Exchange of Realities

I spent last week talking about ways to make an in-depth, detailed character. But sometimes, that’s not what you need. It’s the middle of session, or you’re in the middle of a scene and can’t take the time to detail extras. You need a character for living scenery, or a list of names and what stands out about them, like a character’s potential tavern-buddies or the other agents in a top-secret organization. And you don’t have time to do all the steps right now.

What do you do?

Figure out the minimum, fill it in, and come back to the rest. That’s the key to speedy character generation.

This method requires one item of prepwork, just to make the rest of the process more straightforward: know your character pool. For any given location or scene, figure out the general class of people you’re likely to see there: commoners? Catty wig people? Lesser small gods? Students? Fully trained secret agents? Dog walkers? If you know ahead of time, you’ll know exactly what to toss into the scene when it’s needed.

Once you’ve got your basic class of individual, it’s time to figure out what elements you’re going to need. Purpose probably isn’t something you’ll need to think about too much—if you’re flash-generating characters, you’re generating them for a reason, and that reason is their purpose. Physical appearance to a certain degree can help, but doesn’t require too much detail, and might even be counterproductive on a list of names. The rest depends on what kinds of flash-generated characters they are.

The most common kind is living scenery. In a Hollywood movie, they’re the random people that make up the crowds, with no speaking part and no purpose beyond being A Population. The children chasing a chicken down the street, the old men playing chess or cards, the merchant talking a mile a minute, the horse that tries to raid the pockets of everyone that walks past it: they’re scenery. (Granted, the horse might not seem like “just scenery” to a character packing sugar who walks too close, but I digress.) Generally, with these characters, all you need is a vague description, which may or may not include a distinguishing feature. Distinguishing features make the scene feel less generic, but they also invite interaction by being Interesting. Keep that in mind.

Occasionally, the living scenery will need to interact with someone. Perhaps they’re delivering messages, or making presentations, or just waiting for those heroic lunkheads to move so they can finish mopping the floor. Conversely, they might have been sought out—witnesses to an important event, shopkeepers when one of the characters really wants a bag of dried fruit and is feeling chatty, or just distinctive enough that they must have something to say. They’ll need everything standard living scenery has, plus a demeanor (how are they speaking? How are they reacting to those talking to them?). Once a background character has a speaking part, a name might be necessary, so keep something from which you can pluck names handy.

Then you have the contact. This is the next step up in last-minute characterization; often they’re not detailed either because nobody’s expressed that big an interest in them, or because the character they’re supposed to be wasn’t ready and the GM is stalling until a preparation break or a gap between sessions. These sorts of characters often appear in professional organizations, on ships, and in well-frequented taverns; they’re expected to recur and meant to be expressed interest in. The minima for a contact are usually name, appearance, distinguishing feature, demeanor, partial background. Some contacts are meant as conversation-bait, meant to attract the characters’ interest and get them starting conversations; to create one of these, the easiest thing to do is to choose distinguishing features that hint at secrets, appeal to the characters themselves, or could be useful for the characters’ purposes (when the group, looking for people to help with a party, went to a community of god-animals, I randomly generated a corgi kitemaker, a bat who bred and trained fireflies, an aye-aye portrait artist, and others.

What you’re basically doing is tossing up a wire frame and chucking a cloth over it, then stuffing parts underneath when the characters look away. Slightly underhanded? Possibly. But it works, and it lets you fill your worlds without having to pre-generate massive numbers of characters you’ll never use; moreover, it lets you float concepts, and see which ones you’re going to have to fill out before you start going to the effort.

Needless to say, this is a vital addition to your toolkit.

Want to do more with secondary characters? The site hub is here.