Society for Aesthetic Deletions

The Game WISH (Weekly Idea Sharing Hegemony) is a weekly writing exercise for gamers.

So, today's WISH is:

Describe three NPCs (not major villains) that you really liked and what they added to the game. The NPCs can be from any game you've been in as a player or GM, and any system or genre.

Moirin was the son of Moire and Corwin. This was an Amber game (obviously). Lou created him as a major NPC that would pal around with the other PCs. And he gave him ungodly power, which in the hands of a player could have been terrible. Even in the hands of the GM's NPC, it could have been Deus Ex Machina.

But Moirin was so flawed, it hurt to watch him. Lou crafted an NPC who was, above all, human, and he made mistakes all the time. This was where I really learned that NPCs didn't have to be perfect, didn't have to be the ones to provide accurate information to the players, didn't have to be anything other than people. Characters, just like our PCs were.

Second would have to be Cybele, from my Amber game, Which Endureth Forever. She's Oberon's first child, sent away to die (actually be imprisoned) in the early years of Oberon's reign, for falling in love with her half-brother, Benedict. She got pregnant, but refused to name the father, and so was sent to die.

At the start of the game, Cybele's return was prophecied in Tir. It came to pass, because Oberon wanted her returned. Her daughter, a PC, had been raised in very slow-time shadow, and was only 16 (where over a thousand years had passed in Amber).

She fell in love with a PC, reunited with her daughter, has Benedict living under her newly-restablished House in Chaos, and is currently the center of some plot lines I can't mention here because my players read this. I love her because I made her fallible, a wild card that not even Oberon can be sure which way she's going to play. I can easily slip under her skin to play her, and have to slide out again to realize what impact she has just had on the game. She's not a mother, though she's trying. She has no idea how to be one (sort of like me). Not everyone likes her (and she's fine with that), and she's good at plotting, but not good at relationships.

She's helped me add a romance subplot and a mother subplot, along with other plots to the game.

The third NPC would have to be Torm. Yes, the diety from the Forgotten Realms.

Lou ran a Realms game through 2nd Edition, converted to GURPS, for a long time. I joined in late (still AD&D) with an elven ranger with some wild psionic talents. Agraynel, aka Gray, was your typical elf. However, because of some events in the game and her life, she ended up having a very close relationship with Torm, who in Lou's game world was a demigod.

We had a paladin of Torm (Oquon) in the group, and Gray slept with him. She really didn't love him, though. And when the paladin thought himself at fault for getting cursed with lycanthropy and had to atone, Gray called Torm down to answer for Oquon's punishment. And to her surprise, he came down and talked to her.

They had a good relationship from the start, once Torm explained that the atonement was all Oquon's idea. It also didn't help that, later in the game, Torm would talk to Gray by possessing Oquon.

The makings of a terrible love triangle were all right there, but the game died before anything further could happen.

Torm added a "human" element to the gods, which wasn't necessarily a good thing. But in the Realms, where gods are a dime a dozen and often come down for a chat here and there, it made it fun and somewhat believable.

[Man, this was tougher than I thought it'd be at first.]