How to create your own NPC – RQ6 Encounter Tool 101 Version 1.00 Written by hkokko – one of the members in the RQ Encounter Tool team. What is RQ Encounter Tool RQ Encounter tool is a tool for busy GM to create quickly encounters. It contains more than 1800 templates as of this writing. https://notesfrompavis.wordpress.com/2014/05/13/rq6-encounter-tool-feature-recapfor-busy-gms/ See how to find and generate encounter guide https://notesfrompavis.wordpress.com/2015/01/25/rq-encounter-tool-101-generatingencounters-guide/ This might be enough for many GM’s but many will also want to create their own NPC templates that vary from the provided. This is an introduction to creating a few NPC’s and then a party of those NPC’s. At the end of the session there will be a Sartar River Raider, Sartar River Raider who is Orlanthi Initiate, Sartar River Raider who is a Orlanthi Wind Lord and a party of NPC’s going to River Raid. At the end of the session you should know how to create human NPC’s and associate them with Theistic ready made cult template. If there is enough demand there will be guides to create your own cults, sorcerors, shamans using either ready made cult templates or just directly with the RQ Encounter tool basic features.

Your first own NPC Go to home page of RQ Encounter http://ouropa.planeetta.com/rq_tools/enemygen/

Figure 1 Home page

Register or login if you have not registered already. Use a name that you want to associate with your npc:’s – it can be your real name, nickname or acronym.

Create a NPC template from a race When you are generating a template – see if there is already a similar one existing using the search functionality in home and enemy pages. There are two ways to create NPC’s – either create them from a race or clone existing template. Here we create a NPC template from a race. Race in RQ Encounter terms is mostly a placeholder for characteristics, hit locations, notes and some other fields. You can change the notes and characteristics but not the hit locations. Select a race that you feel is sensible from this point of view. The content of RQ Encounter is crowd sourced and the users will benefit if we keep the “spirit” of NPC’s in building them and tagging them. What is the spirit – difficult to say – see how other NPC’s and parties have been created – look at the characteristics, skills, spells etc. There are couple of special races – spirit and elemental that provide additional functionality. The enemy will not be visible to others until you have marked it public. This will let you keep the enemy as a working copy until you have done all the tunings you want. In case you want to use the tool for building NPC’s for commercial material – this is also a way of keeping the material visible only to you and the administrators. Administrators will not talk about unpublished material.

Figure 2 Create Template from a Race

Tune the template The generated template will have default attributes. First add some leather armor – 2 points to every location.

Figure 3 Add some armor

Change the name Give the template a descriptive name that describes the NPC or monster, makes it easy to find and looks cool when generated either alone or with group of others. It is often best to not directly have a personal name for the NPC (like “Theroman, the Champion of Colymar”) but rather have generic name like “Sartar River Raider” or “Sartar Clan Champion” and then name the character in the generated page. This will make it easier to use the NPC by others.

Figure 4 Change Template Name

Name the combat style and give NPC some weapons By placing 1 in 1-handed weapons amount the NPC will get one weapon from the one handed list. Give a number for each weapon that you want to be chosen indicating relative certainty that NPC will get the weapon. Here the raider’s 1-handed weapons will be chosen from the list (broadsword, longsword and shortspear) with longsword being 20 times more likely to be chosen than either of the other ones. If you want to have equal chance for each weapon to be chosen, just put 1 into each column. Same goes for the 2-handed weapons and shields. Raider will not here get ranged weapons as we did not choose them to be available. If you want to have multiple weapons for each category you can put either an absolute number – for example 3 or random number like 1d3-1. The first would mean getting always three weapons, second would be getting either 0,1,2 weapons. Clicking “All” button will give you visibility to all possible weapons in the system, clicking any of the other weapon options button will give you a list of that kind – for example “eastern” weapons.

Figure 5 Combat Style and Weapons

Press generate to generate the first raiders.

Figure 6 Default Novice River Raiders generated

You noticed that these raiders were quite weak in all the skills. Let’s add a bit more to the combat style skill. Here you will now see a number generated from STR + DEX + 20 + 2d6. So it will be for example 13 + 7 + 20 + random number generated by rolling two D6 dice. It is a good idea to always have randomness in any skills of the NPC.

