Making a location feel alive

[Nicodemus Archleone]

Hello fellow roleplayers.

I´ve been playing DFRPG since it first came out. But always as a player.
Now I´m trying to get my ass in gear and try to GM. I tried GMing once before, but collapsed under my own expectations, not my players mind you. I wanted to be as good as my very experienced GM, and well that´s not happening over night, and what I tried I think was improv GMing, which diden´t pan out at all, so now I´ll try preperation GMing.
So now I´ve stripped the magic of the FATE system, I have for some reason never got that on the backbone just being able to do it, and so I removed it from the game. It makes sense as well since my group I´m running for, all are relatively new to RPGs, one of them have a bit of D&D experience a long time ago, another a bit of Call of Cthulhu but nothing much as far as I know.
One of my players wanted a Zombie game and so did I for that matter, so I tried to create it and I think I´ve got some fairly useful. It was supposed to be a one shot, now it´s a short little campaign it feels like.
My current situation for this act/session of the campaign is, the players has reached a supposedly "secure" location, a survivors camp kind of thing. Who´s running the joint is kind of up in the air right now, I´ve got two candidates the "old one" and the "new one" and they are supposed to help be the deciding factor for what happens now, who gets control. Now earlier I´ve just planned it as I´ll be able to toss different scenes at my players as they progress the story. But now I´m in one location, and I need them to make decision based on feedback from NPCs, which way should they go, ultimately it´s up to them of course, but it´s one location I need to make feel alive. Enough people on the location to make it feel alive, with different opinions and stuff, but not so many that it will overwhelm both players and me for that matter. I´ve had characters two ways before this. Full PC style NPC sheets, which most of my NPCs consist of, one people who are basicly just one aspect to cover what they are like. Do I need to just make a bunch of aspects to try and bring this place to life? one aspect being one person? or come up with a bunch of "full" NPCs? what do you guys do when you need to make a location feel alive? have you got some web based resources for generating Aspect ideas? have you got some old characters I could "borrow" and alter to suit my need for populating my location? or perhaps like most of the time, I´ll get ideas from talking back and forward with you guys, back and forth conversations is usually a good way normally to spawn ideas. Any idea how many I would need to populate a location? looking forward to your input.

[Taran]

Here's a few links:

Spare character concepts

Generic NPC's

I haven't looked at the former but I've gone through the Generic NPC's and there's lots there.  At the very least, it'll give you ideas.  There's no index so you might have to slog through it.  Maybe the DFRPG Wiki has it in a more organized format.

I'd have a good idea of who you want, and have a few aspects for most of the NPC's.  If the PC's interact with some more than others, then you can detail those.

Scene aspects make a location come to life.  Make some interesting ones and have them come into play.  You could even have an NPC tell a story...like,  why they call a certain street 'death alley' (or whatever)  to bring it to life.

If you can get pictures of NPC's and buildings/locations, I find that always helps with immersion.

Having an interesting background for the location will help you out:  what kind of power structure, who the main players are etc...
I like to throw in a non-consequential character in there but make them super interesting and see if the players turn it into anything. 

Also, invite your players to make declarations about the location: location/scene aspects, NPC's, etc...

I like environmental stuff to make things come alive a bit, as long as it doesn't bog things down:
Lots of fog that blocks perception rolls
Frigid cold/blistering heat that they have to, occasionally, make endurance rolls to resist
Heavy winds or storms...that kind of thing.

[Haru]

I've got a magical refugee camp in one of my games here on the board. I don't think I've done anything special, just filled it as it seemed appropriate.

Do I need to just make a bunch of aspects to try and bring this place to life? one aspect being one person? or come up with a bunch of "full" NPCs?

Hold your horses there, I think you might be going about this a bit backwards. Aspects are mechanical representations of things that are there. But the things are there whether or not there are aspects representing them.

So when I went about creating the refugee camp, I started out with the main character, the woman who owned the land. She's the mother of one of the characters and a pretty powerful psychic, so she new there would be the need for a refugee camp, which means she had time to plan. And I've pretty much just worked from there. Since she's had time to plan, there's already some supplies and allies there who started building the camp. But since they also don't have too many resources, it's not too much. A friend of hers looted his army surplus store to get things going, a few minor talents who already felt the need to get to a safe space, and they started setting up tents, building up minor magical security, and so on.

When the players arrived, I had 2 characters fully fleshed out. One of them was Mary, the owner, the other, Susan, was a witch who basically took over the coordination of setting everything up, so the players kind of ran into her pretty quickly. Everyone else was not set up at all, other than "there are a few more people there". Well, and the characters coming with the group that had already been established, of course. I think there were 2 of them at the time, one more later on.

When the players needed an expert in magical disguises, that was basically a team effort to bring them to life. It was well established that there were lots of witches and minor talents in the camp, some where already there, some brought there by the group when they rescued them. The players asked for someone to help them, since none of them was really good at something like this, and a successful rapport roll later, I fleshed out a group of witches who were good at creating disguises like that.

I don't think I've ever even put an aspect on the camp. The characters are fairly well fleshed out, sure, but the camp is mainly a bunch of descriptions, since it hasn't become important enough to make use of aspects like that.