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Adventure Writing Academy

Main Characters

Now you need some characters to populate your story.

Simplified Character Design

Many books have been written on how to design good characters and make them seem realistic. Luckily, for adventures, it doesn't need to be that complicated.

Here's what you need to know about your main characters:

  • Name
  • Description - Your character's appearance, mannerisms, speech patterns.
  • Personality - Values, Ideals, Flaws, Opinions, Likes.
  • Occupation - What do they do with their life?
  • Motivations - What do they want? What do they fear?

Here are some optional things you may want to consider:

  • Relationships - their Allies, Enemies, Social Status, Factions they belong to.
  • Resources at their command (such as wealth or political power).
  • Unique Powers/Spells/Items.
  • Secrets they know.

The easiest way to make your character more interesting is to give them an agenda, a strong desire (which may or may not be related to the plot and the players). Characters that really want something are much easier to play, and much more fun to interact with.

A convenient checklist:

  • What does the NPC want?
  • Do they have goals completely unrelated to the players?
  • What do the players want from this NPC?
  • Are their goals in opposition or in alignment with the heroes' goals?
  • Why can't players get what they want through force?

Coming up with Character Ideas

The easiest way to come up with the physical appearance for a character is to find a well-suited illustration. Search websites like ArtStation and Pinterest for things like "Fantasy Character Design", or visit /r/ImaginaryCharacters. Sometimes you want to search for something more specific, like "Evil Voodoo Shaman". Having a picture of your character will instantly give you most of the information you need to vividly describe and roleplay them.

Personality is also easy - just take your favorite characters from TV and movies. To make your ideas more original you can:

Reverse their key character traits:

  • Creepy and evil Hermione.
  • Shy and humble Joker.
  • Compassionate and Loving Dr House.
  • Well-meaning doofus Darth Vader who tries to do good but fails terribly.

Apply personality to a character you wouldn't expect:

  • The Supreme Holy Emperor with the personality of Homer Simpson.
  • Humble Peasant with the personality of Walter White.
  • Princess with the personality of Indiana Jones.
  • Bartender with the personality of Spock.
  • Paladin with the personality of Chandler Bing.

You can even lift the entire characters (appearance, personality, motivation, occupation, and so on) from your favorite movies and TV shows - since your story is different, your players are unlikely to make the connection. To make it less obvious you can use Sci-Fi characters in Fantasy stories and vice versa, or reverse the character's gender, or reverse their social status.

Examples:

  • Iron Man but in a fantasy universe - a brilliant aristocrat inventing steampunk machines in his spare time.
  • Low-status Gandalf - an ancient wizard shyly mumbling something about the powerful artifact that would be nice to destroy, if that's not too much of an inconvenience to you.
  • Female Yoda - an old goblin witch the players can always come to for wisdom and advice.

These methods make coming up with interesting characters very easy, using a well known character or a celebrity as a reference (with some tweaks) makes it instantly obvious how to write and roleplay the character.

If you find yourself struggling to come up with a name for a character, use one of the name generation websites like this one. You can also use pop culture references, puns, and descriptive names ("Gregor the Dread", "Emperor Barkus Aurelius", "John Silver", "Elon Tusk").

Main Characters

Use the Simplified Character Design method to design your cast of characters:

  • Antagonist
    is the most important character by far, and they should be the most fleshed-out. They are the primary opposition to your players' Objective, their goals are the opposite of your players'. They will be the main source of obstacles for players to overcome, their desires and goals will often drive the story forward (or cause it to happen in the first place), and they should probably be the most interesting NPC in your adventure.
  • Evil Minions
    are the Antagonist's servants, their goal is to serve the antagonist. Antagonist will often use them as primary tools to oppose the players. They can also be used to the players' advantage, they can be bribed or seduced to the heroes' side, intimidated into revealing some information or betraying their master, fooled, used as a disguise to infiltrate the evil lair, and so on.
  • Quest Giver
    is the character that sends players on their adventure. They can ask players for help, hire them to do a job, send them on a mission, or otherwise manipulate them into a situation where they have to engage with the story.
  • Allies
    are the other characters aligned with the heroes' goals. They can help them on their quest, provide resources, narrate some exposition, serve as comic relief.
  • Neutral NPCs
    Sometimes you need a witness to a crime, a bouncer guarding the place that the players need to get into, a shop owner who can be persuaded to help players in exchange for some favor, etc.

As you may have noticed, the NPC roles are defined in relation to the players' Objective - they can oppose the players, ally with them, or be neutral. That is the best way to think about the cast and to select which characters matter the most - the ones who have the most impact on the players' goals.

