HEY GUYS! ISN'T MY PLAYER CHARACTER SO AWSUM?!"

In our Force & Destiny game there was a toydarian antiques merchant/treasure hunter who we'd encounter once every other planet and he'd try to sell us Sith artifacts or whatever Force macguffin we would need in a future session. He'd always give these elaborate explanations of whatever he was selling and our GM would always make it a long bullshit explanation about the item while hiding a small hint about what it actually did, turning every sale into a logic puzzle. Which, in hindsight, was a lot more fun than I give my friend credit for. He's pepper his speech with forewarnings like "if you guys were Jedi, which you obviously aren't, this Sith holocron will definitely turn you evil. 2000 credits, final offer." Plus his attempts at doing a yiddish accent were the worst kind of hilarious.

>the very first example posted transitioned into "HEY GUYS! ISN'T MY PLAYER CHARACTER SO AWSUM?!"
No it doesn't?

>super-special furshit queen who is intelligent, nihilistic and with a wicked sense of edge
>oh and she's prophesied to become a super-powered demigod
>just kidding, the real super-powered demigod was her daughter, who's more loved by everyone and more important too
>also the daughter has super powers and cured the mother's edge with a single glance and made her good now, so she hates her but loves her at the same time
>by the way, this is my character guys
>so awesome right?

Even typing out this summary was pic related.

>the queen grew deeply conflicted between pride and joy for her child, and jealousy and resentment

HOLD IT
Story fell apart. She's not supposed to be able to feel these things. Otherwise neat idea. Ultra-Autist rises to the throne because of no emotions in a dog-eat-dog political system.

Jealousy and resentment aren't compassionate emotions.

I'm torn between two:

>Our party was attacked by assassins in the inn, one of our party members shouts a battle cry
>The GM briefly goes over his campaign notes, giggles, then announces that three half-orcs charge down the hall and start grappling and punching our assailants.
>We find out after the encounter that the GM planned for them to be a barfight; they were rowdy patrons who kept getting kicked out of the inn for their fights, and they were always down for a brawl.
>One leadership feat later and our GM agrees that they enjoyed fighting with us so much that they'd stick around and be violently drunk at our enemies.
>Many fights now consist of half-orcs grappling enemies into submission

Second one is just one I appreciate: A halfling herbal shop owner who drags our party back to the main town whenever we got knocked out early in the campaign. Dude was a lv 11 Druid so nothing could really stop him at the time. He got killed later and we were all pretty upset.

You seem upset.

What are pride and joy?

I had a DM pull a great bait-and-switch on awhile back.

>Campaign setup is that we're all in service to a 16 year old princess trying to run a kingdom on her own, as her parents have just assassinated. Basically she needs all the help she can get to deal with foreign enemies, political unrest at home, ect. DM literally told us he was taking inspiration from Long Live the Queen.
>Princess has this sorceress named Arianne serving as her court-mage.
>Every time we come to see the princess, Arianne is there, usually lecturing the princess on something. It sorta makes sense because she was a trusted advisor to the princess's parents... but something seems off.
>Example argument we see a few times is coming in to find princess asking Arianne to teach her magic, Arianne refusing, saying she has no talent for it, and the telling her to go practice her swordplay instead. Something the princess thinks is a waste of time because she has guards and stuff.
>Basically theres this air of mutual contempt between them.
>We start to get suspicious and think Arianne may be involved in the whole assassination thing that happened, and either using the princess as a puppet or waiting to off her at a more opportune time.
>Everything comes to a head one session where we go to the throne room and Arianne has the princess in tears over this damn sword thing again.
>Decide we've had enough, and basically call her out right then and there, asking her how she can care so little and still expect to be trusted.
>Arianne kinda stares at us quietly for a few moments. Then starts to undo the lacing on the back of her dress.
>WTF MAGICAL REALM!?
>Turns around and lets the back of her dress fall... to reveal her back is covered in scars, lash marks, burn marks, and a slave branding.
>"I was about her age when it happened. It's a good way to make someone important important disappear. She won't always have you, or me, or anyone else to defend her."

Not necessarily compassionate?

I don't understand. Arianne used to be a slave? She was someone important who was 'disappeared' in this manner?

I really expected it to turn out that Arianne was secretly the princess here.

>anime kemonomimi
>furshit

user...

Swap out 'furshit' for 'weebshit' then.

Fuck off back to your hole, OP.

My best NPC was an old lich that acted like your friend's cool grandpa. Just was tired with the whole evil scene and only wanted to entertain the occasional mortal with a story. Still made shady deals but with lower reasonable stakes. But on the whole, just a friendly old man.

but wouldn't that be even more incentive to teach her magic. unless she really did have zero talent for it.