Labyrinths & Liontaurs
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Notes

Creating NPCs

Non-Player Characters are a vital part of Labyrinths & Liontaurs, of course. Creating them can be a chore or a pleasure — which it will be often depends on how much time you have. Here are some options for when you have a lot of time ... and when you have very little.

Make a new NPC just like you would a PC. One way to create an NPC is to follow the standard PC character creation steps exactly as if you were a player. Certainly, this allows you to create rich and detailed NPCs, based on character concepts as intricate as you can imagine. Here is an example of a very complex NPC, one that took hours of work to conceptualize and then to detail:

Mums and Rone — Polymorphed into a little bird, Mums wanders the world perched on the shoulder of his divine companion, Rone.

But what if you do not have hours to create the shopkeeper at the general store, the guard at the town gate, the diplomat from the theocratic empire, or the merchant prince onto whose tent your heroes just fell? You need something easier and quicker.

Use PC creation, but do it fast. Here, you follow the same steps as you would making a PC, but you do it faster. You make it a solo-classed NPC. You select the class and non-class abilities without worrying too much about the nitty and the gritty. Roll stats or just pick them, even better. Guesstimate the math, that's close enough. Give average hit points per die, or close enough. Using this method, you select feats and powers that are accounted for once, but do not require you to think about it during play. For example, feats like Toughness and Fleet adjust base numbers once, but after you set them, you forget them. Don't bother with, say, Lunge or Punishing Kick, which take more adjudication during play. You may find it easier to dash together a rules-complete NPC using this form.

Use a quick and dirty stat block from a published game master source. There are some on the sample NPCs page in L&L. There are more that you can use in the Pathfinder NPC Gallery and you can find more on the Internet. Anything based on the OGL is likely fine. File off the serial numbers, make quick adaptations to fit L&L, and you have a solution in a pinch.

Make your own even quicker and dirtier stat block. This is an excellent choice for NPCs who are unlikely to be encountered in a direct conflict. Do you have to account for every ability? Nah. Do all the numbers add up per L&L rules? Um, mostly? Do what you gotta to run your NPC; your players don't have to know how the sausage is made! Here are three examples:

Labyrinths & Liontaurs is an indie tabletop role-playing game based on the d20 System and the Open Game License. I stand on the shoulders of storm giants.

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