The Planeswalker's Stronghold

  NPC Stat Blocks are a wonderful tool for DMs to create simple interactive characters on the fly. While WotC does provide a variety, 21 broad types of characters hardly fills a world. More over, with the expected removal of Racial Bonus from character creation, the primary means of creating stat variety disappears, or at the least shifts to a much harder to convey background. I don't know about you, but when one of my guards confronts a PC, they won't likely go into a story about their early life to convey background information. This can leave an NPC feeling very similar to all the others of that role, and come across flat and flavorless. Lets look at one of the most commonly encountered NPCs, the Guard. This still leaves a variety of clues a DM can use to convey information to the PCs. First and certainly easiest, a DM can adjust the quantity. Nothing says force at hand better than the action economy of 2 guards for each PC, but lets face it, groups of Guards greater than 4...

 I think every good story begins at the beginning, and for this one we are going all the way back to 2021! A member of our budget community gave me a shout out in appreciation of the MidWeek Magic content, and it inspired me to make special intro/outro and put more focus on the content. The intro segment included a graphic I made using the direct quote from the supportive viewer. The cute part was the common English grammatical error between "You're" and "Your". I actually delayed putting this into production for over a week, as I wrestled with this issue. There were a lot of factors here to consider. For instance, a lot of my viewers are from other parts of the world, and I presume English is not their primary language. Hell, I grew up speaking this nonsense, and make error of this caliber more often than I'd like. The last thing I ever wanted to do was make someone feel bad about having made the error, so I left the quote as is. Despite several people poin...