User Blog:
NPCs You Didn’t Know You Needed: Local Election Official

As I mentioned on Monday's Your Character and You post, I make characters like some people change socks. Frequently and with little regard for the person doing the laundry. I don't get to play even a quarter of the characters I have to create to my satisfaction because they're written for a short term purpose, in a game that goes too quickly, or they're written for someone else like in a book. I mourn the tragedy of a character created but never really played, however, my sadness is your good fortune.

Why? Well, because any good player character concept that hit the table for players can just as easily be used as a non-player character or game master driven character elsewhere. So, each week I'll toss you NPCs You Didn't Know You Needed. I'll include enough background and role-playing instructions to get them off the ground, some story seeds, and if it's a NPC for a specific game, maybe a stat block so you can plug 'em right into your game.

So, without further ado, your first NPC You Didn't Know.

Maria Robin-Finnigan: Local Election Official

Description: Maria is a 60 year old true-blue liberal from a time when liberal meant something different then it does now. Still, she's stuck to her party lines because some part of her sees fighting conservatives a habit worth repeating. She speaks painfully slowly, engages in long conversations about what it really means to be politically active, and breaths The System even if she's a little moderate for her younger associates. She also knows where all the political bodies are buried on a local level. She can tell you the names and bad habits of every corrupt official from the Mayor to the second boroughs trash collector. She can tell you, but she won't without some heavy reason to do so. She's been around long enough to know that a certain level of corruption is almost necessary to keep things moving along steadily. She's got a biased toward Unions over Business Owners and the like, but she knows on some level that the dirty money that flows from one party to another is still a part of the flow of The System. It's only when it stops flowing that she gets actively involved.