Snap Summary for Busy Wyverns
We’d like to share our new site, NPCReactor.com, with you. NPC Reactor empowers Game Masters to craft truly intelligent non-player characters that remember every player interaction, evolve naturally, and stay consistently true to their defined personalities. Imagine NPCs that reduce your prep time, eliminate the need for extensive note-taking, and allow you to deliver richer, more immersive, and believable storytelling experiences for your players. Stop juggling notes and start creating unforgettable moments with NPCs that feel alive.
The Problem
Every GM has strengths and weaknesses. One of our weaknesses is NPC differentiation. Often, our NPCs end up feeling very “samey” – we’re not great at voices, or accents, or even keeping up with the same mannerisms or speaking style for the entire NPC/PC discussion. Even some of our most beloved (by the players) NPCs end up feeling a little blah after a few sessions, as we just can’t remember how we’re supposed to be playing them. Many times when PCs ask a question, we will drop out of the NPC persona and answer in our own voice, the GM voice, relegating the NPC to the 3rd person. This is not ideal for immersion! We are not actors. We did not come to RPGs through the drama and theater kid pipeline. We started as a spreadsheet GM, focused on system mastery, memorization, and mechanical accuracy. Over the years, we’ve drifted more into the narrative-style of play – but we don’t have the background of skills to really help out with some of those shifts in tone.
The Solution
What we do have is some computer programming experience and a good sense of what would help. And so we’ve built a tool to address our NPC problem – and hopefully address yours too. With NPC Reactor you can generate or create NPCs for many genres and ancestries. You can prompt the AI, write your own information, log facts that the NPC knows. The NPC will speak in their own voice (via chat for now). You can ask the NPC to rephrase something you want to say – no more dropping out of NPC into the 3rd person. They will remember things said, quests given, and events that have occurred so you don’t have to. You can feed player questions to the NPC and use their responses as your inspiration. Your improvisation will always have something for you to build off – no more blank slate freezing (another problem we sometimes encounter).
Some Notes
This is currently web-only, but it should render well on mobile browsers. We are hard at work to bring it to Android and iOS as apps, and hope to accomplish that in the coming weeks. While you can try it out for free (most functions), there are some limits because there are costs involved with hosting and AI generation. We consider the current prices introductory to better understand demand and use. We hope you find them fair, or better than fair. One obvious feature that is missing is NPC portrait art. While it’s technically possible to generate portrait art from the NPC information, we do not feel comfortable using NPC art generation. There are too many ethical concerns around it. We are thinking about ways to work around this – while its unreasonable to expect artists to be able to create art for all these NPCs, perhaps AI art generation may be a separate add-on, with some portion of the fees donated to RPG artist collectives? If such a thing exists? We are open to discussion on that.
We hope you, at the very least, take a look at NPC Reactor to see if it’s something you might find useful. We’d love feedback or suggestions on improvements. We think it’s a powerful, unique tool in this space and hope you think so too. Check it out, and share the site with any GMs you think might also find use in it. We will continue development as time goes on, but the core experience and feature-set is ready to go!