Figure 7 Change a combat style

Figure 8 Weak River Raiders with Combat Style

The skill set of the raiders look definitely novice except for the Combat Style. Here is the official definition what the skills should look like 01-30% Novice 31-50% Competent 51-70% Proficient 71-90% Expert 91-110% Master >110% Paragon

Increasing all the skills Let’s increase all the skills on average by 22 by adding +4d10 to “Apply skill bonus” field.

Figure 9 Apply a bonus to all skills

Figure 10 After applying the bonus

..and then generate

Figure 11 River Raiders with stronger skills

Now the raiders look like a bit more competent lot with some skills even reaching to proficient level.

Adding cultural skills River raiders should be able to swim and handle a boat. Click on those fields.

Figure 12 Get Boating and Swimming

Figure 13 Raiders after Boating and Swimming

Raiders should also probably have survival, navigation from the professional skills. Click the professional skills button and add those skills.

Figure 14 Add professional skills

Some skills are not on the list as they could multiple ones – like lore skills. Add a lore(River) by adding a custom skill.

Figure 15 Add custom skill

This is how the raider looks after professional skills and custom skills have been added.

Figure 16 Generated with professional and custom skills

In Glorantha everybody knows magic. Let’s add folk magic for the raider. After clicking on the folk magic field we also get the Folk Magic spells visible.

Figure 17 Add Folk Magic

Let’s define that even a competent raider does not always have folk magic spells. 1d3-1 means that he/she will have 0,1 or 2 spells from the list. The list the spells are selected from is defined next. Add the coordination, heal, protection and repair spells to be the ones that the spells are generated from. Here similar probability is given that coordination and heal are 20 times more probable to be generated than repair and protection. If all spells should be of same chance to generate put the same number to each spell.

Figure 18 Select few folk magic spells

Figure 19 Generated with magic

Give the raiders random names

Figure 20 Add names to raiders

…and now that they are not novice anymore, mark them skilled.

Figure 21 Raise Raiders to skilled

Figure 22 Named raiders generated

Additional features You can add additional features for the raiders. For example – hair color and beard. You can view what the additional features could be by using the view items. Additional features will be generated with a certain probability. It can be fixed probability like 100 or 20 – but here we chose them to be POW+POW.

Figure 23 Add an additional feature - hair color

Figure 24 Could add more additional features

If you want to have same additional feature for all the raiders you can add non-random feature. This can be useful especially if there are special abilities like being “undead”. Let’s select a “Combat Style Trait” for all of the raiders.

Figure 25 Add the same exact feature to every NPC – combat style trait

Figure 26 Combat Style Trait added

As the River Raiders are very quick on their feet, boats and slippery rocks they are given “Excellent Footwork” as a combat style trait.

Figure 27 Generate with additional features and combat style trait

Making it possible for other people to find your NPC Tags are important – you can filter by tags in the enemies and home screen. It is very useful for all the users of RQ Encounter if you give good tags to your NPC and only you can do it – nobody else can add the tags.

Figure 28 Add a tag to help finding the NPC

There are couple of 'reserved' tags. If the enemy is from Glorantha and "generally accepted" to be - add a keyword Glorantha and other Gloranthan keywords like Gloranthan place names to it. "Generally accepted" means roughly has been described in a Gloranthan supplement. Same way for Monster Island. I would reserve "Mythic Rome" and other "Mythic" etc for the possibly upcoming books. If it is from neither of these places add always a tag describing the world where it comes in. "Fantasy" is a placeholder for these - you could add that keyword to anything. If you have for example "Cimmeria" for Conanesque stuff. Romans could have "Ancient" as the overall tag and "Fantasy" "Roman" (and respectively "Vandal" "Goth" "Pict") as additional tags and then use the common environment tags "Mountain", "Jungle", "City", "Sea" Tags are there to help the users find the stuff with the filter and they speed up the enemy page quite a bit. Usually two or three tags would help a lot in finding - so first I would use "Ancient" at least for the Romans to pinpoint the world for the filter - then nationality and then the environment if you need that. Using the environment tag in addition to the world tag helps you build up encounter charts. "Do you feel lucky" will get from current filter you a random enemy and it is quite useful feature - so tag usefully

What is acceptable - that is a difficult question. Aside from the normal - keep it useful and 'safe' for the players of any age and that is already a difficult thing to answer. Take a look what is there currently - similar things are acceptable. For Glorantha and Monster Island - keep the feel of it. Technically there are couple of things - spirit society's, mystic brotherhoods and sorcery orders that have been implemented as templates. They probably should not have world tags but just technical tags "Spirit Society", "Sorcery Order". They are there as helpers to create shamans, disciples and sorcerers and would clutter the filters if they had the world tag "Glorantha" or "Monster Island" Legionnaires or Centurions are perfectly fine - look at the discussion above for tagging. Vikings as well... Basically anything that would be supported by RQ6 rules but please use the tagging rule.

