Tuesday 17 February 2015

Casting a famous NPC

In my current games I’m using photography to provide reference images of NPCs, as there are quite a lot of them to keep track of. In Buffy some are famous and most are borrowed from YA shows and films (and some are monsters - thank you Face Off!) while in Vampire: The Masquerade I’m generally avoiding overly familiar faces as it dents verisimilitude. About a third of the recurring cast are borrowed from Person Of Interest, because it provides lots of images of unfamiliar character actors in gloomy places.

But now a situation has come up where the PCs might get a flashback glimpse of the founders of Clan Tremere. This seems like a moment to bring in a big “guest star” particularly for Tremere himself. I don’t know who, though...

There’s art available, but it would be an obvious break in style - especially when I’ve managed photos of the Nosferatu (thank you Blade II, Left 4 Dead cosplay and Face Off again indirectly, the direct link being pretty strange!) so maybe I should keep him as a glimpsed silhouette.

I can say that most of the sequence will (at least in my head) look a lot like Dracula Untold.

Not least because the end of Dracula Untold looks a lot like Vampire: The Dark Ages.

While Tremere in particular never came up, I have previously considered making a trailer about the Vampire Revised signature characters. I just never got any further than Eva Green as Lucita...

This relates to a recent Onyx Path thread about playing such notable NPCs. I tend to go for less-is-more here. Tremere may well not speak in the flashback, while his coven Etrius and Meerlinda might do so. A lot of my really powerful NPCs stay silent or say very little, because I figure a stare or a few weighty words will be more intimidating than my usual rambling.

No comments:

Post a Comment