Today I was planning to make a potato and green bean quiche, because we had an extra pie crust, lots of potatoes left over from holiday latkes, and some blanched haricots verts from a recent dinner party.

So I par-baked the pie crust, like you do, and it shrunk to the point that it had no chance of holding a pile of potatoes and an egg batter. Time to change tacks! The mandoline has been on my mind, since we make a lot of gratin-style dishes in the winter, and it occurred to me that I could make something of a terrine with a potato crust. I sliced a potato paper-thin and microwaved it with a little milk and salt, which softened the potato slices and released some of the starch into the milk, creating a kind of glue that helped me arrange the potatoes into a shell inside of a loaf pan. Into the pan went some haricots verts, more potato, cheese, and some other leftover vegetables I had around. I made a little béchamel sauce and caramelized some onions. These were split between the loaf and the tart shell. Then more cheese went on the tart. I covered up the loaf with more potato slices, and everything went into the oven.

I am pretty sure that the results will be much more delicious than a quiche.

Step One: Scope

For any given NPC brain, you need to set a scope. Let’s say I want to make a brain for a villain in my ongoing D&D campaign, Journeys to Tanelorn. He’s a campaign-level plot, so let’s set the scope of this brain to ‘medium term tasks.’ These are approximately things you can set out to do and accomplish in a week without monomaniacal focus, like “get a new pair of eyeglasses” or “buy a cow.” Maybe we’ll use slightly longer-term tasks now and then. The scope will inform our choices for constraints later on.

If you want to handle an NPC at multiple scopes, use your largest scope brain to choose your main tasks, and break that down into sub-tasks and evaluate those, and so on. I am not sure to what extent you might benefit from this.

Step Two: Constraints

Now we are going to set up a number of constraints that color your NPC’s thinking. I don’t think we’ll benefit from using more than three to five per scope. Here’s where you start creating your NPC’s personality. In OT, we define constraints as “things that we try to avoid. That try to is important! You may arrive at a situation where you need to violate one or more of your constraints. That’s okay, even desirable. (In OT linguistics, the prototypical constraints, from which all the others are derived, are in direct conflict: “Say as little as possible,” and “Say what you mean.” The specific way that different languages resolve this conflict is what makes them unique.) It creates that naturalistic texture we’re looking for.

For our villain, let’s imagine that he is a merchant baron living in Tanelorn. We will call him Leoric. Maybe what we know about him is, he’s petty, lazy, and greedy. Now let’s translate those into constraints. For petty, we can say, Don’t let an offense go unpunished. In the table below, we’ll call it PUNISH and it’s violated when Leoric is annoyed and does not punish anyone. Let’s elaborate this a bit and add another constraint, *DICK (that’s pronounced star dick,) the “don’t be a dick” constraint. *DICK says, Punish the person who offended you. We only care about it when PUNISH is also relevant. What’s interesting about *DICK is that, because it’s a constraint, we can violate it sometimes, which means that sometimes Leoric will be a dick to someone to blow off steam from some third party pissing him off.

For lazy, let’s use MINION: Don’t do things yourself. For greedy, we’ll use *50gp: Don’t spend 50gp. Leoric’s greed doesn’t affect his decisions unless expenses hit a certain price threshold; then he gets sticker shock. *50GP can be violated more than once—if a task costs 100gp, that’s violating twice. Again, we can violate these things if necessary.

Lastly, we have to figure out how much these things influence Leoric’s behavior. Maybe we’ve already established that he rides around in an expensive carriage; he blows a lot of money to look cool and avoid walking on his own two feet. That tells us that MINION » *50GP ( » is pronounced “dominates”), which is to say that if Leoric is forced to choose between doing a thing himself and spending 50gp to get it done, he’ll spend 50gp. We could devise test cases for the other stuff, but instead, let’s just define them in a way that seems fun. We’ll rank PUNISH below MINION (Leoric will avoid personally punishing folks even if it results in them going unpunished) and *DICK below *50GP (Leoric will avoid being a dick if it doesn’t cost him anything.)

Step Three: Evaluate A Task

So now that we have Leoric’s thought processes in hand, we are able to evaluate his actions. We do this by naming a desired end goal, like for instance “That potato farmer pissed me off; acquire his farm.” Next, we think of some strategies that he could use to make this happen. (In by-the-book OT, we would assume that all possible courses of action are being evaluated, but that is bound to make your decision-making less enjoyable, so let’s not.)

