Week 9 Studio: NPC workshop

Cutting every NPC that can't answer "why does this character exist," and giving the ones that remain one playable trait.

19 April 2027

A longer NPC roster isn’t a richer scenario — a roster full of people who don’t do anything for the player is worse than a short one where every name matters. This studio is a cut-and-sharpen pass: for every NPC in your draft, state their purpose in one sentence, and if you can’t, they go.

Before the session#

Bring the full NPC list from your draft, including anyone you added “for flavour.”

In the session#

For each NPC, write one sentence: what do they let a player do that they couldn’t do without this character? Guides them somewhere, hides or reveals a specific clue, or is a stated obstacle. If the sentence is vague, the NPC probably is too. Survivors then get exactly one vivid, playable trait — not a paragraph of backstory a player will never see.

Two more cuts, aimed specifically at scenes with more than one NPC present: check that no scene relies on two NPCs talking to each other while players watch — if the only way to deliver a piece of information is through NPC-NPC dialogue, players stop being the protagonists of the scene, and the fix is almost always to give that information to a PC directly instead. And check dialogue against era and role: a 1920s professor and a dockworker shouldn’t sound interchangeable, and neither should say something their background gives them no way to know.

Afterwards#

Fold the cut list back into your Investigation Architecture submission, due this week, alongside your truth, antagonist timeline, locations, clue web and investigation paths.