NPC Forge

You do not need three paragraphs of backstory for a character the party will meet once. You need someone the dungeon master can voice in one breath and the table will still remember three sessions later. This skill builds that card.

It starts with function, not flavour: patron, obstacle, mirror, informant or villain, and one shadow function at most. Then it writes the card in the order the table actually uses it — combat line, appearance, personality, voice, secrets, hooks, dialogue — so the DM reads the body first and the motive second. Every character gets three secrets in tiers: one trivial, one important, one that touches the central conflict, each marked with the clue that reveals it and the check or deed that earns it. A secret with no discovery path is treated as a diary entry, not a secret.

What separates this from a chatbot's NPC is the discipline. Wants and fears must be concrete — "the ledger the guild thinks I burned", not "power". Every hook names a verb and a cost. Voice is three to five read-aloud lines the DM can say without rehearsal. Every character either links to a stat block or is explicitly marked a non-combatant, with no third state.

Honest limit: it writes people, not creatures or places, and it enforces a word budget — a major character runs 500–800 words, a minor one 200–400.