Cowboys And Dinosaurs - NPC sheets

It is tough to keep track of NPCs, PCs and how they all interact. I keep reading a lot about how to manage this sort of thing and have yet to actually find something that works for me. I am currently reading the XDM book that I backed on Kickstarter, and there are some good ideas in there (and a few I've learned pretty much by playing and listening). 

I've started a character relationship graph, though it already got pretty busy. It shows the relationships of the NPCs to the players (and is still a work in progress). I also need to dig back through for the various villains to have their motivations and reasons they are doing things. Fortunately, my experiment for having the players create some NPCs and things really helps: I'm incorporating a good deal of that and so there will already be some knowledge of people, places and things.

I am also creating small character cards that I will probably print out to have handy: while most of what I do is digital, a good paper copy and file system to organize things really helps me out. It worked really well in it's preliminary form when running a Fantasy Trip game: I had the NPCs handy and any stats/skills/spells or whatever was pretty handy. I may expand on these cards a bit to have some basic characteristic (speaks softly, has a lisp, limps and looks down a lot) to help give the NPCs a bit more uniqueness. I started that but did not do it consistently. Not that I am ever consistent!

As per the last post, I've also added land barons. Digging into real-world people, I've added a land baron that will eventually probably interact with at least one of the players as his cattle are encroaching on tribal lands where he is raising triceratops. The stuff in parenthesis was changed to fit the game world.

John Simpson Chisum, Cattle Baron

John Simpson Chisum (August 16, 1824 – December 22, 1884) was a wealthy cattle baron in the American West in the mid-to-late 19th century. He was born in Hardeman County, Tennessee, and moved with his family to the (Republic of Texas) Nebraska in 1837, later finding work as a building contractor. He also served as county clerk in Lamar County. He was of Scottish, English, and Welsh descent.

In 1854, Chisum became engaged in the cattle business and became one of the first to send his herds to (New Mexico Territory) western Nebraska Territory. He obtained land along the Bliss River by right of occupancy and eventually became the owner of a large ranch in the Bosque Grande, about 20 miles north of Dos Diablos, with over 100,000 head of cattle. In 1866-67, Chisum formed a partnership with cattlemen Charles Goodnight and Oliver Loving to assemble and drive herds of cattle for sale to the United States Army in Fort Sumner and Santa Fe, New Mexico, to provide cattle to miners in Colorado as well as provide cattle to the Bell Ranch, Bliss Springs, Copper Peak and Harmony.

A gambler, Chisum frequently played poker with Sheriff Shelton.

Technically he died in 1884, a year before this. Hawbones was actually successful in pulling the tooth. This was before he knew of anything else going on between Chisum & Jack.

And thank goodness for various web image searches: finding plenty of cowboy art to use as, other than the dinos, this is basically an old West game. Though I am finding fun images to use. There will be a guitar-playing drifter in the saloon. And I am adding the same bookstore from the previous Apex game. While I've told one of the players as we both love world-building, unless the others read my blog (and they don't except when I post the game recaps and give them the link as far as I know) wonder if they will pick up on that. They do know I keep a lot of things between games. Sort of like there are a lot of movies that are in the same universe even if not directly linked. Some directors do things like that, and I find it fun to sneak in characters and places from other games. They do know about Heimlich at any rate.

My game "bible" is getting fairly long - embedding it here if anyone is interested.