Don't make the list of characters too long or too complicated, you don't need to design the minor unimportant NPCs - the GM can improvise those on the fly. Especially in a one-shot, 3-5 core characters is often all you need.

Antagonist

You want to make sure that your antagonist:

  • Has a well-defined motivation - you want your players to be able to understand why the villain is doing what he's doing.
  • Is Relatable - everyone is the hero in their own story. Don't make them evil for evil's sake. How do they justify their evil actions to themselves? How can you make the players identify with them?
  • Is Threatening - good villains are scary and difficult to defeat. They are good at what they do, they create a legitimate threat.
  • Is Proactive - the villain actively pursues his goals and adapts his plans when he sees resistance from the players, he doesn't just sit around and wait for players to come over and defeat him.

Antagonist-Driven Adventures

Most of the time the players' actions and choices drive the story forward, and NPCs are there to provide obstacles or help on their path. Players are active, NPCs are passive. Players want things and try to accomplish their goals, NPCs react to their actions. But there's one exception to this:

Antagonist is the one NPC whose actions can drive the story forward. Making your antagonist Active is a great way to make sure that your adventure doesn't feel like it is "on the rails", like players just walk through the story laid out for them. When the players take actions, the world (the antagonist) is going to react.

This will make the adventure more dynamic, the events will change in response to the players' actions. You won't have to always rely on the players to drive the story forward - they can be put on the defensive, forced to respond to the villain's actions.

When you're creating an antagonist-driven adventure, the Villain's evil plan is the plot of the adventure. Once you know what the Villain wants and the steps they're going to take to get it - you can figure out the series of challenges players must take on to stop them.

In addition to the Simplified Character Design outlined above, for the Active Antagonist you want to answer the following questions:

  • What is their goal? Why do they pursue it? What horrible thing will happen if they succeed?
  • What are the steps of their evil plan? How would the plot unfold if they were completely unopposed by the players?
  • How will the players learn about the plan, when will the players' and the villain's goals collide for the first time?
  • What could players do to disrupt and ultimately ruin the plan? How will the villain respond to these disruptions?
  • What resources do they have to accomplish their goal, fight back against players, and get their plan back on track? What "moves" will they make to make life more difficult for the players?

Unlike in written stories and computer games, in TTRPGs the antagonist is simulated using your actual human brain, so they can be truly creative and flexible. The Villain has a goal, they're going to pursue it, and intelligently respond to the players' attempts to thwart them. Players will attempt to interrupt them at every step, and the villain is going to fight back using all the powers and resources at their disposal.

Active Villains can:

  • Trick and manipulate the players.
  • Set up ambushes, lure players into traps.
  • Send minions after the heroes.
  • Flee, forcing the heroes to give chase.
  • Take hostages, kidnap or threaten innocent characters.
  • Seduce/intimidate players' allies to the dark side.
  • Bribe, persuade, or intimidate people in power.
  • Use their political power/influence.
  • Send double agents to infiltrate the players (traitors and spies).
  • Hire an assassin, bounty hunter, a rival team of adventurers.
  • Frame heroes for a crime.
  • Reveal heroes’ secrets.
  • Have a “dead man switch”.
  • Set up a ticking time-bomb.
  • Impersonate someone else.
  • Befriend and betray the heroes.
  • Plant false clues, decoys.
  • Foster rivalries, mistrust, disorder
  • Create difficult moral dilemmas for the heroes.
  • Take away (steal or destroy) a key resource heroes rely on.
  • Mislead everyone about their weaknesses.
  • Use heroes’ flaws/temptations/fears against them
  • Develop a good public image, make the public dislike the heroes.

Not all adventures require an active antagonist. Sometimes it's okay to just have an evil monster to defeat, a priceless artifact to heist, a dangerous environment to survive.

But I hope you can see all the ways the adventure can become deeper and more interesting when the heroes are playing against an intelligent and proactive opponent.

Action Steps

  • Come up with the main antagonist for your adventure. Choose their name, personality, occupation, and the main motivation.
  • Design the other important characters in your adventure - Quest Giver, Minions, Allies, Neutral NPCs.
  • Optional: find some cool images to represent your characters.
  • Optional: If you want to design an Active Antagonist - figure out their evil plan and answer the other questions I've listed in this section.
  • Share your ideas in the #share-your-ideas channel.
  • Extra Credit: Find someone else's post in that channel and give them some helpful and constructive feedback. How would you improve on their character idea?
Setting and Locations
Key Plot Points