1. Go to the farm and buy it.
2. Send a dude to go to the farm and buy it.
3. Drive the farmer off his farm and take it.
4. Send dudes to kill the farmer and take his stuff.
5. Abuse the dudes you are sending to kill him and take his stuff.

Okay that’s enough. Let’s say, btw, that this farm costs 100GP. Now we can evaluate these courses of action against the constraints. We use an OT tool called a tableau to illustrate this.

How to read this: If there’s a star in a cell, it’s a constraint violation. If a candidate has a violation and any other surviving candidate doesn’t have one for the same constraint, its a fatal violation—the candidate is strictly worse than some other. Fatal violations are marked with an exclamation point. (Due to the limitations of my WordPress style I can’t use the helpful shading that OT tableaux usually use to mark cells that we can ignore.) In this case, the winner has no constraint violations at all! This isn’t always the case. If it hadn’t occurred to Leoric to drive the farmer off his farm, he might have tried to send a dude to buy it for a reduced price, which would end up violating *50GP once rather than twice.

Obviously this is a laborious method and I’m not sure that you should actually use it in tabletop gaming! But I assure you that, with repeated use, it becomes a much faster technique. You can often do it in your head.

These are often for games that you don’t play. Here’s a way to make some use of them for your D&D games.

You need:

• Art cards
• A one-inch circle punch (get it at a store that sells scrapbooking stuff)
• Glue
• Stiff card

In my case, I used a bunch of Magic: the Gathering cards; I used to play MtG but I don’t any longer, and this lets me make some use of my collection*. All you need to do is punch out circles and glue them to a stiff backing to give them a bit of substance. As you can see, some of mine aren’t perfectly aligned; that’s fine. I use reclaimed cardboard from food packaging for backs: cake mix and pasta boxes are just about right.

I assign a unique token to each recurring NPC, and use duplicate tokens marked up with little numbers for generic monsters that appear in groups. I keep sets like “Thugs,” “Vampires,” “Wild Animals,” etc., in labeled baggies inside the index card case you see in the picture. Most of the sets have a couple of repeated ‘grunts’ and one or more unique ‘leaders’ so I have material for mixed but thematic groups.

There’s probably about fifty finished tokens and a baggie of unused backs in there right now, and plenty of room for more. It’s really easy for me to just grab the baggie I need for any given encounter, and it takes up less space than a novel.

Cheapass Evaluation: I had all the supplies lying around in my house, so it didn’t cost me a penny. If you’re building something like this from scratch, expect to spend five to fifteen bucks for the circle punch, a couple of dollars for a big pack of mixed common CCG cards from the gaming store, and a couple for glue. I’m sure that you have already budgeted for food that comes in a box.

*: As it happened, the last con I went to, Wizards were handing out free preconstructed decks in all five colors, so I got a large number of beautiful, mostly-current commons that aren’t worth really anything. They made for great token fodder.

One part of the build, however, has remained squarely in the DM’s hands through editions—equipment. Although back in the day this was often supported by random item tables, the role of the DM in item placement was always clear—campaigns such as The Rod of Seven Parts or the central story of Dragonlance revolve primarily around the location and control of several plot-central artifacts. Other items, such as the Hand and Eye of Vecna, the Apparatus of Kwalish and its corresponding control rod, and even rare weapons such as holy defenders are set forward as potential campaign hooks or engines. In 4e there is the magic item “wish list,” which the players offer to the DM as a plea that he will offer items that are appropriate to their characters. This is nonetheless DM-driven, and furthermore it is a little artificial-feeling to my sensibilities.

In Journeys to Tanelorn, I don’t necessarily want all the work of distributing items to be in my hands. While there will be times when I hand-pick items to offer the players, for much of the campaign I want item selection to stay player-driven, so I’m adding a series of items I call warstones.

Warstones are conceptually similar to materia from Final Fantasy 7—when mounted in a weapon, they confer mystical properties upon the weapon in question. To permit choice and create simplicity for me, there are a limited number of warstones and each stone type covers a series of enchantment types; a particular warstone also has a level that limits the level of a magic item that it can create. Naturally it’s impossible for me to cover all the enchantments in this way, so some particular weaponry will need to be hand-crafted by experts or found as unique treasure.

