The world that you create is complemented and defined by the characters that inhabit it.  Characters that fit into the scene can immerse your players deeper into the environment.  Characters that feel out of place or fail to meet your players expectations for the fantasy environment run the risk of pulling your players out of their immersion and out of the world you are building for them.

When designing a character for your world, you must first find out what role that character needs to fill.  Are you looking to have a bazaar trader who your characters can chat with briefly or a permanent recurring NPC with a fleshed out backstory and their own motivations?  It is important to have both of these elements in the characters within your world.  In real life you interact with characters who fill both of these roles, so your players need to experience that dichotomy as well in order to feel properly immersed in your world.

Creating surface level characters is a fairly straightforward process, as they need to simply cover a very specific role within your world and don’t require a motivation or background to shape the way that they interact with your players.  These characters can be simple and straightforward without breaking immersion, but there are still a few things to keep in mind to ensure a seamless experience. 

The two key characteristics of these surface level characters are appearance and tone.  First, ensure that the characters described appearance fits the environment.  If you players are in an old dwarven mine full of artificers then a shop-keep may appear as an old, squat dwarf with mottled hair and a magnifying lens for a monocle, or if you characters are exploring a forest town inhabited by elves, a bar tender may appear as a rough gruff older elf with a scar over his left eye wearing a vest the color of the leaves. 

Once you have an appropriate appearance for you character, you need to ensure that the characters tone is correct.  The old dwarven artificer from our first example must speak with an inquisitive tone, asking our characters what they are looking for, offering details related to the history of the mines or what machines he has been tinkering with in the shop.  When speaking for the elven bartender keep you dialogue gruff, short and to the point.  A grizzled hunter who is not interested in small talk.  He will answer questions, but is not sticking around for a conversation.

These surface level characters are simple to design and help build out your world with living breathing elements.  If you want to make a strong impact on your players, however, creating a meaningful NPC character who your players connect with on a deeper level either as an ally or an enemy can be a strong step in the right direction.  Creating a character of this importance is quite a tall order unfortunately.  It can be difficult in a setting such as a table top game where you have descriptive language and role playing mechanics as your primary method of illustrating the environment to your players.  If you want to build a compelling character that will leave an impact on your characters it is important to examine the following items related to that character:

• Background – what situation and where does your character come from
• Motivations – What drives your character?
• Flaws – What does your character struggle with?
• Actions – What is your character doing now?

To begin, creating a complete background for your character can help to fill out your world in a real way.  It is important not to drop the entire background on your characters at one time, but to sprinkle it in where you can in creative ways.  Mention the character growing up in a town that is relevant to one of your players characters, or indicate that their spouse passed away in an event that your players took part in.  Give the players a reason to interact with your character in a specific way based on these background details.  Additionally, this background doesn’t have to come from the character in question.  Perhaps a well-informed entertainer knows about their history, or heard them asking around about the topic.

The second item to build out is motivation.  You character needs to have goals in mind.  The characters motivation may align with you parties, or may be in direct conflict with the parties goals.  Alternatively, this third characters motivations may have absolutely nothing to do with you party.  Even if the characters motivations do not interact with your players in any way, the can still help to immerse your characters deeper into the world that you have designed, in which there is more happening than their own adventure.

Thirdly, in order to create a character that is believable, and who is easy for your players to connect with, you want to give you character some common character flaws.  These flaws could be as simple as arrogance or greed, or they could be more complex such as stealing in order to feed their family.  Providing moral qualms for your party to decipher is an effective way to ensure that they will remember their encounter with the character that you have created.   Character flaws are also important when creating protagonist allies and antagonist enemies.  Creating a greedy protagonist who helps the party for a large share of the treasure vs. a plotting and evil character who has a shred of good at her core will ensure that players feel the interpersonal dynamics at play.

Finally, in order to ensure that you have an immersive environment for your players, ensure that the characters you design intentionally to be larger parts of your world or overarching narrative are interacting with the world outside of the players immediate view.  Perhaps the party hears about the exploits of the paladin they met in a bar early on in their adventure, or maybe through hushed whispers it becomes known that another tax collector has been found murdered and mangled.  Whatever the characters purpose, make sure that they are taking actions that align with their motivations, backgrounds and flaws so that even when they are not immediately present they are growing and warping the world in which your players are immersed.

Using the tools above you can create both surface level characters that flesh out the world you are populating and deeply compelling, narrative shaping characters who your party will interact with and time and time again.  Both are necessary in order to ensure a seamless and immersive experience.  Please let me know in the comments below if you have any thoughts or examples of characters that you have built out for your parties!