NPC personality creation workflow

I took the 3 lists of traits from Out of the Weaving Secrets 638 Primary Personality Traits article in 2014 and set up a trio of random selector functions in my big excel sheet. I get a positive, a neutral and a negative trait. It also randomises male/female and romantic preference.

I combine that with my big list of ancestries - started from Skerples OSR: Table of Races, the usual D&D suspects from the core books and the raceoids from Lizardman Diaries - for 73 different possible ancestries. You could swap this out for a cultural background table also for similar effect.

This gives a bit of who they are, what are they like - combine that with some motivations - basically tagging them to a local faction to say what they might care about and then deciding how invested they are in that factions goals (from fanatic to casual). I talk about this a bit more in NPC motivations to meet player role-play preference. Most of the non-recyclable effort has gone into what he local factions are, who is doing what in a location. That is what I have to put the effort into when the players move around the map. Otherwise, if whatever is going on locally is sufficiently big, bad news (undead invasion, natural disaster) then what anyone encountered cares about will be clear.

And that gives me seeds to get me going:
- What this person is like individually (randomised traits)
- Their background / ancestry (randomised background)
- What they care about (picked faction)

With these generated I either just write them down directly or if I'm rejecting elements its because I know something needs to be more like something else - so I do that instead.

A good use of prep-time has been to generate a bunch of random NPCs and write them down on a big sheet for quick reference during play.

One big learning for me of late is to 'reveal secrets' - an NPC encounter is a chance to reveal what the locals are concerned about. Have them talk about the local factions and conflicts, warn off or try to recruit the PCs. Particularly if the players are moving around, there are not likely to be that many points of contact between the players and a given local concern so have the NPCs be vocal about what is going on.

I do not use occupation generators so much as most often I am deploying these created NPCs when the players go look for something specific and I use these for 'what is the blacksmith, innkeep, scout like'. For cold encounters I will also use an initial attitude roll to get something on the hostile-to-friendly spectrum. What 'hostile' might mean will be situational, a grumpy shopkeep is very different from a set of hacked off dwarven tombdivers.

I have spoken before about the output results of this in NPC mannerisms: d66 animal-folk attitudes - how randomly generated traits and play at the table has created a perceived set of 'what these people are like' for a bunch of the animal-folk in my Menagerie world campaign. That was the results of this randomly generated traits input.

It took me a while to re-find my original source on Out of the Weaving Secrets which prompted writing out my whole workflow.

Pretty similar is the flow described by Reality Refracted in Preparing NPCs - Personality Generators they have a bunch of interesting articles under the 'character development' tag - the later ones seem to be more on NPCs, earlier is for players and your own character.

Some other interesting generators can be found on Perchance, Chartopia, RanGen and Kassoon which go into more or less detail. I find mannerisms less helpful then 'who they are' and deep background generators less helpful when you are using anything not standard issue fantasy-land.