Hi everyone,

As the title says, I am looking for stories about how players unknowingly aided in the creation of an NPC in your game.  

Here is my tale of one such instance.

Alston Stone, originally to be nothing more than an old man running a general store in a large port city.  The parties halfling bard enters the shop looking for a hand crossbow and learns that the price is way outside of what he can afford. The players at this time were still starting out, and had not made a lot of money yet.  Well, our halfling tries to persuade the shop keeper to lower his price.  He rolls well, but not high enough to lower the price a lot.  The price is lowered by 1 gold for each point over 10 on the die.  This price was still outside the halfling range after losing a lot of it gambling the night before.  So, he instead asks for another item, and Alston goes into the back to find it.  During this time, the halfling starts looking around the shop and finds a vial of dark red liquid.  He doesn't know what it is, but Alston returns, and tells him he should put that down, that it is expensive.  So the halfling gets a glint in his eye, grins, and does a run and jump onto the counter that Alston is behind, and threatens to dump the liquid on the ground if the price is not lowered...  Roll for intimidation.  Not good. Alston gets angry and threatens to call the guards if the halfling doesn't get down and put the vial away.  Well, instead the halfling gets angry and grabs him by the shirt collar and proceeds to try and pour the contents down his throat.  Alston reaches over and starts ringing a bell that is hanging in an open window to summon the guards to his shop, and a few seconds later, 2 guards run in with swords drawn.  

The halfling proceeds to jump and pivot around behind Alston, grabbing him around the neck, and holding a dagger to his throat threatening if the guards don't lower their weapons.  A short threatening conversation later, and combat starts.  The halfling hits the guards with Thunderwave, and drops one guard unconscious. The other however, pulls his own crossbow and fires it, with a nat 20, and rolls max damage on the dice.  The bolt lodges into the halflings arm, pinning him to the wall behind the shop keeper. Alston elbows him in the face, and drops the last hit point he had leaving him unconscious. 

Alston Stone, originally to be an old human man, has now been shifted to become a disguised half-elf assassin who is a leader of a large underworld of rogues from thieves to assassins. His influence stretching across all of the continent the game started on, and a handful of cities on other continents.  Now this NPC has a vendetta against this halfling, and has launched a plot to wreak havoc on the halfling.

Tell me your tales of how your PCs influenced the creation of an NPC, in my case, villain.

That's hilarious! 

The closest I can think of (we're not very far along in our campaign) was when the players befriended a Nothic who they named Nathanial. I'd created an 'I know your secrets' creepyish moment, where the players were trying to figure out where the thing talking in their heads was and kill them. However, the Nothic was reduced to 1 hp over the course of the combat, and ended up surrendering. The players then befriended him. It turned out, he only wanted secrets because he didn't have any for himself. They invited him to join their cult so that he could have a secret of his own.

My player was lined up for a brief jaunt in the sewers (and an optional one at that, she could have left the last bandit to get away). She would wash up in the sewers after a fight on an out-of-control barge, then find a way up, maybe fight a crocodile, and climb back to the town.

Well, that was a great plan - until she brought her horse with her. Now I needed to decide how you could get a horse out of the sewers, and so introduced an entire subterranean village run by the local thieves guild, overseen by a gnome called Felizio Greed, who has a suitcase full of magical eyeballs which he can use to see out of someone elses eye. Their eye goes white whilst he does it, so you can tell if Felizio is watching. He's pretty creepy and controlling. I also created Tim, the Bitling. Bitlings are my own creation - they are a mishmash of different parts of people and animals, and they are stitched together with magic thread by the Bitling Queen, which they refer to as "mum". Mum is always very proud of her babies, and bitlings have the tenacity and enthiusiasm of a ten year old. 

Tim took a shine to Molly (the PC) and made her sandwiches for the journey (he's the chef in the thieves guild). He's about the size of a small dog, and has about 3 mouths, scuttles along on an odd assortment of fingers which he uses as legs, and has one large, multi-elbowed arm on his back which he uses to cook things and so on. Tim has a toy horse which he named "Molly", because he didn't know he could name it (he didn't make it, and Bitlings are named by their mum, who made them, so he doesn't know its name). Molly asked him his favourite name, and he sheepishly replied "Molly". He also made her a sign for her room out of bent cutlery which said "MOLY".

Eventually she agreed to guard a caravan of goods (she never asked if they were stolen or anything) out of the town and to the town of Preen, which was her destination anyway. But all of that - all of it! - was because she took her horse into the sewers with her!

@ThorukDuckSlayer, I love that. It is great that you allowed the horse to enter the sewer instead of saying outright that the entrance was too small for a horse to fit. And it led to a great story and wonderful new location that otherwise would not have existed. 

@UndauntedDM, that is a great tale showing that diplomacy can sometimes create friends and allies that would not otherwise have been. 

