For another project, I’m working on research mechanics, and I thought it might be interesting and fun to create a stable of researchers and scholars that you can drop into the narrative on short notice. Maybe the PCs need someone to interact with while they’re hitting the books at an academy of magic, or maybe the nerds have gotten in over their heads while exploring ruins again, and it’s up to a reasonably balanced party to rescue them. For each character I’ll include a name, usually with a descriptor they’ve picked up, and a brief description.

Bounty Hunters | Crewmates | Scholars

Academia NPCs

1. Zayerzin the Horrid: a gnome acolyte who specializes in rhetoric and formal logic. Mutated by magic, his canine teeth have been replaced with the heads of living earthworms.
2. Lucianus the Argentifer: an aasimar bard who researches the locations of holy relics and seeks them out in dangerous places. He often has holy water and holy symbols to sell, when encountered in a dungeon.
3. Corigola the Frozen: a water genasi druid, who studies ancient civilizations. Her hair and fingernails are made of hard blue ice, following a close call with the white dragon Rhugithaz.
4. Fray Quinlain, the Celestial Sailor: a human astronomer (mage) whose dreams often verge on astral travel. He is often found in circles of standing stones or on mountain peaks, awake or asleep.
5. Gravech the Mourner: a stone giant with a ring that allows her to reduce her size to Medium or Small, as needed. She studies rare and dead languages, and she is as likely to be in a library as in a thousand-year-old crypt.
6. Tihuan Parvi, the Leech: a half-elf priest who studies medicine and medical treatment, including leeching. He speaks to his leeches and cares for them as pets.
7. Sister Nacre the Flamekeeper: a dwarf noble who dedicates her time and vast resources to learning and potentially recovering lost dwarven strongholds. She relates almost any topic back to this primary interest.
8. Mathom the Golden: a warforged mage with an unusual and intricate gilded plating. They study alchemy and transmutation magic, with a particular interest in guarding the secret of turning base metals into gold.
9. Amira bint Khadija, the Unsleeping: a human acolyte with an affinity for coffee that runs well past the bounds of good sense. Her main area of study is divination magic and prophecy. She is most often found at a coffeeshop, with books and papers covering several nearby tables.
10. Varstaya Moonglast: a goblin swashbuckler who chases down rumors of fencing manuals and lost dueling techniques. She is forever getting herself captured to observe techniques firsthand and has become an expert at escapology to compensate.
11. Barum the Fiddler: a half-orc bard who secretly works for the Summer Court. He gathers tales of the Fair Folk, modifies them according to the Seelie Queen’s whims, and spreads them far and wide.
12. Ilmehar the Wayfarer: an adult copper dragon in human form, researching exotic geometries. This study frequently takes them to places of Far Realm intrusion, and Ilmehar is encountered out of chronological order.
13. Nashua Sarwa, the Sunscribe: a fire genasi evoker who studies and pursues the phoenix Anjara, working to free it from the clutches of an ancient evil.
14. Grimmorn the Second-to-Last: a dragonborn diviner who has a curious prophecy of his own fate; he knows he is to be the second-to-last of something, but every further divination he has performed to find out more has returned conflicting or muddled answers.
15. Kleisya the Hooded: a ghoul who passes for a necromancer. She regains the vast knowledge she possessed in life each time she feeds. When the PCs encounter her, she begins quite lucid, but her control slowly fades.
16. Chalvern Esca: a human priest who studies genealogies in preparation for writing a comprehensive and updated book of the peerage. He is being paid to debunk the nobility and royalty claims of as many families as possible, which has made him persona non grata in high society and an ironically celebrated figure in revolutionary circles.
17. Kindly Dyval: an apparently elven sage and senior lecturer on dreams, myths, and semiotics at the royal academy, he is in fact possessed by a nightmare creature (stats as a night hag); the soul of the original Dyval is long gone.
18. Ochrebor the Bowed: a tiefling cult leader who purports to study molds, slimes, jellies, and spores, but in fact has come to worship the demon lord Juiblex. Ochrebor can be found crawling on all fours, scraping molds and slimes off dungeon floors and muttering to himself.
19. Xiao Jìjìng, the Stillness: a human mage who studies constructs of many types. Often found in a workshop, he pays by the pound for the remains of deactivated or ruined constructs, whether mechanical or magical.
20. Castellan: a dwarf knight who has gone by her job title rather than her given name for over a century. She has an obsessive scholarly interest in architecture and fortification, and takes long trips to visit ancient or foreign castles.

It’s always useful to have a Rolodex of interaction encounters you can drop in with minimal preparation. My intention is that each of these entries has enough to be a launching point for at least a short interaction, particularly when you want to break up a string of combat encounters. The scholars don’t always have to be oblivious to the extreme danger they are in, though I imagine that’s a common encounter premise.

In other cases, the scholars have used invisibility spells, scrolls, or potions to sneak past challenging encounters. This might give the DM a chance to reveal alternate routes back to safety, suggesting ways the PCs could have used Stealth and Investigation to bypass danger.

They’re also useful for turning dry research downtime activities into colorful, memorable encounters – introducing them for later dungeon encounters, or paying off having encountered them previously.

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