Lords & Lands: Making the Everyman

Hey everybody! Cody Pondsmith’s back with a vengeance! It’s been amazing to see so many people enjoying the Witcher TRPG! Having launched the core book and a run of errata I was itching to get back into the saddle and start work on supplementary material! Which brings me to Lords & Lands, the first supplement for the Witcher TRPG!
A lot of people have asked for a GM screen and we wanted to address that desire plus give everybody a little bit extra! We mulled over what we could include which would be useful and fun to go with the screen. And we paid attention to what people were saying across the broad array of social media. With the GM screen and the extra material coming with it, we want to help Gamemasters expand the Dark World of the Witcher and let their players interact with it in new ways.

That started off fairly simply: adding more general NPCs. With the core book we really only focused on the enemies that you would be encountering. Bandits, mages, and socia’tael made perfect sense as combatants but left something to be desired as far as the larger world was concerned. In theory, you should be able to play Witcher and avoid physical combat as much as possible. But that requires more widely varied NPCs. So, I sat down to make “Everyman NPCs”, characters who represent the average folk you run into in a city. This way, if players want to interact with the merchants, laborers, and entertainers around them they can do so without the GM flailing to make up statistics when a criminal attempts to pick a merchant’s pocket or a doctor haggles with an innkeeper over the price of a room.

The Witcher TRPG assumes that your players are seasoned professionals, capable of so much more than the average person. These Everyman NPCs are generally good at one thing but quite average (or worse) at everything else.

Don’t snag an everyman thief to be the main villain in your campaign!

At the moment, the roster of Everyman NPCs will give you generic stats for: an artisan, a criminal, a laborer, a merchant, an entertainer, and a scholar. In addition, each one will have rules for customization, to give you better variety.
It’s great to be back! And stay tuned for more updates!