RPGaDay 2024 #22 Notable Non-Player Character

 As I explained back on the 14th, I don't get to spend a lot of time with my NPCs because they only really exist at need. And I wound up discussing one of my recent favorite NPCs that day.

So I'm going to go ahead and talk about someone else's NPCs.

I'm sure I've told the story of Sir Meriwether, but it's so notable that it's worth retelling.

To try to replicate some of the feel of an Old School game in his D&D 3.5 megadungeon, Kris set up a rival party, led by Sir Meriwether. He presented himself as a paladin of St. Cuthbert. Kind of snooty, but in that paladin sort of way. The rival party also put some pressure on us to explore the megadungeon, since whatever treasure we didn't find would go to them.

Outside of the dungeon, we got on well enough with the rival party. I remember a not-very-social dwarven druid named Bear that my character had a few interactions with. Sometimes, our wizard would take time off to make magic items, which was annoying because there weren't really other downtime activities that the rest of the party was into, and also meant that we would have to meet with Sir Meriwether to request that he keep his party out of the megadungeon to keep things fair.

This worked out okay for a while. Right up until we decided to build a clubhouse for our adventuring club. Some groups might have called it a "guild," but we were all shouted down by one very vocal party member. That same moment, Sir Meriwether decided that he needed the same resources that we did in order to build a church to St. Cuthbert.

We needed the sponsorship of a town matriarch to make our club official, and the matriarch had a granddaughter that she was looking to marry off. So Sir Meriwether came courting as well. The Diplomacy checks were flying fast and furious, with our sorcerer just barely getting the edge on Sir Meriwether.

We figured out that something was up when he started carrying an amulet of undetectable alignment in the shape of a holy symbol of St. Cuthbert. As a sign of how devious either Kris or Sir Meriwether really was, the amulet had been made on commission by our party wizard. Sir Meriwether has used a broker to manage the transaction and kept his name out of it.

Our first assumption was that he was a fallen paladin, but further investigation revealed that he had never been a paladin.

We were eventually able to figure out his scheme to embezzle money from the townsfolk in the guise of giving them a temple of St. Cuthbert.

Once he was defeated (my wife and I still argue which of us got the killing blow), Kris let us behind the screen a little bit and revealed that Sir Meriwether had always been a Neutral Evil Bard that had been built to fake being a paladin in as many ways as possible.

So this incident goes down in history as "The time the party nearly got pwned by a bard!"