GM's Tip of the Week

If you’re anything like me, you’re almost constantly building characters, testing builds (… I do not test for sheer destructive might, I test for ‘is fun to play?’), and at some point, you look up and realise you have half a village full of people. Or maybe a whole village. What the heck do you do with them, when your active games folder is maybe two or three games thick?

Trouble is, most of those people were probably designed to be adventurers, and are probably not generally suitable for most villages (going back to my folder, I have several dozen plane-touched of various kinds, tieflings, aasimar and others). But you’d like to use these people somehow, and you’re a GM, right?! Okay, so, hold up a moment. First thing; the GMPC only works in certain situations, and usually when they aren’t the star of the show. They can be useful for advice, and mine has prodded the group a couple of times (she got hired on for her skill set and brains, and once in a while, she has to cast Invoke Common Sense on all the idiot warriors, when the cleric isn’t doing it for her), but as a rule, she doesn’t do much but hang around and occasionally ID things.
Yes, I have a GMPC in the group I run. No, she isn’t very interesting, although she did help knock a dullahan on his undead rump, when she was one of the only characters to make their save vs. his aura of NOPE! The half-orc wizard carries a great honking falchion, and she occasionally gets to use it.  It was an odd combat. Most of the time, she just floats around in the background and snarks.
Most times when you actually get to use a GMPC is if the whole group decides to play something oddball (group full of rangers, or something), and you really need one of them to be a cleric for some reason, and no one wants to take Leadership. Or … well, there are a lot of ways around that, and not all of them want a GMPC.
So, what the heck do you do with all these ‘I used to be an adventurer but …’ characters? If it works, build a village. If it doesn’t, have them form a community within a city. Or … a temple. Or scatter them through cities and towns. This does work with a pre-written module or adventure path, by the way; you just have to make sure that your NPCs fill the roles of the NPCs they’re replacing. For example; I’m running Shattered Star right now. The main NPC contact is a high-ranking member of the Pathfinder Society… except that our head-canon for the Pathfinders is that they’re a suspect group who may or may not be having their strings pulled by Aboleths, so … I pulled from some stuff that happened in the last AP (Rise of the Runelords, for this group) … and at least one of my players reads this, so I’ll say no more. But that means that I have quite a lot of NPCs who came from the folder, that have replaced points of contact. And made this whole thing rather more interesting in many ways, yes.
Having class levels doesn’t necessarily make a character from your folder unsuited for being a game NPCs; just because canonically most towns are full of Experts and  Adepts does not mean there aren’t a few classed characters with a few levels of a given class, and in a city it’s even more likely that the master crafters of a given discipline have a few levels in wizard, for enchanting and selling their gear. Or they have a wizard in house who specialises in armor and weapon enchants, and perhaps does some simple item enchants on the side. And more than likely the highest ranking town guards and the elite guards for nobles or what you have are going to have fighter levels. And the high priest.. you get the idea.
If you have been poaching your players backgrounds for plot hooks, you may be able to tie some things in with this, either directly or indirectly. You may not have a player who’s willing to let you take the liberties I have with backgrounds, but if you don’t screw them over with it, you may find that they will trust you with more and more as time goes by.