[Talk] GM-made NPCs

This thread shall be a place to discuss the Non-playable Characters. The famous "NPCs" that pop up in basically all areas of all roleplays. The Gym Leaders of your journey roleplays, the various antagonists in your fantasy stories, the Guild Master of some Mystery Dungeon adventures, the Matron from Halls of the Screwed...

Basically, all the characters that populate a world and that are already put there by the Game Master, either for they to control or for you to direct for a few posts! Is there any character like that which stands out to you? Any character you maybe had trouble writing as, or that just felt very mysterious and interesting to know more about? Let's discuss!

By the way... here's the twin thread to this one, which is about Supporting Characters made by players! Even if they're technically still "NPCs", I figured they deserved a separate thread since they're generally created for different purposes!

i cant talk about my own can i aaaaaa

my true actual fav was Arthur from trainers ahaha idk what it was. he was easy and fun to write for the little time he was around! but i like beaumont and jarmie a lot too, they have a lot of potential. i don't have a very hard time picking up others' characters generally, but i make sure to ask a lot of questions and get a solid sense of their core traits. and i try to make the profiles for my own NPCs as clear and solid as possible and encourage others to work with me to get a good consensus on how they behave! otherwise they do end up reading weird across multiple posts dont they?

So, right. NPCs that stand out to me...
here the obvious answer would be... a good number of the Gym Leaders and general NPCs in Hoenn Square 1! I think Anna has created a very interesting cast with both characters from the games and totally new faces and has given them a very solid outline - yes, even espite that, I still managed to completely overwork Wally into a person he's not but... that was definitely a mistake on my part, not hers. Out of this group, I want to say that one that catches my attention is... the Mauville Gym Leader but no one has reached the chapter where they appears so... all we know of them so far is in the chapter post. But then there's also Brendan and May, and I absolutely love what players have added onto them everytime they've been involved in a post! Especially Groc, kudos to him hehe

On the more mysterious side I'll have to throw a mention to the Yokai Academy professors (by Sapphy), especially Kokomi before she was invented Divine, as well as the cast from Final Fantasy : Alternate (by gimmepie). Which are both roleplays that are no longer active, and that leaves me with no real way to know more about those NPCs... ^^;

bringing this back to say i love beaumont and jarmie in trainers ✨ theyve had some experiences and are no longer rivals for the title of gym leader in a small town! well, they still kinda are, but more importantly they are now a somewhat reluctant vigilante duo who get to snipe at each other and learn to work together 💕 they've really grown from the base concepts now!

Shout out to Lycanthropy for creating some particularly memorable NPCs who happen to also be elementally attuned objects a D&D campaign is centred around. Each of them has a different attitude, thinks their element is the superior one and has varying levels of disdain for the other elements and their associated items.

The items in question? Rocksplitter the pickaxe who has developed a weirdly wholesome bond with the party barbarian who is trying (and mostly failing) to curb his more destructive impulses. Flamebearer a torch with anger issues and a desire to burn everything who is currently being tortured rehabilitated by being paired with the party's pacifist bard, Wavebreaker the fishing rod who kind of just goes with the flow and Windpiercer the flute who we have only recently met but has stoner vibes and prefers to be called Dave.

seconding the elemental artifacts; rocksplitter gets excited at the prospect of smashing anything and iirc takes everything literally, and has somehow become the actual hexblade patron of our barbarian-turned-warlock.
flamebearer has been nicknamed Flickering Toothpick by the party's paladin and seemed to hate our bard whom it had reluctantly allowed to attune to it, yet became very tsundere jealous when the bard started to play well with Dave The Flute for a moment.
wavebreaker seems oblivious and like nothing can upset it - not even the party killing its previous owner and my ranger confiscating his hat for her own moonlight vigilante outfit. oh and wavebreaker so far has been stuffed into my ranger's backpack 97% of the time, we should probably try attuning to it at last...
'tis a joy to interact with Lycan's creations!