I've been curious how other DMs handle running gods or other named NPCs in their games, since it always feels like the most difficult part of running the game to me.
What motivated me to ask is I'm running two separate games of Rime of the Frostmaiden, and I've struggled to roleplay the titular character in a way that I felt was satisfying. The book recommends avoiding having her speak unless absolutely necessary to preserve her alien nature, but in both groups I had players who encountered her spend no small amount of effort in trying to communicate with her. Having her an unspeaking foe makes her seem rather dull and single focused, but making her conversational in any meaningful way isn't easy either.
One of my players is a Kalashtar who was so determined to psychically link to Auril I decided to just let her have it (after asking her to pass a pretty high wisdom saving throw to not go completely mad from the experience). I described Auril projecting single worded thoughts about her desire to 'preserve', all the while having Auril rather savagely attack the players which had disturbed some statues she cared about. The group escaped from the encounter (much to the frustration of the Kalashtar who thought she was about to make a breakthrough in conversation), but now they've got it in their minds that Auril is some kind of misguided environmentalist, unaware of the destruction she is causing to living creatures. Whoops..? Without derailing my own thread in the OP, I'm think its a shame that the adventure never really gives a very good explanation to why she is doing this in the first place, other than to enjoy a little more attention from the 3000 odd suffering people who live in the Dale. I'd welcome other peoples thoughts on this, as an aside.
This is just the most recent example, but I've had a lot of difficult-to-play NPCs come up before. It's mostly to do with characters who have a legendary wit or intelligence, like Jarlaxle, or Strahd, or the such. Especially for my players who have actually read the books he has featured in. How do other DMs run these encounters and give the characters the justice they deserve? It's particularly difficult when there is only the vaguest suggestions on how they should behave or react (and I don't actually have a +5 modifier to intelligence myself).
Auril's motivation in the spoiler below. If you are role playing creatures like Auril you need to emphasize the essential inhumanity of their thought processes. They are probably closer to psychopaths and sociopaths than a normal person. In the case of Auril, if your players think they are misguided due to a lack of information, then the DM missed something in the portrayl.
"What the characters discover in the course of the adventure is that she's unhappy and craves isolation. Her nightly quest to hold the sun at bay stems from a need to preserve the beauty of things by freezing them. There is no way to reason with a being so bereft of compassion as Auril, but in her weakened state, she can be defeated or forced to reckon with her cruel indifference toward life."
"Auril was aligned with the gods Talas, Umberlee, and Malar. Together they wrought terrible destruction, inspiring fear that compelled tribute to hold their power at bay. Umberlee, queen of the wrathful sea, grew to despise the enduring nature of the ice and snow Auril created. Umberlee seethed when Auril's frigid cold transformed her chaotic, unpredictable tides into rigid, motionless sheets of ice. Umberlee brought Talas and Malar into an alliance against Auril, who retreated to the coldest corner of ToriI to escape their fury."
"After a world-shaking event known as the Sundering, most of the gods withdrew from ToriI , leaving mortals to govern their own fates without the gods' meddling, but the Frostmaiden could not stay away for long. Auril returned to her icy realm in the far north and, after a time, plunged it into frigid darkness using her magic."
"Auril's beloved ice grasps all things in her clutches, preserving them against the ravages of time. She hoards beauty in all forms, from art objects and flowers to skilled artisans and their wondrous works, freezing them in magical ice for her pleasure alone."
---------
Auril wants to be surrounded by the static beauty of ice. She does not want to be reminded of other gods and why she had to retreat to the far north originally. She has come back to Toril and likely wants to create HER perfect heaven on Toril. It is dark and cold and everything is preserved in ice, the sun brings warmth that melts the ice and so the sun is forbidden in her realm. This is why she expends so much of her power each day casting a spell to stop the sun from rising.
She does not care in the slightest about any living thing - except the prettier ones might make good ice statues. If a creature linked with her mind, I think I would tend to describe it as an unending landscape of ice. Thoughts are razor sharp and almost hurt and cut psychically as ice would do physically. The content of the thoughts would be on creating her perfect static realm formed of ice, snow and frost where the sun never shines. If she noticed the prying mind, she would assess whether it has a form or beauty that could be frozen and attractive and if not she would freeze it and shatter it. There is no compassion, no mercy, no warm feelings whatsoever - every creature and object is either decoration or material to make decorations. If the effort of keeping the sun from shining did not take so much of her power, she would already have encased the north in ice - but she is only a lesser god and thus more limited.
