Welcome to the Dog Days of Podcasting, 2022 season. This year we’re taking part by creating 30 NPCs to use with table top gaming, writing projects, or other creative endeavors. These NPCs are system agnostic, but may include minor suggestions for how to run the characters with a party of adventures and explorers. They are written with a specific genre in mind, but will include notation for how to use them within at least two other realms.
That said, let’s get started.
Today, we’re visiting The Depot Overthinker, an NPC designed for Sci-Fi Space campaigns.
The Depot Thinker
XIII
It was supposed to be a quick layer over. Refuel the ship, grab some snacks, a shower, go meet the client, blast off. Two hours. Three, tops. Yet when the party returned to the depot, mission objective and seemingly reasonable timetable in hand, they found their trusty ride cracked down like an egg, engine picked apart and thrusters detached. And the perpetrator of this act, was still there, running some random part through a cleaning process that should have taken hours to even get to this stage.
Some much for deadlines.
He’s a machine speaker, maybe literally, maybe not, and when he sees a piece of tech that can be improved, he has a hard time resisting. The machines are easier to understand for him. They break, he fixes. They can be better, he obliges. The locals know to keep an eye on him, and his team typically tries to keep him out of other folks engine blocks. But this time, they failed.
The Depot Thinker is a surprise gift horse wrapped inside of a nightmare situation. If the party has the technical skills, they could attempt to put the ship back together themselves, but if they seem game to play along with the events, they’ll find the parts they need to fix the ship aren’t all here. The overthinker saw what could be better and already arranged trades, drop offs, and favors, and will help arrange local transport if the players don’t have access (anymore). After all is retrieved and delivered, the crew will find their vessel working better than new. The ship just sings now. Maybe literally.
The Depot Thinker doesn’t have many interests outside of machines, and the chance to play with a new one is a carrot he’d have a hard time resisting. He doesn’t respond well to threats unless it involves taking away access or damaging things needlessly. He doesn’t really care about money outside of keeping the parts coming in and the lights on.
In Sci-fi, he’s positioned in an off the beaten path way station, probably along a smuggling route where he’d get a lot of chances to tinker.
In ages of exploration, he’s setup in a smugglers’ bay, and the local pirates and privateers find his work charming.
In steampunk, he’s adding strange gadgets to otherwise mundane machines in an air ship depot.
The machines call to him for aid, and his spanner will always answer. With the dash of patience and willingness to explore, he can turn a simple stop over into an unintended upgrade, overhaul, and headache.
The audio portion of this episode is shared on a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License. Sounds and music are provided by Syrinscape’s Docking Bay 94 Soundset. Please see the website for individual song and sound usage. The text for this episode is shared under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. Have a good time with the character, and let me know if you use them for something.
Until tomorrow.