Figure 29 Add multiple tags

Here we added the tags Glorantha, Sartar and River.

Make your NPC public by publishing it Published enemies will be visible in the enemies, parties and home page.

Cloning an enemy After you are sufficiently sure that your NPC has all the features, tags, skills and spells you like it is time to create a more powerful or different version of him/her. It is really useful to have the basics complete enough before you clone. After cloning you will have two separate versions of the templates and any changes you want for both will have to be done to both. You can do that by using the clone button. You can clone any NPC or party. Let’s first create an initiate.

Figure 30 Clone a template as a base for another

Figure 31 Name the cloned template and make it a dedicated (=initiate in Theist)

Cult rank affects many calculations according to the RQ6. So mark your initiate to be of cult rank: “Dedicated”.

Easiest way to create an initiate of any cult Add a cult template. Here we add 1 cult template called “Orlanth Initiate”. This will bring in from the cult template all the folk magic and higher magic spells appropriate for Orlanth initiate. There exists hundreds of templates – one for almost every Gloranthan cult and all shaman and sorcerer varieties in Monster Island and few others as well. You can find descriptions of these in https://notesfrompavis.wordpress.com/2014/05/11/gloranthan-cult-onepagers-main-page/ It is possible to create initiates just by adding the spells at one at a time but this is far faster. It is also possible to create additional cult templates.

Figure 32 Select ready made cult template to attach

Initiates are usually a bit stronger in characteristics than lay members.

Figure 33 Strengthen the characteristics of the initiate

They have also needed to practice more. Let’s add 15 to all the skills so we get to approximate level of 50 which is what RQ6 recommends at initiate skill levels to start in

Figure 34 Initiate is a bit stronger. Increase skills by 15%

Initiates often have devotion and exhort. If you mark neither then the theistic spells (Rune spells will not be visible)

Figure 35 Initiate should have devotion and exhort

Figure 36 Generated initiates

As you see initiates are already somewhat tougher than lay members of raiders.

Creating a leader – Wind Lord. After you are satisfied with the initiate let’s clone the initiate and start building a WQind Lord. Wind lords are at priest level of their cult and are often masters of many skills. Let’s mark it so. Wind Lords are usually stronger and otherwise better in characteristics so let’s mark the STR, DEX and POW to be high.

Figure 37 Clone the initiate to wind lord

Figure 38 Windlords are probably better at STR, DEX and POW

Wind lords are masters of the skills so let’s add 35 to all of the skills – with the “Apply skill bonus0”

Figure 39 Windlord Raider generated

It is rare to see many wind lords at the same time as they are usually leaders of their tribe or cult. They are accompanied with other members of their cult so we will create a party for that later. Priests are major NPC’s so they often have additional features to distinguish them. Here are few added.

Figure 40 Master level characters might have some memorable features

Figure 41 windlords generated

Creating a raider party Parties can be useful to gather a variety of NPC’s together. It can be for example the boss, the big bodyguard, several competent bodyguards, escape mount and an undistinguished rabble of followers. It could also be a raider party with several competent raiders with some initiates and possibly a leader. You can create a party either by cloning an existing one or by using a “Create new party” button like here.

Figure 42 Creating a Party

Let’s give party a name and select from the template list (it is a long one) few NPC’s to join a party. You can scroll the list by typing letters. You can also do multi selects.

Figure 43 Selecting NPC's to a Party

Figure 44 Added a Humakt Sword to a party

Here we added 1d4+2 Sartar River Raiders to the party, it might also have from 0-2 initiates and one third of a chance to have a Wind Lord and one fourth of a chance for Humakt Sword to join in.

Additional features for a party We can add a multitude of additional features to the party to either use directly or just inspire us. They will be there with the probability mentioned for example they are likely to be on a raid 50% of the time. Here are a few party features attached.

Figure 45 Adding party features

Figure 46 Raider party generated

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