I think this is part of what they are trying to get across with their roleplaying suggestions:
"ROLEPLAYING AURIL Portraying a deity, even a lesser god such as Auril the Frostmaiden, can be daunting. For roleplaying purposes, the following suggestions might prove helpful:
So long as she has mortal worshipers, Auril can't truly die (although the characters can rid the world of her for a time). Thus, she has no reason to capitulate to mortals' demands. As the embodiment of winter's cruelty, she is incapable of showing mercy or compassion. Play her as a supremely cold and unfeeling entity.
Have Auril speak only when necessary. The less she talks, the less risk you have of unintentionally demystifying her in the eyes of your players. Let her actions, not her words, define her.
Lesser gods in the D&D multiverse are extremely powerful and arrogant, but also fallible and blind to their own flaws. It's appropriate for Auril to act as though she's invincible while underestimating her mortal enemies, even in her current weakened state."
Auril does not care about mortals and she does not consider them much of a threat. She is powerful, she controls the ice and she can not die. She won't bother to get into a conversation with mortals because they aren't significant or worth her time. There is little that they could say of interest (though they might be able to appeal to her vanity or the beauty of ice and frozen things if they pretended to be worshippers - these are probably the only things Auril actually cares about. She would be aware that her immortality comes from true worshippers but she would also know that true worshippers would not question her actions and would intuitively understand her desire for frost, ice and snow in a perpetually frozen north filled with an infinite number of individual flakes and crystals of ice, each with its own pattern and shape and intrinsic beauty.
Finally, a few more concepts a character might glean from Aurils thoughts ...
- mortals are WARM. They melt ice, snow and frost. They are almost as bad as the sun and one of her goals that the character should perceive is that she wants the north COLD, eradicated of WARM life if at all possible. She just doesn't have enough power to freeze everything after stopping the sun from rising every day.
- creatures are SOFT. creatures MOVE. She probably finds mortal forms repulsive. Auril's third form probably comes closest to her ideal. Creatures are best frozen solid.
Anyway, use short non-responsive thoughts that are chaotic but follow common themes of ice, snow, frost and the beauty inherent in a static, icy, frozen landscape sculpted to show of the best FROZEN examples of creatures that used to live there. Given her nature it should become apparent to players that having a conversation with Auril is nearly impossible. She doesn't reason with them - she is a lesser diety and doesn't care.
You could also portray her as a collector. She collects anything that will freeze nicely and is aesthetically pleasing to her. Its state of life is not relevant to her.
Thanks David42, this was actually incredibly helpful in pointing out some things which I forgot about her. I think to avoid the dreaded ret-con I might introduce the ideas of 'solitude' and 'isolation' more heavily as dream sequences for the Kalashtar player, to try and 'clear things up'. I'll also try to reinforce the idea that she is repulsed by their warmth and movement somehow, so they don't think she can be reasoned with. Some sort of lingering side effect to being mind-linked to a god, or whatever. Right now they're all under the impression that the frost druids have corrupted the god to their own ends for some reason (I honestly don't understand how they made that leap of logic, but here we are).
I've found having players understand her motivations to be difficult in this adventure. It's easy for us, the DMs, since we read the adventure book and have the pieces (mostly) laid out for us, but it's a supremely difficult thing to get across to players who are left in the dark to why she is doing all this. Especially when she is not the loquacious type. The encounter that my players just survived occurred a lot earlier than when is supposed to happen in the book. I'm a bit of believer in letting the players get to know the 'big bad' early on so that they have a running rapport with them for the final show down, so I decided to adapt one of the 'Luskan Deliverers Encounter of the Week' articles to allow them to face off against her at level 2. Most of the players immediately dropped to their knees and began praying to the goddess while she was attacking the one player who had damaged one of her ice statues, so I was at a bit of a loss to what to do about that too. Jarlaxle was there to pull the ripcord and end the 'possible vision of the future' just when things were getting a bit too real. I'm still not sure if it was a good idea, or if it was fun for them, but it made for some interesting roleplay among themselves once it was over.
As I mentioned in the OP, I did find playing her to be very difficult. Your post has given me good reasons for me to explain why she wouldn't talk to them, but I'm left wondering how to express those reasons to them in a way that feels both satisfying, and terrifying. I'm hoping this dream sequence thing will do the trick, where the player will be privy to some of her actions and history, without being spoken to. I just hope the player won't think that Auril is 'reaching out' to her in the night.
Regarding the overall intent of the first post, did anyone else have any tips or tricks in roleplaying extremely complicated or witty NPCs? Even just other peoples experiences in 'being a god' for a while would be interesting to hear about.