Watch the early episodes of Oxventure. They take several NPCs and make them into their own. e.g. A no-name guard that was meant to be incapacitated became a major character. An educated scholar became a baby.

In one campaign they befriended a townsguard, which meant he needed a name. That turned a run-of-the-mill guard into Peotre Valinova.

In another campaign they murdered the NPC who was there to help them (they thought she was the BBE), so another random shopkeep had to step up to be their contact. 86 one Clara Bodkin, sub one Tad Morrison. (Sorry, this is an active campaign so no spoilers!)

@IAmSposta, still great stories. Would love to have the details of how when why, etc... Aren't players wonderful... 

Thanks. For the guard they were checking their weapons at the town gate of Threshold and started chatting up the guard fishing for information since they recognized him. See, two of the party were from Threshold and asked if they recognized any of the guards. I decided there was about a 20% chance they would and had them roll d% to find out. They rolled above 80, so I used my technique for “quick custom NPCs” and Peotre suddenly existed.

As for Tad, he was created using a similar technique and later refined as he needed to be a more significant contact. but under different circumstances.

Great stories so far. Any others, anyone?

One day I misspoke and said 'Lester's Restoration" Instead of lesser restoration and my players hung onto it so much that I ended up making a homebrew version of lesser restoration renamed to Lester's Restoration.

How does this link to an NPC? Well 3 years later we are getting into one of my player's backstories and they gave me full control to do what I want without consulting them.  Her character turned out to be a Homunculus made by a master transmutation wizard who had been studying a way to create fully autonomous life. After an illness drove said wizard's wife mad and resulted in the death of both the wife and their daughter. The Wizard did not know that his wife was preggo so, wrought with grief, he finished his research and created a vessel with which to imbue his child's spirit. His creation became my player's character and the Wizard's name? Lester.

Another time I had the party go on a vacation to an amusement park called 'Hero Land: Where anyone can be a Hero'. It was a fun way to mix up the gameplay by letting the players pretend to be other classes to see how it would go. Turns out my artificer is a better rouge than my rouge. Anyway, they have these little robots around that you could buy potions from to make sure that everyone is healthy and safe. Right before the 'final boss fight' they came across one of these robots. Now, they had been fighting really hard in the room prior and had damaged this robot because of an AOE spell he got caught in, so when they went to buy a potion from him I gave him a bit of a stutter. Before I know what was going on they had shoved this small robot into a bag of holding effectively stealing him and gave him a headband of intelligence. Spencer the Brewbot now runs a successful distillery within their guildhall and has a small army of himself helping him run the place (thanks to the aforementioned Artificer).

Or how about the time one of my players was infected with a deadly infection. They had saved from being symptomatic of the virus but it had progressed enough to where they were still infected. So they went to this Elvan Gala to speak to one of the other players Dads. While there everyone's characters were dancing except for the infected player character (the character has low charisma and was shy) so I had one of the staff go over to dance with her. They had a good time and bonded. getting caught up in the moment, the NPC went in for a kiss. The player wanted to make some sort of check for the situation so I had them make a generic charisma check. She rolled a 2. She had a 7 charisma. That's a Zero. So she bit the guy. About 2 IRL hours later when I had the player make another save against the infection did they realize that Player had bitten that NPC. An NPC that was a common person who would almost certainly have failed to save against this infection. This lead to a Multi-session chase to track down this NPC and attempt to stop the infection before it could kill him and spread. Also, this was the first instance of in-game romance for this player and ultimately led to the player's character becoming a co-leader of a guild. What happened to the NPC? Well, Geoff became dreadfully afraid of all things magic and became a monk who now practices celibacy. 

I have a few more of these, but I feel like most of the time it's my fault they get attached to the miscellaneous NPC's.

@ConalTheGreat , these are great. DnD is all about the players telling their story with the guidance of a DM or has laid a path for them. The path often has more curves, turns, bends, and twists than intended, but those deviations are where the best tales happen. Thank you for sharing these. 

Group I play in, run by my daughter's boyfriend were in a town and we were warned of potential trouble coming.  We were assured someone from the guard would tell us if something went down, so, when it did "a guard" ran to let us know there was trouble at the gate.  Our Ranger said to him "What's your name?"  The 10-15 second pause told me (I DM as well) this "a guard" had no name....he blurts "Terry"  Well, during the battle, the Ranger and Monk insist on Terry joining us, and now Terry has apparently embarked on a career to be a swordcaptain or some such, working his way up through the ranks.

The last campaign I ran the players decided to mess with me. 

They were in a town for a sanctioned heist. There were a lot of people around to talk to. One of the players suggested to the others to see how many voiced npcs I had ready. So the entire 4 hour session they did this. 

It was a valiant effort on their part. What they didn't know is that I have all my npcs ready just in case. All with backstories. 

So they didn't create any. They just found out how much effort I put into a game. 

@Avohei,

My players do stuff like that to mess with me as well. It is both great and terrible at the same time. Haha