Campaign NPCs in the Library?

[Sigurd]

Is it possible to make an NPC book in the library, associate it with a module, and then have it appear\disappear with the module?

eg Create Library book.

Temple of Sludge NPC book
Holds all the NPC's for the module in drag and drop format.


import module -- Temple of Sludge.
TOS NPC book appears in the DM's library.

drop or export the module
TOS NPC is gone.

I'm more clueless than lazy and I just want to know if this is a doable goal before I put my clue-finding hat on.


Sigurd.

[sloejack]

Yes, it can be done, it requires manually editing the db.xml in the module. You could even do it to a campaign db.xml but fg will nuke any <library> entries when it saves the campaign so it's best to keep a master copy of it, make changes and replace the db.xml and reload to test/validate things before you're ready to put it into a module.

So, now that I've said that, why would you want to do this? It's far easier to create an npc tab in the adventure/story control and just group all your NPCs there that way they're easy to jump to similar to the library but you don't have the hassel of having to try and deal with creating and populating a library entry by hand.

[Sigurd]

I was thinking mostly as a sort of House Rules collection. Load a module of a particular setting and get monsters & NPCs of that setting in your DM Library. They might be secondary to the story but still possible encounters.

As a fictitious example:

If you were making christmas stories as modules Mr & Mrs Clause might not be NPCs in any of the stories but they might be probable to the setting so they'd be in the library.

[sloejack]

In the context of recurring characters it makes sense. However, I think the principle of what I mentioned remains in terms of ease of assembly. You can create a campaign module with nothing but NPCs in it and load your NPC module whenever you need it.