By: Jared Biti
While pondering how I build out cities and settlements for my larger metro areas in some of my campaigns, I have decided to let you all in on my system for creating a series of shops, or “Markets.” In this article, I am going to go over how I make the NPC shopkeepers in D&D 5e 2014 and give a few brief examples of ones I have made for the large city that I have referenced in previous articles.
So I start with what kind of shop I am making. Is it a Tavern, Crafter, Product, Service, etc? For this example, I am going to make it a magic product shop. So it mainly sells low-level magic items to adventurers and may buy some of their looted magic items depending on the value and rarity. But let’s get into the shopkeeper. Being a magic shop, it needs to be a wizard or some form of magic user so that they can identify magical items accurately. So I settle on a form of Wizard, randomly choose a race, then a name, and then work out specifics.
So we start with race. For that, I usually just look to the races listed in the PHB (Player’s Handbook) and make myself a random roll table. We have Dwarf, Elf, Halfling, Human, Dragonborn, Gnome, Half-Elf, Half-Orc, and Tiefling. That is 9 possible races. I could leave one off and make it a 1d8 roll, or just make it a 1d10 and reroll a roll of 10. I’ll go that route. I roll a 6. A Gnome. Works for me. Then I look at a name generator that I use, https://www.fantasynamegenerators.com/, and look under gnomes. I randomly roll, High or Low, on a die to decide male or female, and look at the name lists. I rolled Male and chose Del and Bog from the random name generator, giving me Del Bog.
I now have a magic-classed/trained Gnome named Del Bog. I need to decide his subrace. Looking at the details in PHB, it makes sense to me to make him a Rock Gnome; that way, he gets the “Artificer’s Lore” Feature. Next, I start spelling out his attributes. I use a point buy system for my players, so I start with the same thing here. 74+Racial, with this Rock Gnome, that will be a total of 77. Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, Charisma…. Well, the physical stats are not that important at the moment, but obviously, Intelligence is, and Charisma would be useful for running the shop side of things. Wisdom would be handy for observation and such. So I will start with an 18 in Intelligence and say 14 in Wisdom. Probably 14 in Charisma as well. That has burned 46 of the 77. The Constitution should probably be a 12, bringing us to 58 of 77. Now we have 19 to spread between the other two stats, so we could make them 11 and 8, Dexterity and Strength, respectively. Maybe bump the Dexterity up to 12 just to round it out. So, the totals are: Strength 8(-1), Dexterity 12(+1), Constitution 12(+1), Intelligence 18(+4), Wisdom 14(+2), Charisma 14(+2) for a total of 78.
The rest of the stats are kind of arbitrary. I will use the random roll tables for Gnomes to determine height, weight, etc. Then I will look at what skills make sense. Arcana, Insight, Persuasion, History, and, let’s say, Investigation. Now what modifiers for these? It is just an NPC, and we have not determined what “level” they are. Technically, all that determines it is Hit Points and spell slots. So let’s look at Spell Slots. They need to be able to cast, at least the Identify spell, so that makes them a level 1 caster with ritual casting. Probably needs to be a little tougher and more knowledgeable than that for the sake of being a useful source of information about items and most things arcane. With all that, let’s make them about level 5. As a Wizard with their +1 Constitution, they have about 27 Hit Points(5D6+5) and give them access to up to 3rd-level spells. Going back to the skills that would give them a +3 Proficiency modifier, plus their attributes. So the skills are Arcana(+7), History(+7), Insight(+5), Investigation(+7),Persiuasion(+5). So those are set.
Next, I make a brief description of their personality and how they are likely to interact with the average adventurer. Say “Del Bog likes most adventurers, but if they are rude or try to intimidate him, he will raise prices on those particular characters till they rectify themselves in his opinion.” And “He may catch himself rambling about a particular item that he knows a lot about when he identifies it, or if a favorite item in the shop that he likes to tell everyone about.”
Then physical appearances. My preferred method here is to design something up in HeroForge and drop a screenshot of it in the Discord for the players or attach it to the NPC sheet I have in Roll20. Here is Del Bog when I first made him. As pictures are worth a thousand words and all that.
I lastly throw in some practical equipment items, a wand, a spellbook, etc. Maybe some minor magic items, and in Del Bog’s case, I will have to pick some spells for him. For that, I will just follow the expected spell account expected for a PC wizard of 5th level. May even look at the prefab wizard characters from Wizards of the Coast for 5th level.
And that makes Del Bog, the shop owner and expected face of a magic item shop in the city of Modo near the Adventurer’s Guild. I hope this will give you a basic outline for how to create your shop owners and NPCs in your gaming worlds. Game on!
About the Author
Jared “Martel” B has been GMing and playing in several TTRPG’s since late 2013. Enjoys the challenge of bringing his players worlds and stories straight from his mind in the moment that it happens. He is one of the Founders of RPGCounterpoint, happy husband to an active historian wife, and father to two puppers and a toddler!
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