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When the study of history comes in useful for adding depth to your games as a #ttrpg GM: Everyone – *everyone* - is a product of the society around them.
Your NPCs are shaped by the communities and culture they live in. They reflect it.
In turn, they say something *about* it.
Your NPCs are shaped by the communities and culture they live in. They reflect it.
In turn, they say something *about* it.
The Great Man theory of history is horseshit. That's not to say that individual actions don't matter - but events happen because societal pressures and forces act through individuals. You very rarely get just one person who thinks a particular thing, or tries to achieve a goal.
Even someone who has never encountered another human being and was raised by wolves implies things about the presence of a human society and its nature.
But anyway, how is this relevant for your NPCs?
But anyway, how is this relevant for your NPCs?
Firstly, don't think of your NPCs as detached from the wider world, and reap the rewards of suggested connections and depth to plot. If there's a lord conspiring against the king - they're probably not alone, and they probably have a *reason*. Sure, the individual might just want
power, but *why* is it that the lord feels their power is curtailed or not as much as it should be? How do other nobles feel about the same issue? To what extent does this reflect a wider power struggle between aristocracy and throne?
Where there's an adventurer - what does that say about their society, that it produces a rootless combatant class like this? What're the pressures pushing that one character to be an adventurer - and then think about how those same pressures might affect a whole *lot* of people.
As soon as you look at an NPC and realize their motivations are from a wider societal context, you can start threading in new characters with ease, linked via said context. As the game moves forwards, it feels natural to show how allies and rivals are drawn together by an issue.
Literally anything and everything can be an influence in this way. Institutional struggles stemming from faith, nation, traditions of personal loyalty, and so forth. Wealth and commerce - one of the BIG overlooked things in fantasy games is the impact stuff like
'this beautiful dye is really expensive' can have on cultures and communities, stirring everything from practical concerns to war to spirituality.
Beyond that, though, you get to show off the depth of the world in a very 'show, don't tell' way if you make sure to fold the wider context of societal pressures into NPCs and their presentation. You don't *need* to clumsily jam exposition about religious strife down your
players' throats if you can just show them, on the immediate and personal scale, how said strife impacts on NPC after NPC in the little things about how they're behaving. Then thread it through into new NPCs via that connection - the religious figures, the firebrands.
And it all naturally builds into enormous amounts of pre-cooked drama, literally falling out of your GM-ly hands into the game. When you think about how an NPC is shaped by the forces around them, rather than just building them as 'evil priest', it suggests so much to work with.
And that helps give the impression of a living, breathing world all the better, because the players will witness your NPCs acting in ways that *make sense*.
(This is a somewhat clumsy thread as Twitter isn't great for this sort of discussion but seriously, there's a LOT of stuff in historical theory that is hugely useful for building and running ttrpg settings.)
