Sins and Virtues

Sins and Virtues is a tool to help you flesh out NPC personalities on the fly. I like letting my players take ownership of certain NPCs in our game. This works especially well if that NPC will be recuring during your story. John Wick calls this idea 'The Living City' in one of his articles from Play Dirty.

The trick is giving your players enough of a cue to breath life into those NPC with little or no preparation. I try to make that easier by providing them with this deck of 60 cards.

I ask them to draw two cards (not just one).

Each card has:

a saying

a list of suggested personality traits

a suggestion for what they might be good or bad at

I let them know that these are just suggestions to get their ideas flowing.

If you find these cards fun or useful please drop me a line.

The cards are copyright 2008 by me, Justin Evans through SinisterGame.com, but feel free to print them out and use them as much as you want for personal use. If anybody is interested in publishing them commercially please contact me.

Printing:

There are two PDF files available. Each is 7 pages long. One is designed to be printed on Avery 8871 double sided business cards. The other has crop marks included in case you want to print the cards on regular card stock and cut them yourself.

Make sure 'Page Scaling' is set to 'None' in Adobe Reader otherwise your cards won't line up correctly with the pre-cut business cards.

Also, don't print the entire document since the last page is intended to be the back of all the other pages.