Table Setting -#8 - Sci Fi NPC Mood, Character, and Motivations

Have you ever wanted to quickly determine the make-up and motivations of a random NPC that your players want to know more about? How about fleshing out that informant or vendor who is pivotal to a plot hook, or becomes a familiar staple in your campaign? Here's a simple set of tables for random Sci Fi NPC Mood, Character Traits, and Motivations that will help keep things rolling.

Roll once (1) on the Mood Table to get an overall mood or attitude for the NPC in their first interaction. Next, roll on the Character Table three (3) times to get the NPC's character or make up. Finally Roll once (1) on the Major Motivation Table and once (1) on the Minor Motivation Table. This should give you a nice starting point for who the NPC is and what they want.

Mood

What is the mood of the character? How do they represent themselves to the world around them? Roll d100 on the Mood Table:

Character and Makeup

What traits define the makeup of the NPC? Roll 1d6 three (3) times. A result of 1-2 is a Positive Trait (Roll 1d100 on Positive Trait Table), 3-4 is a Negative Trait, (Roll 1d100 on the Neutral Trait Table), 5-6 is a Negative Trait (Roll 1d100 on the Negative Trait Table). Roll on the table indicated for the NPC's Traits.

Motivations

What makes the NPC act the way they do? What is their inner drive and what has affected them to behave the way they do. Roll 1d100 once (1) on the Motivation Table to determine their primary motivation. This will be top of their mind for their actions. Roll 1d100, 1d3 times, on the Motivation Table to determine their Minor motivations. These minor motivations are important pulls on their personality and actions. They will try to accomplish these in the pursuit of, in conflict with, or as a means to an end for their primary motivation.  

While these tables were written for Sc FI, they will work equally well for other genres. You will just need to update some terminology or inject genre specifics into them. I will do a separate set of these for each genre we go through. So look for the Fantasy NPC Motivations this fall.

Some example NPC's made directly from the tables, with flavor added in:

1. Street Cart Food Vendor Informant - Caleb Lang works for the Company Xi Wei Kart Delicacies. He looks exhausted with black circles and bags under his eyes and slumped shoulders. He has apathy for the work he does but is prudent so he can keep his job. The only perk he has is he gets to look at all the pretty scantily dressed night club people. He has nothing in his life but the thought of revenge since his wife was killed by thugs robbing her as she was running her cart in the space port district. He has loyalty and will protect his cart by any force necessary.   
2. Big Guy at end of Bar - The Big Guy at the Bar is known only as Croc. He has a cold, hard as nails exterior that keeps people from talking to him. His life has left him a bit crude, and his travels have left him with the belief that life is meaningless. If approached he is friendly. He is motivated to bring his crime lord ex-boss to justice, while preventing anyone else from doing it first, as he is stalked by the crime lord's daughter, his wife. 
3. Chop Shop Surgeon - Rex VariGen is a brilliant chop shop surgeon who has partaken of several enhancements himself. Rex is proud of his skill and sees it as a way to bring fame and status to himself. He is loud and boisterous and has little patience for people who don't know what they want of him. However, he does what he says and can be counted on to do the right thing. His primary driver is to serve NEW YOU SALONS with great work. He also does so because he owes a great debt to the owner Brag Hartmann who loaned him the money for his enhancement procedures. 

There you have it with some rolls and some chrome, you can have more fully fleshed out NPC's for your games in a jiffy. Enjoy gamers!

Lead Addict