Unintentional Beloved NPCs

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>>54568203

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>>54568203
>Standard DnD setting
>Players want to do an evil campaign
>Basically make a mercenary group who will take on any job as long as it pays enough
>Give the player a series of small jobs as they work their way up
>Party eventually gets an invitation from a rich asshole warlord who wants to carve out his own empire
>Warlord is loaded, a point I make sure to drive in when the party first meets him
>Party is basically invited to this grand feast in a lavish manor and warlord has this slave girl named Serina waiting on them and serving on them
>This is where I think I unintentionally hit the magical realm of 3 out of 4 of my players, because they start asking what she looks like.
>Give a pretty generic slave description, talk about how she's nicely dressed as if on display, but when she moves a certain way burns and lash marks can be seen under her clothes, and her wrists are bruised as if she goes long periods wearing chains.
>One of the players speaks up and asks how much it would be to buy Serina
>I attribute this to the players just being evil power hungry assholes who want their own slaves, because it's an evil game and they've all been power hungry evil asshole so far anyway
>Play this up and have warlord tells them there will be slaves enough for them all very soon in the future
>As soon as the banquet is over, the players basically start questioning everything they've done and decide they can't let people like this be in charge.
>Party literally decides to become good guys over a slave girl NPC I pulled out of my ass in like 5 minutes
>Later on in the campaign, they basically start a guild and pretty much teach Serina to read so she can be the secretary for it and do something with her life besides menial servitude.
>In addition to this, I decided to also have her start visiting the local temple to cope, and had her read up on alot of the religious texts and such there, becoming something of a DM-info-dump plot device for obscure legends and lore.

One of my players wasted a favor from the king of the Danes to Waifu a random thrall girl and dragged her around with them for the rest of the campaign, and it eventually got to the point where the group decided to be viking abolitionists because of it.

>>54569264
Are you the anon who storytimed Fate of the Norns campaign?

>>54569396

Indeed I am.

>>54568203
I inserted a super-ugly trollslayer into the background scenery of a tavern, and the PCs immediately chatted him up. I pretty much had to bring him on when they mentioned they were looking to fight a vampire, to keep him in-character, and made up his personality on the fly.

The result was a surprisingly sanguine trollslayer who always screamed at the top of his lungs and liked to fish using s line tied to his beard. The PCs stuck with him for a while before he eventually departed to help escorts a noble bearing an artifact they rescued back to Karak Azgaraz in the Gray Mountains. That was the last they saw of him.

>>54569234
This is cute as fuck

Although I know the thrust of the story I tend to make a lot of interesting NPCs on the fly just for local color and have maybe three of four NPCs in the entire game thought out beforehand. This means almost every character who keeps showing up is "that random npc the party brings along". Lemme think of a few, they mostly blur together cause of all the games I've ran.

>>54568203

Not quite on topic, but at the end of a recent story arc, the party had wiped out a hive of medusa that had been entrenched in a ruined temple for generations.

The players immediately decided to drag each and every last intact looking statue back to civilization, with plans of Flesh To Stone'ing every last one.

Thus far, we've revived a dwavern brewer, a conman that was pretending to be a cleric, and a tsundere minotaur prince. Last one has sparked a quest to return him to his kingdom, about fifty years after he should have been back.

Meanwhile, the DM is giving us looks of "what the fuck is wrong with you people."

>>54569234
That went from good DMing, to great DMing.

Props

>>54569234
Not sure if I should be pleased with how this was cute or kind of disappointed over how the players broke character. I dunno, I just get the feeling that it was more the player's being unable to fully commit to being evil and wussing out rather than a real moment of development for the characters themselves.

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>>54570764
To be honest, I was kind "WTF are they doing...?" about it while it was happening.

But yeah, you're pretty much right, they tried to be evil, got bored of it, and decided they wanted to be good again. I was kinda hesitant about running an evil campaign to begin with because I had fears of the "evil burnout" happening.

>>54570825
At least they had a reason for turning from Evil, rather than just switching teams out of nowhere.
They saw an abused and vulnerable young woman and it tugged at their flinty little heartstrings.
You did good.

>>54569450
What happened to him?

>>54569234
Now that's what I call a character arc
>Maim! Burn! Kill!
>Yeah man it's great being a big bad merc
>Wait shit these warlords we work for are enslaving regular people?
>you mean people other than armed combatants are getting harmed by the action of people like us?
>gohomeandrethinkmylife.jpg

>>54569234
D'aww. That fucked up your game but it's awesome tho!

>found a village of stranded brownies on a deserted island
>DM proceeds to make them annoying as possible
>especially the mayor
>eventually the mayor is "revealed" (improvised into) a somewhat incompetent pervert
>put up with his shit for a few quests
>as we are about to escape this shitty diversion our wildcard party member kidnaps the mayor
>my PC is not about slavery or group infighting
>don't want to go back to the town
>end up with a brownie living in my mess kit
>end up paying him a single gold piece weekly since they're gigantic to him, and he's an idiot
>now have a character to explain our DM's nonsense and let our DM make shitty in universe sexual innuendo
>has slowly become our mascot

beloved in sort of an annoying "fun" uncle who everyone knows is really an alcoholic sort of way