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I've been curious how other DMs handle running gods or other named NPCs in their games, since it always feels like the most difficult part of running the game to me.
What motivated me to ask is I'm running two separate games of Rime of the Frostmaiden, and I've struggled to roleplay the titular character in a way that I felt was satisfying. The book recommends avoiding having her speak unless absolutely necessary to preserve her alien nature, but in both groups I had players who encountered her spend no small amount of effort in trying to communicate with her. Having her an unspeaking foe makes her seem rather dull and single focused, but making her conversational in any meaningful way isn't easy either.
One of my players is a Kalashtar who was so determined to psychically link to Auril I decided to just let her have it (after asking her to pass a pretty high wisdom saving throw to not go completely mad from the experience). I described Auril projecting single worded thoughts about her desire to 'preserve', all the while having Auril rather savagely attack the players which had disturbed some statues she cared about. The group escaped from the encounter (much to the frustration of the Kalashtar who thought she was about to make a breakthrough in conversation), but now they've got it in their minds that Auril is some kind of misguided environmentalist, unaware of the destruction she is causing to living creatures. Whoops..? Without derailing my own thread in the OP, I'm think its a shame that the adventure never really gives a very good explanation to why she is doing this in the first place, other than to enjoy a little more attention from the 3000 odd suffering people who live in the Dale. I'd welcome other peoples thoughts on this, as an aside.
This is just the most recent example, but I've had a lot of difficult-to-play NPCs come up before. It's mostly to do with characters who have a legendary wit or intelligence, like Jarlaxle, or Strahd, or the such. Especially for my players who have actually read the books he has featured in. How do other DMs run these encounters and give the characters the justice they deserve? It's particularly difficult when there is only the vaguest suggestions on how they should behave or react (and I don't actually have a +5 modifier to intelligence myself).
Auril's motivation in the spoiler below. If you are role playing creatures like Auril you need to emphasize the essential inhumanity of their thought processes. They are probably closer to psychopaths and sociopaths than a normal person. In the case of Auril, if your players think they are misguided due to a lack of information, then the DM missed something in the portrayl.
"What the characters discover in the course of the adventure is that she's unhappy and craves isolation. Her nightly quest to hold the sun at bay stems from a need to preserve the beauty of things by freezing them. There is no way to reason with a being so bereft of compassion as Auril, but in her weakened state, she can be defeated or forced to reckon with her cruel indifference toward life."
"Auril was aligned with the gods Talas, Umberlee, and Malar. Together they wrought terrible destruction, inspiring fear that compelled tribute to hold their power at bay. Umberlee, queen of the wrathful sea, grew to despise the enduring nature of the ice and snow Auril created. Umberlee seethed when Auril's frigid cold transformed her chaotic, unpredictable tides into rigid, motionless sheets of ice. Umberlee brought Talas and Malar into an alliance against Auril, who retreated to the coldest corner of ToriI to escape their fury."
"After a world-shaking event known as the Sundering, most of the gods withdrew from ToriI , leaving mortals to govern their own fates without the gods' meddling, but the Frostmaiden could not stay away for long. Auril returned to her icy realm in the far north and, after a time, plunged it into frigid darkness using her magic."
"Auril's beloved ice grasps all things in her clutches, preserving them against the ravages of time. She hoards beauty in all forms, from art objects and flowers to skilled artisans and their wondrous works, freezing them in magical ice for her pleasure alone."
---------
Auril wants to be surrounded by the static beauty of ice. She does not want to be reminded of other gods and why she had to retreat to the far north originally. She has come back to Toril and likely wants to create HER perfect heaven on Toril. It is dark and cold and everything is preserved in ice, the sun brings warmth that melts the ice and so the sun is forbidden in her realm. This is why she expends so much of her power each day casting a spell to stop the sun from rising.
She does not care in the slightest about any living thing - except the prettier ones might make good ice statues. If a creature linked with her mind, I think I would tend to describe it as an unending landscape of ice. Thoughts are razor sharp and almost hurt and cut psychically as ice would do physically. The content of the thoughts would be on creating her perfect static realm formed of ice, snow and frost where the sun never shines. If she noticed the prying mind, she would assess whether it has a form or beauty that could be frozen and attractive and if not she would freeze it and shatter it. There is no compassion, no mercy, no warm feelings whatsoever - every creature and object is either decoration or material to make decorations. If the effort of keeping the sun from shining did not take so much of her power, she would already have encased the north in ice - but she is only a lesser god and thus more limited.