Warstones can only be used to enhance armor, weapons, and implements.

The list of warstones is as follows:

• Alabaster: Milky white alabaster creates acid magics.
• Almandine: This reddish-purple warstone is used in healing applications.
• Amberheart: Found in the brains of dragons, golden amberheart confers lightning enchantments.
• Cairngorm: Smoky yellow cairngorm, found in old tombs, is used for necrotic magics.
• Cymophane: A sap-green cat’s eye gem, cympohane warstones generate thunder enchantments.
• Girasol: Red-gold girasol, filled with flashes of yellow and green, girasol is used in radiant enchantments and various holy items.
• Jade: Many-colored jade does not offer any special effects, but can create magic weapons or enhance the level of other warstones.
• Minium: An opaque red, waxy stone that offers enchantments that deal with “blood,” fear, or enhancing damage. Minium used with a blood sample creates a bane weapon.
• Mormorion: Nearly-black mormorion is used as a locus of illusion enchantments.
• Orpiment: A sparkling yellow ore that generates poison enchantments.
• Plasma: A black stone marked with yellow speckles, plasma is useful for charm and fire effects.
• Vermarine: Fragile blue-green vermarine warstones are the focus for force and psychic enchantments.
• Water-sapphire: Changing color from blue to violet when viewed at different angles, water-sapphire is useful for teleportation and cold effects.

This week, your agency’s street team has brought in the following leads:

• The autumnal equinox is approaching, and so it is nearing time for the annual journey of the Unquenchable Fire of Pelor from the Summer Temple in Abtor Hor to the the Abbey at Sojahan, where it will reside for another quarter-year. The pacifist monks who carry the Fire traditionally hire a guard of heathens to protect them, since the pilgrimage route runs closely past a stronghold of Bane and hostilities between the two cults are almost constantly at a low simmer.
• A bandit leader is rising in the east, plying the coast road used mainly by silk caravans from farther south. He would benefit from knowing what’s good for him.
• Another agency team is being held in a nearby village, accused of banditry themselves. They will need to be investigated; depending on the results of the investigation, either they will need to be recovered or their contracts terminated.
• It’s the hatching season in the Blackspine Mountains several days’ journey north, and drake-hide boots are fashionable in the city at this time. The profits from a decent harvest could be considerable.

After these hooks, the group asked me to make some maps, which is what led to the detailed mapping of the city and a rougher map of the region at large. We settled on running the Unquenchable Fire quest.

My next step was developing NPCs and encounters. For the NPCs from town, as well as the monks being escorted, I used a “three details” method, to give me something to go on when portraying the characters. For NPCs who might be involved in combat encounters, I came up with a detail or two just to make them unique and give me a little material in the event that the players chose nonviolent interactions.

A couple of the NPCs I developed (I don’t want to spoil them all):

After the first session, I’ll be reviewing the NPCs and thinking about what motivates them. I’ll also look over the unaddressed adventure hooks and update them depending on the amount of time that passed.

The initial setup is this:

Journeys to Tanelorn

The city at the center of the world, Tanelorn is the adventure-hub for the PCs. They are a team working for a “travel agency” in the medieval Chinese style: a combination of delivery service, guides, scouts, and hired swords. Apart from these more obvious duties, travel agencies also functioned as liaison to bandit gangs and corrupt officials, using alliances, pay-offs, and outright violence to manage them.

Tanelorn itself is a large and diverse city situated near the coastline, surrounded by rich farmland and close to a major trade route or two. This makes it a major trade center and destination for pilgrims and tourists. Its center is the point where the Red Brenn and White Brenn rivers meet to form the Great Brenn.

The first things I did to set up the game were to come up with some adventure hooks, get the players to make characters, and detail their home base. To give the city some texture, I thought about it as a growing, living thing: it starts out from a center and regions grow and change as the city ages and expands. While most of the city’s landmarks remain in place, the districts around them have shifted to reflect current realities.

What’s In The City

Tanelorn is divided into several major districts.

