Creating NPCs for the First Adventure

[volt875]

Greetings all! So I’m gearing up to run my first game of Palladium Fantasy (actually using Keep on the Borderlands as the base adventure albeit heavily modified) and just have a question. When making up NPCs like goblins or bandits, is everyone suppose to have an O.C.C. of some sort? I’m the one bringing this game to my group so no experience with it as of yet.

Another random question that just hit me as well. Does Palladium have adventure modules like old school dnd does?

[Library Ogre]

Generally, yes, everyone should have an OCC BUT you can usually dispense with it and just give everyone the hand-to-hand and weapon skills they need. Sure, there's probably a difference between the goblins who are thieves, the ones who are soldiers, and the ones who are peasants, but if they all have hand-to-hand basic and 3rd level WP with their prefered weapon, it doesn't matter much.

And Palladium has not done a lot of published modules; there's some old ones (like Arms of Nargash Tor), and adventures in sourcebooks (Wolfen Empire, Old Ones), but, while that was a mainstay for AD&D, it was not so much for Palladium. Closest is the Island at the Edge of the World.

[volt875]

Generally, yes, everyone should have an OCC BUT you can usually dispense with it and just give everyone the hand-to-hand and weapon skills they need. Sure, there's probably a difference between the goblins who are thieves, the ones who are soldiers, and the ones who are peasants, but if they all have hand-to-hand basic and 3rd level WP with their prefered weapon, it doesn't matter much.

And Palladium has not done a lot of published modules; there's some old ones (like Arms of Nargash Tor), and adventures in sourcebooks (Wolfen Empire, Old Ones), but, while that was a mainstay for AD&D, it was not so much for Palladium. Closest is the Island at the Edge of the World.

Thanks for the info.

[Orin J.]

when making mooks for combat i usually had a "Cheat sheet"- a page or two of generic bandits, raiders, ect. i expected to use in the short run with a very limited list of shared and individual stats (combat modifiers, partiallyfinished SDC, and skills likely to come up in a fight) that i'd made ahead of time to pull from, and then if i need to flesh any of them out i can start from there and work it out. i usually just ballparked their belongings so i could say they didn't have much besides their damage armor and gear at the time if the party looked to be turning to the murderhobo side.

[Hotrod]

I've made about a half dozen disposable NPC generators for Palladium Fantasy, where all the stats are pre-generated and all you have to do is pick a level to scale it. They're available on my Patreon page below (in my "Month of Experiments" post).

In general, most published NPCs in Palladium Fantasy are either very developed, high-level and important NPCs, or they're very under-developed low-level NPCs that don't include most of the skills that come with their OCCs. The lack of instant antagonist examples or generators tends to increase the amount of prep work and SWAG for GMs.