I think this is part of what they are trying to get across with their roleplaying suggestions:
"ROLEPLAYING AURIL
Portraying a deity, even a lesser god such as Auril the Frostmaiden, can be daunting. For roleplaying purposes, the following suggestions might prove helpful:
So long as she has mortal worshipers, Auril can't truly die (although the characters can rid the world of her for a time). Thus, she has no reason to capitulate to mortals' demands. As the embodiment of winter's cruelty, she is incapable of showing mercy or compassion. Play her as a supremely cold and unfeeling entity.
Have Auril speak only when necessary. The less she talks, the less risk you have of unintentionally demystifying her in the eyes of your players. Let her actions, not her words, define her.
Lesser gods in the D&D multiverse are extremely powerful and arrogant, but also fallible and blind to their own flaws. It's appropriate for Auril to act as though she's invincible while underestimating her mortal enemies, even in her current weakened state."
Auril does not care about mortals and she does not consider them much of a threat. She is powerful, she controls the ice and she can not die. She won't bother to get into a conversation with mortals because they aren't significant or worth her time. There is little that they could say of interest (though they might be able to appeal to her vanity or the beauty of ice and frozen things if they pretended to be worshippers - these are probably the only things Auril actually cares about. She would be aware that her immortality comes from true worshippers but she would also know that true worshippers would not question her actions and would intuitively understand her desire for frost, ice and snow in a perpetually frozen north filled with an infinite number of individual flakes and crystals of ice, each with its own pattern and shape and intrinsic beauty.
Finally, a few more concepts a character might glean from Aurils thoughts ...
- mortals are WARM. They melt ice, snow and frost. They are almost as bad as the sun and one of her goals that the character should perceive is that she wants the north COLD, eradicated of WARM life if at all possible. She just doesn't have enough power to freeze everything after stopping the sun from rising every day.
- creatures are SOFT. creatures MOVE. She probably finds mortal forms repulsive. Auril's third form probably comes closest to her ideal. Creatures are best frozen solid.
Anyway, use short non-responsive thoughts that are chaotic but follow common themes of ice, snow, frost and the beauty inherent in a static, icy, frozen landscape sculpted to show of the best FROZEN examples of creatures that used to live there. Given her nature it should become apparent to players that having a conversation with Auril is nearly impossible. She doesn't reason with them - she is a lesser diety and doesn't care.
You could also portray her as a collector. She collects anything that will freeze nicely and is aesthetically pleasing to her. Its state of life is not relevant to her.
Thanks David42, this was actually incredibly helpful in pointing out some things which I forgot about her. I think to avoid the dreaded ret-con I might introduce the ideas of 'solitude' and 'isolation' more heavily as dream sequences for the Kalashtar player, to try and 'clear things up'. I'll also try to reinforce the idea that she is repulsed by their warmth and movement somehow, so they don't think she can be reasoned with. Some sort of lingering side effect to being mind-linked to a god, or whatever. Right now they're all under the impression that the frost druids have corrupted the god to their own ends for some reason (I honestly don't understand how they made that leap of logic, but here we are).
I've found having players understand her motivations to be difficult in this adventure. It's easy for us, the DMs, since we read the adventure book and have the pieces (mostly) laid out for us, but it's a supremely difficult thing to get across to players who are left in the dark to why she is doing all this. Especially when she is not the loquacious type. The encounter that my players just survived occurred a lot earlier than when is supposed to happen in the book. I'm a bit of believer in letting the players get to know the 'big bad' early on so that they have a running rapport with them for the final show down, so I decided to adapt one of the 'Luskan Deliverers Encounter of the Week' articles to allow them to face off against her at level 2. Most of the players immediately dropped to their knees and began praying to the goddess while she was attacking the one player who had damaged one of her ice statues, so I was at a bit of a loss to what to do about that too. Jarlaxle was there to pull the ripcord and end the 'possible vision of the future' just when things were getting a bit too real. I'm still not sure if it was a good idea, or if it was fun for them, but it made for some interesting roleplay among themselves once it was over.
As I mentioned in the OP, I did find playing her to be very difficult. Your post has given me good reasons for me to explain why she wouldn't talk to them, but I'm left wondering how to express those reasons to them in a way that feels both satisfying, and terrifying. I'm hoping this dream sequence thing will do the trick, where the player will be privy to some of her actions and history, without being spoken to. I just hope the player won't think that Auril is 'reaching out' to her in the night.
Regarding the overall intent of the first post, did anyone else have any tips or tricks in roleplaying extremely complicated or witty NPCs? Even just other peoples experiences in 'being a god' for a while would be interesting to hear about.