NPC Good Guys and Bad Guys

[Preacher]

Inspired by the NPC topic on the HU2 Board I was curious as to how you guys come up with NPC's in Your Rifts Games?

Myself I draw on inspiration from the books with a good mix of completely self generated NPC's.
My group is now in the middle of an on going war with a Raksasha and his minions. The Raksasha was just something I did on a whim as a side adventure for the group which went in an unanticipated direction and is now the center of the game for the forseeable future. The group because of the Raksasha's devotion to killing them have now had to give up their base of operations because the Town they lived in ask them to quit bringing down firefights with the minions of the the Raksasha.

I figured RoArk (The Raksasha) being a long lived and powerful being would have the resources ti finance several groups of Merc's to send after them. That being said that made me design two new NPC's with full write ups and the whole kit and caboodle. Leon and his son Deon who are RPA Elite pilots and have a modified (THrough Photoshop) X-500 Battlebot. The Enhanced Battle Bot now has a mini missile drum on the top and a 14 mini missile launcher on each lower leg. The other enhancement was a Naruni Forcefield Basically the battlebot is now a mini missile thrower with some medium missiles thrown in for good measure. I figured that the Battlebot would be a great initial opponent in a confrontation but due to lucky rolls on INT. he got off a couple of vollies right off and had some of the PC's really hurting and on the run. They did manage to destroy the BOT but Leon and Deon escaped and will be back with another Forager provided by the Raksasha.

For Non Com NPC's I usually make them on the fly and write notes in my GM's log for future reference. One set of NPC's were Rita and Anita Bean from the Village of Preen. Kind of a running joke in my group.

Now the original question after a few examples of mine. How do you guys come up with Good NPC's for Rifts?

[ApocalypseZero]

I tend to take the same approach to Rifts as I do HU. Although, with Rifts I am able to come up with more for. I have intigrated everything from Movies to Anime to Books to Video Games into my Rifts games.

But for cold hard stats, the characters are usually just given a D6 for all combat stats and I take into account any special abilties of the Race/OCC/RCC's. Other than that, they are pretty much done. Unless I get the wild hair up my butt to do the full scale, Kevin Siembieda like write ups. Then I basically just copy the same procedure as the NPC from the books are done.

[Uncle Servo]

I tend to take the same approach to Rifts as I do HU. Although, with Rifts I am able to come up with more for. I have intigrated everything from Movies to Anime to Books to Video Games into my Rifts games.

Same here. One of my old Rifts campaigns was notorious for a wandering group of NPC do-gooders that took their inspiration from the ruins of an old pre-Cataclysm bookstore containing chronicles of champions of justice who wore brightly colored uniforms to identify themselves (hey, they didn't know the comic books were fiction). They adopted 'codenames' for themselves based on the resemblances they bore to these ancient champions and dubbed themselves "The New Avengers."

Yeah, it was hokey as all get-out, but the players loved the way they took themselves seriously.

Anyway, another common tactic of mine is that when I come across an OCC/RCC that looks intriguing, I roll up a full-fledge character to see how it fleshes out. I then put it away in my files until a chance comes along to play the character or if I'm GMing and the character may fill a particular niche in my story.

[MADMANMIKE]

..I naturally use the NPC quick generation rules I made for the Rifts Game Master Screens, then flesh them out from the random rolls. So far the game I've been running as of late hasn't had the time to do more than shoot it out, but when they get around to the roleplaying they should get really interested..

..Often I just let the near-photographic memory and thousands of hours wasted reading sci-fi and fantasy novels and watching every movie and tv show I could fill in the blanks based on the situation. NPC's start out as carbon copies of characters in similar situations in the past, then evolve around the rifts setting there. So not very helpful, I wing it in my own way.

-Mike >8]

[Syndicate]

It's hard to say, I grab inspiration from nearly ANYTHING I interact with from T.V., video games, and movie, to books, household appliances, and nature. Guess it depends on my mood...

[Drakenred®™©]

Depends, sometimes I borrow one from one of palladiums other games, sometimes I Borrow them from fiction, (Alice in wonderland for example has some positivly WAPRED charaters in it!) sometimes I use Paul Jaquaes charater generators.

[DBX]

from all sources mentioned so far.

most people try to create whatever character from fiction they like or has managed to grab hold of them using an rpg character creation system.

you can also do it from scratch, but usually this too will have elements of different fictional characters that you like.


there is always using given npc's in books, by changing them slightly, add your thing to make them relevant to your scenarios/campaigns, change their name, and enough **** about them that identifies them as an npc from a book to your group of PC's and you end up with a really good and useable NPC.

[RainOfSteel]

I come up with NPCs by a combination of needs and chaos.

My needs are usually for an OCC and an alignment, so these are pre-determined.

I then randomly pick an archetype character, assigning a few salient attributes, and spend a bit more trying to think up unusual twists for the character to make them seem more than your average lifeless NPC (with varying degrees of success).

It's a process that is heavily dependent on inspiration and instinct.

[Scooter the Outlaw]

I usually come up with a rough concept based on R.C.C. or O.C.C. and then pick one aspect of a person I know and exaggerate it, or of a fictional character and expand on it to transform it into the central theme of the character. Because of this, a lot of bit characters who were never intended to have any real importance ended up sticking in the PC's heads as favorites.

For example, there are Ramon and Perez, the guys who run LYfeStilze Lowriders in New Lazlo. They were one-shot NPCs with no stats who happened to run the shop a character in the game used to own before he sold it to finances his adventuring. However, they turned out to be hilarious and everyone loved them because of their ridiculous personalities, which basically consisted of using a very limited vocabulary (everything was 'tight' or 'whack', and they were spineless: 'Like, I'm just sayin'... it's not like, definitve or anything... just... y'know.') Today, the PCs live with them.

For the actually significant NPCs, like villians, I do full writeups stat-wise, but the personality is usually pretty much the same; pick something and exaggerate it. If you have a voice and gestures for them, it will produce an NPC that will stick out quite well in your player's minds.