Easily create NPCs or enemies

The group of adventurers arrive to your recently crafted city, and go to the local tavern in search of rumors about the Lich they are looking for. You didn't really expect  your players to go there as soon as they got to the city and now want to create some random (possibly memorable) patrons that frequent the place without telling your players you didn't have time to create this part of the city.

Benjie Art

For this, I like to guide myself using the following methods:

If you have enough time to prepare: DMG

The Dungeon Master’s Guide (DMG) from Wizards of the Coast is often underappreciated when it does include lots of great things to help the DM, one of this being the Creating Non Player Characters chapter (DMG Chapter 4). There you will find a great amount of tips on creating them, and tables you can roll in to make a random deep NPC.

You have little to no time to prepare: Donjon

As I previously stated in another post, Donjon has got random tables for anything you might ever need. One of these is the NPC table, in which by only selecting (or not) a race, gender, class and culture you can get several of them, each with its own detailed description. By knowing that, you can pretty easily give them a voice and way to interact with the players and maybe even personality traits.

GO TO DONJON

You have no time to prepare: These random tables

There’s always that moment where your players want to interact with some random person you mentioned only to make the place feel more vivid or realistic. For when this happens, I always have a table of voices and mannerisms prepared in my DM’s screen:

TECHICAL GRIMOIRE NPC VOICES TABLE

Slow and gravely	Fast and high noted	Normal
Normal and high noted	Normal and gravely	Slow and high noted
Slow	Fast	Fast and gavely

The first table was made by Technical Grimoire, including lots of mannerisms and accents your NPCs can make. The second one is a simple one I created to know how deep or high noted its voice is going to be.

By having both of this in your DM’s screen, when you’ve got to create a character on the fly, point to some random place in both of the tables. Whatever you pointed at will define your NPC. It may not be very descriptive, but by having these two things decided you will surely be able to imagine some person with this characteristics and detail it to your players.

Say for example you picked “Spits Often” and “Fast and Gravely”. What first comes to my mind is a creature of low stature or a kid as in my world they tend to speak in a faster manner. Let’s say because the PCs found this character in the tavern it is a halfling. Having a gravely voice must mean he is quite old, and grumpy, as he spits often. By having all of this thought out I can easily give a general description.

Now, let’s say you want to create someone your players’ party would like to fight. For this I suggest you use a table created by a Youtuber I really recommend. She also gives a description on how to use it, so I’ll just leave the blog she posted it in here for you to read:

GO TO MONARCHSFACTORY'S BLOG

 Did you find these tips useful at all? Do you use any other random table I didn't mention? Do you use any other method, or would like to improve one of the ones I wrote about? Let me know in the comments!