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time becomes tedious and players, no matter how smart they are or what manner of memory they have, will not necessarily remember everything you tell them about. As well, the size of your description should be directly proportional to how "big" your NPC is to your characters, and I'm not talking height or weight, here, although those can be effective descriptive tools as well. Ask yourself how much effect the NPC is to have in the lives of your characters, how long they will be affiliated, and whether the NPC has ulterior motives or not.

My rule of thumb is pretty simple: if the NPC is a bad guy trying to drag the characters into doing something he needs to have done for malicious reasons, then he gets the largest description I can give without giving away his ulteriors. Friendly characters with no motives other than good ones get a smaller, though still relatively substantial, description. More often than not, evil characters, arch-enemies if you will, are going to stick around longer than good characters, because good characters are likely to ask you to perform one deed and then be on your way, while evil characters are going to squeeze your groups characters for all they can get.

Using these characters must be up to you, and how you run your game, but before I move on to the next topic, I would like to point out that it would be an extremely good idea to build a time-line for the actions of your long-term characters. This will help you build ulterior motives, if there are any, and aid you in developing your game around the players characters and keeping your players characters within the confines of your game. Simply put, make a short list of the goals you've developed for your characters to accomplish under the direction of the NPC, placing space between each objective in a vertical manner on a single sheet of paper. As your players give you more information, background, and characteristics of their character, you can blend those into the story as you have it, coming up with happenstances, side goals, and ways for your characters to find out who the bad guy(s) really is/are. Feel free to be as devious as you want about this, but please also keep in mind that your players will not continue to play if all of your settings are developed toward their ill, instead of also having the occasional reward for their troubles.

THE IMPORTANCE OF IN-GAME HISTORY
In many of the novels placed on the market today, and in the movies and television programs produced for our enjoyment

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