Old Town

Located in the ‘spike’ between the two lesser rivers, Old Town is the place where Tanelorn was founded. Now much of it has been cleared to make room for market squares. The buildings that remain are primarily homes, for the wealthy, the clergy, and the several families that trace their ancestry to the city’s founders and vie for its throne. There are several landmarks in Old Town: the Capital Citadel where the city’s Regent and Council sit, the Great Sky Temple where Pelor, Sehanine, and Corellon receive worship, the House of Queens home to the priestesses of the Raven Queen, Avandra, and Melora, the Spiral Hall magical academy, run by monks dedicated to Ioun, the ceremonial City Gates, Tanelorn University where the city’s scientists, surgeons, and scholars are trained, and the Capital Market, which by law is the only place in the city where imported goods (outside of the vague city-state borders) may be sold.

Mud Town

North and east of Old Town spreads Mud Town, a disparaging name for the agricultural outskirts of the city. The Temple-Colosseum of Kord lies in Mud Town near the point where it meets the Common Quarter and the Jewelers’ Quarter.

Jewelers’ Quarter

Slightly west and north of the Old Town, the Jewelers’ Quarter is another old section of the city, home to artisans, magicians, and scholars who are comfortably well-off but not so wealthy as to live in the Old Town itself.

Common Quarter

Located north of the Great Brenn and west of the Jewelers’ Quarter, the Common Quarter is home to many immigrants; it is the most diverse of the regions of the city, and houses a market second only to the Capital Market itself. Buildings here are tall and densely packed.

Little Sarnath

At the city’s western extreme lies Little Sarnath, mainly home to tieflings and devas.

Golden City

On the southern side of the Great Brenn is the Golden City, a recently gentrified area where the nouveau riche have created lavish, if hastily-built, homes. Here there is fine dining and entertainment. There is also the Palace of Justice, where criminals are brought to trial. Rumor has it that the Palace has a hidden entrance to the city’s underground prison-catacombs as well.

Flower Town

Spreading south of the Golden City is Flower Town, where most of the land is divided up between large farming chateaux, which are the traditional homes of the city’s elvish inhabitants. In recent years, some chateaux have welcomed outsiders inside their walls, and the borders between Flower Town and the Golden City are increasingly blurred. The city’s red-light district is at the eastern point of Flower Town, spilling over into the Necropolis and Golden City. The Gates of Tanelorn Dwarfholm are found here.

Necropolis

Across the White Brenn from Old Town is the Necropolis, where the Sacred Forest and Great River Temple Ruins can be found. It is the traditional burial ground used by all that dwell in the city, and so it holds active graveyards as well as the construct slums, once mausolea which have true to their name become home to squatters, mostly constructs (the golems and the restless dead). It is a quiet district that is rumored to also house the local assassins’ guild, although its precise location is kept secret, if in fact such a thing exists. The Necropolis also boasts a small market.

I’ll talk soon about adventure hooks and encounters for the first session.

Artisans: The palpitating heart of any art community are its artisans, the people who’re very good at what they do, and who care most about doing good work, and fuck what the rest of you think about it. That’s how I see Vincent and Nathan—their passion for craftsmanship moves me to do better work.

Innovators: The innovators’ job is to try new things, do experiments, give us new ideas. They don’t always do things best—that’s what artisans are for—but they do things first, and the work they do in breaking new ground keeps us from being mired in stale ideas. It’s why I keep an eye on Jonathan and Kevin—I know they’ll always be up to something I didn’t expect.

Liaisons: Of course, we would still stifle each other just with the weight of our company, if it weren’t for the liaisons like Emily, Eero, and Jenn, who keep us connected to related communities. Their bringing in fresh faces and concepts from other fields helps us avoid chasing our own tails.

Experts: Being a community with really strong interdisciplinary needs, we also benefit a lot from experts like Harper and Elizabeth, who are good at things that aren’t core to our community values—as I see it, we’re game artists, and that means, we are good at playing games, and sometimes we write about them—but support that core value by knowing things that we don’t all know.

Enthusiasts: Let’s not forget the most important part of the community, its social feedback engine. If it weren’t for wonderful people like Meg, John, and Eppy, we wouldn’t be doing what we do.

If you are into the complex naming customs of wuxia fiction, then you should pick up the ‘Drama’ sheet, which has spaces for your character’s given, family, and martial names. The ‘Film’ sheet has spaces for your character’s name, role, and the actor portraying them, instead.

Use the ‘Loyalties’ or ‘Synopsis’ section to keep track of what’s on your character’s mind. There’s some room in the reference zone to keep your voting chips. You can cut off the Prop and Set bits on the side to make cards.

Enjoy!

Download the Drama sheet.
Download the Film sheet.