Campaign Design – Picturing NPCs

Well, my Midnight game is still going forward at the speed that a Midnight campaign moves (I don’t know what that means, or why I wrote it). The last part of my Relationship Map has to wait until my players make their characters and at least two of my potential players keep changing their character concepts, so there really is no point to worrying about that right now. At last count, I’m going to have six players, which is a little past my comfort zone for political games. There’s only so much information I can keep in my head at one time, and worrying about keeping six people entertained and invested in a very slow-paced game will be a bit of a challenge. Luckily, it turns out that I’m the greatest gamemaster ever.

One thing that my group usually does is make pictures for the NPCs in the game. One of my friends started this a few years ago and it proved to be very popular, so much so that pretty much every game since then has HAD to have pictures for all the NPCs. Usually this is simply actors, but occasionally we have used art, rock stars, etc. For fantasy games, it’s very hard to avoid using art because of the bizarre races. Luckily, this Midnight game only had one other prominent race and those are fairly easy to find.

Having pictures for your NPCs is beneficial for a couple reasons.

1. It makes them easily recognizable to your players, making it easier for them to remember the NPCs. It’s one thing to hear “Malger Korvath” and quite another to be introduced to Malger Korvath and presented with a picture of Ian Holm. Even if your players sometimes forget the names, they will still remember “that Bilbo guy.”
2. It provides personality that might not have been obvious. For instance, I had an idea for this nervous former mayor of Baden’s Bluff who is trying desperately to retain some power while also not pissing off the legates who surround him. But ‘casting’ him as Paul Giamatti instantly provides a personality, even a voice. Now both my players and I know exactly how this guy will act.
3. It creates NPCs almost by accident. If I had a legate who I told you was being played by Tom Cruise, you’d sorta have an idea of how he’d act. But taking that same legate and making him Gary Oldman? Now, we’re dealing with something else entirely. And I didn’t even tell you what exactly this legate’s job in the city is. Accidentally-awesome NPC.

Of course, there are some problems with getting pictures of all your NPCs.

1. It takes forever! Hours of scouring fan sites and Google Images. Sometimes even days.
2. If you need an NPC on the spur of the moment, you don’t necessarily have a picture. I try to ‘plant’ a few blank NPCs in my lists in case I suddenly need a new NPC. Players can often equate the important NPCs with those who have pictures, so I try to alleviate that with some preplanning.
3. Depending on how long you do this, your NPCs might all start to look alike. Casting the same actor in multiple games, or even the same picture of the same actor, starts to get a little old.
4. As a heterosexual male, I have seen way more pictures of naked men than I care to admit. Say you decide to cast one of the actors from Law & Order as a police chief in a game. After all, you watch the show and are familiar with his work. So, you type Chris Meloni’s name into Google and are confronted with pictures of his penis!! This happens more than I would like.

So, a few thoughts about the specific work I’ve done for the pictures of NPCs in this game. The last couple of games I’ve ran I’ve started messing around with Photoshop filters to provide a different “look” to the NPCs. You can’t tell all that well in the picture above, but I’ve applied the Cutout filter to these pictures to wash them out (I also made them monochrome, but that was probably obvious). I’m happy with that look on some of the NPCs, and not on others. I guess it’s the quality of the picture that’s going to determine whether that particular filter achieves the look I wanted. For the legates in the above picture, I put pictures of their asteraxes next to them. The glowing eyes are another Photoshop filter. Not really necessary, but what the hell. You can also see one of the orcs I cast. Obviously, orcs are fairly easy to find after the Lord of the Rings movies, but there’s only so many of them. Also, World of Warcraft has pretty much destroyed the ability to ‘cast’ fantasy races/classes (Instead of complaining about how its destroying roleplaying, I’m going to complain about how its destroyed finding pictures of NPCs for roleplaying). No, really, go to Google Images and type in ‘orc.’ Almost all the pictures are from World of Warcraft. (This also applies to certain fantasy classes, too, like ‘paladin.’) If that’s the style you’re going for, great. But it’s usually not the style I want.

This is my “player copy” of the NPCs. I have another document with their stats, personality notes, and relationships mapped out. But that’s for another time.