Sorry, I am already playing catch up on this. I was kind of hoping to post every day and sometimes multiple times a day.
So my most memorable NPC was probably a Spacemaster mercenary, “Doc Murray”. He used a lot of the character enhancing meds, so he could haste pretty much on demand and could ride out stuns and bleeding criticals, if I remember correctly. The character was originally inspired by Rogue Trooper from 2000AD but without the blue skin.
He was pretty much a tour de force of heavy weaponry with the light machine gun and grenades as his weapons of choice. There were times when he joined the characters as a mercenary and they needed extra muscle and he returned to hunt the PCs down as it was known that he knew them and could get close.
Despite appearances he was not an Armsman profession but a Criminologist. This was before I had moved over to No Profession but I found myself gravitating towards using Criminologist more and more for NPCs as they were simply the best ‘all rounder’ and if you wanted to put an NPC into multiple adventures the generally low skill costs across the board made the Criminologist a good choice.
I used to love the old 2000 AD mags!
My most memorable NPC grew out of me winging a random encounter. I was DMing Quellborne, and the random encounter called for a Vampire. I gave him his own estate and his servants welcomed the PCs to spend the night, then he tried to eat them. He killed one or two and the rest escaped. I just expected it to be a random encounter, but the PCs got all fired up about revenge. They knew they weren’t up to his power level yet, so the rest of the campaign became ‘Lets get more powerful so we can get revenge on him!’ I can’t even remember what I originally called the vampire, but his name was close enough to ‘Tiananmen’ that the characters called him simple ‘Baron Tiananmen’ (we were actually playing just a little after those sad evens in China, and the idea of an unjustified massacre very much fit).
Oh, right, so the other main point of my story: random encounters can lead to amazing things! So when Terry asks if we want him to include random encounter tables in his Shadow World material, I always say yes!
I’m not sure I have a favorite NPC. I may be developing one now. If anyone has followed the Discworld series, they may be familiar with C.M.O.T. Dibbler and all his incarnations around the Disc. He’s a “meat” pie street vendor who always saying “That’s my lowest price and I’m cutting my throat at that price.” But he’sa street vendor and always seems to have the know on things happening. In each city, there is a “relative” of Dibbler selling “meat” pies.
I’ve started adding C.M.O.T. Dibbler in Gryphonburg and the players are up in the air about him.
The only other NPC I could say is what used to be my PC from decades ago. I don’t get to play RM anymore, I only GM. The PC I have to is too OP for anything I am running now (We had a very generous GM back then.) I’ve had to relegate him to an NPC role just doing administrative roles in the gaming sessions I run.