Two Kinds of NPC: Agroikoi and Bomolochoi

16 Jun, 2024

Over on his blog my brother Nick wrote a post (link) about designing NPCs in his West Marches campaign, providing a threefold typology of NPCs based on whether and how well they will help the player characters achieve their goals. I quite like the idea he's developing there, so I shared it to the Discord server for Planegea, David Somerville's stonepunk setting, when one user asked what kind of NPCs he should include at the beginning of a Planegea campaign. However, although Nick's post is about kinds of NPCs, it isn't really meant to address quite the question the user was asking on the server. My impression is that the user wanted ideas for NPCs who introduce the themes, concepts, and aesthetics of the Planegea setting to players unfamiliar with it, not what relationships those NPCs have to the PCs' objectives. That got me thinking about designing NPCs deliberately to communicate a setting's atmosphere.

A Mad Tea Party (1907), Arthur Rackham

Specifically, it got me thinking about a few pages in Northrop Frye's An Anatomy of Criticism. The Anatomy is a book of literary theory, the thesis and flaws of which we don't need to get into here. What I want to observe is Frye's own typology of characters early in the book. He notes four different kinds of character that appear across literary works, though the role each plays is different according to the work's genre. Frye calls these characters the alazon, the eiron, the bomolochos, and the agroikos, taking these terms from (much) earlier critics. It's the last two that are most relevant here, but I'll discuss the other two briefly first.

The alazon (meaning "imposter") is generally hypocritical or ignorant, but either way regards themselves as more important than they really are. The eiron has no such misapprehensions; they are self-deprecating, though they could either be humble or they could be a jokester willing to make light of themselves. Protagonists are either alazon or eiron,¹ depending on the genre they are in; according to Frye, whichever one the protagonists are, the antagonists are the other one. In tragedies the protagonist is usually an alazon; in the other three genres Frye discusses, the protagonist is usually an eiron. This means that in tragedies, and more or less only in tragedies, it is the antagonist who is self-deprecating. Whether PCs tend to be alazon or eiron varies from table to table, I imagine. The point is that when we're talking about non-antagonist NPCs, we aren't talking about either alazon or eiron.

Like the alazon and the eiron, the bomolochos and the agroikos are opposites. Frye takes the names for the character types from the most common examples in ancient Greek comedies. The bomolochos, meaning "buffoon," brings an air of festivity into the comedy, while the agroikos, meaning "farmer," brings a measure of crankiness and practicality. In other words, in a comedy the buffoon is more comic and the farmer is less comic. But importantly these character types would be very different in a tragedy or a romance. As Frye describes them, the bomolochos leans into the genre's atmosphere and the agroikos introduces a dose of reality. So in a tragedy, the bomolochos would be an innocent victim who dies tragically, like Hamlet's Ophelia, and the agroikos would be the phlegmatic observer who lives to mourn them, like Hamlet's Horatio. In a romance (in Frye's terms this means something more like an adventure story, ideally one with knights and princesses and dragons), the bomolochos would be a fairy or friendly giant while the agroikos would be an honourless mercenary or a cautious servant.

I think it will be immediately obvious to you why you'd introduce a bomolochos in your game: they directly heighten the mood or themes you're going for. Why would you introduce an agroikos, though? Perhaps counterintuitively, an agroikos heightens the atmosphere, too, by producing a contrast. When the knight's cautious servant warns about the dangers of the forest, the knight appears more heroic entering it. When even the concerned, well-adjusted friend weeps over the tragic hero's grave, it drives home how sad the ending is, and also suggests that the story was a tragedy in part because the hero wasn't so well-adjusted. Every supporting character can't be an agroikos, but stories work best when some of them are.

One of the few things Walden Media's 2010 The Voyage of the Dawn Treader got right was its treatment of Eustace, and he's an excellent example of an agroikos in a fantasy. By the third installment of a fantasy series, the magical elements can appear less magical. Indeed, the two Pevensies still going to Narnia are fully accustomed to the country's fantasy residents and events; we can no longer look to them to see that the setting is remarkable. It is through the annoyingly mundane Eustace's reactions to Narnia that we are reminded how fantastical it all is. Furthermore, the film helps us maintain our suspension of disbelief by first acknowledging that disbelief in a character who shares it and then showing us that he's wrong, at least where Narnia is concerned.

So, perhaps, if you want to be deliberate about fostering a particular atmosphere in your tabletop game, you might think about the NPCs as bomolochoi and agroikoi (though by all means feel free to forget those particular words). Here are some possibilities:

• In a grimdark setting, most NPCs will be untrusting and slow to cooperate, but maybe include a few who are refreshingly normal, willing to trust and aid the party however foolhardy that might seem, and also willing to comment on how suspicious the other characters are and how much harder that makes life for everyone.
• In a high fantasy setting, many NPCs will be supernatural creatures, but maybe include a few normal human farmers awed by the party's magic items and overly impressed by stories of their heroics – or underwhelmed by those stories if they care more about supporting a family than about feats of derring do.
• In a sword-and-sorcery setting, NPCs will mostly be mercenaries, scoundrels, and the conjurers or priests who hire them, but maybe include a few well-intentioned people with decidedly human abilities just trying to do the right thing, even if they mostly can't succeed.

In each case, by introducing a character with a more realistic perspective than the other NPCs, you can both create a contrast with the overall atmosphere of the work and also call attention to that atmosphere directly with the character's own observations.

For Planegea, then, what NPCs could you use? Well, it depends on what kind of Planegean game you want to run. The Star Shaman's Song of Planegea helpfully describes the different genres you could draw on depending on which of the setting's main threats the party is up against, but in general the setting is stonepunk rather than prehistoric fiction, borrowing heavily from sword-and-sorcery for its tone. Therefore I might tend toward the pulpy for bomolochos, using those kinships invented or highly reinterpreted for the setting, and I might tend toward prehistoric fiction for agroikoi, focusing on the more prosaic survival elements. Here are some examples:

Bomolochoi

• twin elf shamans who beseech their clan's god to conjure food during a famine;
• an orc hunter from another tribe poaching the party's quarry in order to secure the glory for himself;
• a giant-killing dwarf whose legend always proceeds her, and is painted on her rocky surfaces in case it doesn't;
• a saurian spellskin who will enchant items in exchange for rare ingredients gotten by any means, so long as you don't ask where he gets all the blood needed for the enchantment.

Agroikoi

• a human gatherer worried because he can't visit the regular berry bushes now that longwings have taken residence among them;
• a quietkin fisher whose consistent skill and regular catches sometimes go unnoticed because she rarely speaks and never brags;
• an exhausted half-giant chieftain who spends too much time negotiating access to pastures for the clan's flock;
• a half-ooze guardian who wins skirmishes against the cultists more because of competent logistics in the weeks before combat than because of any particular heroics on the day of battle.

Of course, if you want to run a Planegea that hews closer to prehistoric fiction than to stonepunk, then you'll need a different realistic contrast. Instead of emphasizing the difficulty of survival, an agroikoi might introduce laughter and festivity, or petty squabbling, or good-natured gossip, or any of the other facets of real life that have always existed among people but don't necessarily fit in well with our expectations of prehistoric life.

A disclaimer, however: unlike other techniques I have described on this blog (here and here), I have not consciously tried this approach myself, and so cannot give any guarantees about its quality. Furthermore, I do not think every one of the types in Nick's post is appropriate for both bomolochoi and agroikoi. For example, an agroikoi in a grimdark setting almost certainly must be what Nick calls friendly, while a bomolochoi probably cannot be (though a bomolochoi could appear friendly, only to abandon the party at a vulnerable moment). It would take some thought to use the two typologies in concert.