Love/Hate: Priming your game with NPCs & Groups

In our own world, there are people we love and people we hate. Our feelings about others might be distant or dispassionate, or they might be personal and urgent. Sharing a love for the people of a neighborhood, a country, a sports team, or a gang is a quick and easy way to bond with someone else—as is sharing a hatred.

Establishing a setting, giving your players a solid enough grasp of a world for them to feel like they know it or understand it, takes a lot of work. A little preparation on the part of the storyteller (with optional help from players) can make a big difference.

Prime your players by giving them a handful of different NPCs and groups (collectively I’ll call them entities) with extremely basic descriptions. Then, require that PCs choose a minimum of one entity to love and one to hate. Encourage them to choose more. Maybe, if you have six or more entities, you can raise the minimum numbers they must love / hate.

It’s up to your players to come up with reasons why they love or hate these entities. You’re free to offer input or encourage backstory that is helpful for your plot ideas. I recommend doing this all together as a group rather than independently.

If your players tell you that their PCs wouldn’t love (or hate) any of the entities you’ve offered, or not enough of them, ask why! Then work with them to make up an entity that the PC would love (or hate). Finally, adjust your collection of entities as necessary: you might want to keep the starting number of entities low, to make sure that PCs have strong feelings about some of the same entities.

Remember: some players love intra-party friction, some players hate it. You’re risking intra-party friction if some PCs love an entity and others hate it. Talk with your players and manage those overlaps to meet your group’s needs.

Let’s say we’ve got 3 players: Alex (they/them), Brandon (he/him), and Claire (she/her). Alex is playing a cleric, Brandon plays a rogue, and Claire plays a paladin. Nobody knows more about their character yet. Given that mix of characters, I’ll want at least military, religious, and criminal entities, as well a few more just for variety. Let’s make up four people and four groups—we could make six total, but eight gives us a nice spread.

Do these have enough excitement and distinction for our players? Maybe! It’s worth offering them to the players at this point, just to find out. If the players don’t feel like there’s enough going on here yet for them to feel attached to any of the entities, work with them to add more details.

Maybe Brandon feels like the Ratking is too obvious a connection for him, and he wants more variety. Perhaps we can add a little more subterfuge to these entities? And maybe Alex and Claire feel like the choices of having their characters love the Abbess and The Order of The Golden Rose is too straightforward and boring, lacking in complication. Let’s make things a little spicier and add a few details.

Group 1: The Order of The Golden Rose; a militant holy order. They’re wealthy, snooty, and have a reputation for defending those who cannot defend themselves.
Group 2: The East Blade Street Blades; a gang of apprentices and journeymen mostly associated with the smithing guilds. They’re rebellious, they like picking fights, and they’ve all got well-made weapons.
Group 3: The Guild of Spicers; a collection of merchants with a monopoly on the spice trade in the local city and its environs. They’re influential, they have wide-ranging connections to distant lands, and they’re ambitious.
Group 4: The City Watch; the militia and other local guards consolidated under the Duke’s control. They’re corrupt, brutal, and eager to curry favor with the wealthy and powerful.
Person 1: Duke Tonklin of Abelard; the ostensible ruler of the local city and several nearby counties. He’s losing his grasp on reality, losing his grasp on power, and generally considered to be a very nice man.
Person 2: Abbess Guilfoyle of the Offered Hand; head of the abbey of the Offered Hand. The Abbess is generous, detests the Order of the Golden Rose for being what she sees as a bad influence on the Duke’s children, and is fond of rich food.
Person 3: The Ratking; head of the local beggars and thieves. He’s the first to hear any rumor, is conniving and venal, and is a bit of a softie when it comes to the kids who make up many of his wards.
Person 4: Gertrude the Gracious; famous local bard and entertainer. She’s heartstoppingly beautiful, has a voice like honey, and is extremely in demand both across the city and in the realm beyond yet chooses to spend much of her time here.

There! We’ve added some drama. I’ve tried to include details about behavior, about personality, and maybe a little about motivations or intent. Some of the entities don’t like each other, the obvious picks are a little more complicated for each PC, and more entities have compelling reasons for a PC to both love and hate them beyond simply saying “Claire the Paladin loves the militant holy order, obviously.”

The entities now also have a few more details that tell us why our PCs might want to seek them out or interact with them. Plus, there are now details about how these entities are perceived by others, which will make our job of portraying them in play easier. This minor prep work will let me improvise more easily later.

All that said, I wouldn’t want to put more prep work than this into any of these entities until the PCs had already spent some time interacting with them. I don’t want to spend time and effort on groups or NPCs that won’t get screen time. If the players don’t care about the Duke, then the Duke isn’t likely to show up. The exception to this: if I have a plot point that really needs the Duke to have made decisions offscreen, then he will… but even then I don’t really need to know more about the Duke.

You might have noticed that this logically follows my post on how to create NPCs. This approach is not one that I’ve seen used elsewhere, but it is a clear outgrowth of Apocalypse World’s PC-NPC-PC triangles, and Blades in the Dark’s starting gang reputation system. Consult those sources if you want more related ideas.

Alex is a sweetheart, much like their cleric, and their cleric loves the Duke and the Abbess, while hating the Blades and the Watch. Brandon decides that his rogue has a soft spot for orphans (maybe he is one?) and as such loves both the Ratking and the Abbess (he suggests that the Abbey of the Open Hand offers food to children). Like Alex, he hates the Watch, but he also hates the Guild of Spicers—they have abundance while he never had enough. Finally Claire’s paladin loves the Order of the Golden Rose for their protection of others, and Gertrude the Gracious because, I mean, have you ever heard her sing? Claire almost says that her paladin hates the Abbess, for her opposition to the Order, but after a group discussion everyone agrees to keep intra-party conflict to a minimum; Claire’s paladin also hates the Blades (for being a bunch of hoodlums protected by their positions in the smithing guild’s hierarchy) and the Spicers (for only ever giving aid to others with lots of strings attached).

As the players align their PCs with or against the entities, we learn more about who the PCs are as well as what the entities are like. This will create patterns and strings that you, as a storyteller, can pluck or manipulate to introduce new complications and propel existing plots. It also shares some of the storyteller’s workload while building players’ investment in the setting—I didn’t realize the East Blade Street Blades were using their positions in the guilds to get away with hooliganry until a few sentences ago. Who knows what you and your players can uncover?

Try this out. See how it goes for you and your play groups. And let me know what you think! Are there any extra details or limitations you’d want to add? Anything you think needs to be changed to really make this process sing?

Fistful of Wits