Please be careful with spoilers from major campaigns, particularly Curse of Strand cos I’m playing through that atm please thank you 😊
I’ll go first…
I’m running a homebrew pirate campaign and I have a character called Rusty Ben who’s great fun to play. He’s a warforged in the form of a skeleton made of rusted iron. He wears a pirate hat and he has a stuffed parrot nailed to his shoulder. He’s a great sailor, who never tires, or eats, and he even keeps watch as he ‘sleeps’, because warforged. He’s also handy with repair work, so he’s a valuable member of the party’s pirate crew. He’s very friendly and speaks in a kind of silly Southern US accent. When he asked to join the party’s crew, he held put a gold piece and said “I can pay my own way!”. They declined and one of them gave him a silver piece as wages. He was bowled over by their generosity. Another player offered him a copper piece as well, and he got all serious and said, “No, no… let me earn the copper piece.”
He acts as a kind of sailoring guide for the party. He has worked aboard quite a few pirate ships, until he was aboard one that sank in battle. He walked for a long time across the bottom of the sea and eventually found an island and just walked up onto the beach, where he met the crew of The Candlestick Maker’s Revenge and joined them, which is where the party met him at the start of the campaign. They took passage on that ship to get to the island chain that is the setting fornthe canpaign. He’s one of my favourite people that I’ve ever made up!
He didn’t last long, because my party murdered him, but I had a cleric of the goddess of luck that would challenge people in the tavern to dice games (which he couldn’t lose), to raise funds for his temple. My barbarian spent like an hour trying to beat him before he realized what was going on
That’s hilarious. Did the player fall for it, or were they just RPing the barbarian really well?
It took him a bit to catch on, but definitely not as long as it took his character
@Infynis @jossbo Another Luck Cleric! Mine was basically Friar Tuck. He was always drunk (a lucky drunk) and searched every couch for loose change that he would give to the needy. I built him with a level dip into Barbarian so he could wear robes and occasionally “lose his temper”. I would love to get to play him again someday.
My favorite npc I ever ran was in a homebrew spelljammer campaign a few years ago, the foible for the party was a beholder pirate captain named eye-beard who would constantly one-up or outmaneuver the party. Also let me talk like a pirate. After they killed him he later came back as a death tyrant
Love the beholder pirate captain, may have to steal him for my campaign!
I at one point had a pair of NPCs travelling with the party. One was an Orog (which is like an orc/ogre hybrid) and the other was an Elf Archer who rode a Winter wolf. The two NPCs both had good reason to trust each other but only so long as the party’s interests aligned with theirs. Orcs and Elves in my setting are very mistrustful of each other, and it was fun to frequently present the group with interesting choices where these NPCs were arguing for different options. The PCs wanted to keep them both around because they were both reasonably powerful companions, and they knew that the boss at the end of the adventure was an adult dragon, so they needed the help, which meant they had a mechanical incentive to keep these NPCs away from each other’s throats.
That’s a great way fo encourage some interesting RP with stakes
A pigeon aarakocra, who is a very caring matronly figure. The voice I chose for her is very light and airy and uses a lot of pigeon coos. It’s always a blast to voice her and hear the players’ amusement.
It’s always the bard
In my campaign I made a bard nemesis for the party’s bard to be in competition with. He’s a one-man-band Tortle named Shelldon who is incredibly haughty and superior sounding. The first time they met, Sheldon was performing and one of the party put a silver piece in his collection hat. He looked at it and gave them a judgey look, so the party bard said “fuck this guy” and they had a Dueling Banjoes style battle. The party bard won and Shelldon got butthurt and accused him of bad musicianship. Some cutting remarks fron the party had Shelldon running away crying. I’ve had him pop up again throughout the campaign trying to one-up them.
