Hotel Nowhere: A Deep Dive Into My D&D Campaign

The Staff of Hotel Nowhere

Guide NPCs are a good addition. NPCs your party can befriend and help are a good addition. NPCs who can potentially double as love interests are a good addition.

So, it's only fair that I made eleven guide NPCs that the party interacts with on a regular basis. Hotel Nowhere's a big place that serves a lot of needs at once, and it needs a staff to keep it running—and me being the character-creation nerd that I am, I did my level best to flesh out everyone. A lot of them wind up being pretty instrumental in PC character arcs, after all.

Also, heads up—I'll be giving you details about character backstories that the players are not privy to yet. So, you guys get spoilers ahead of time.

Let's get cracking.

Just A Nice Intelligent and Curious Educator, aka JANICE

JANICE is a Warforged artificer from the year 3034 (if you don't know what Warforged are, they're pretty much robots), and she acts as the "rehabilitation professor" at HoNo—basically, she's in charge of catching them up on important historical events and cultural norms in Chronopolis. Seeing as she was designed to be a history teacher, this makes perfect sense... unless, of course, you take into account that she's more than a little bit psychotic. It really just manifests in poor people skills, constant cheer even in dire circumstances, and a very short fuse.

There is actually a reason behind JANICE's off-putting demeanor, which I'll be getting into. She was made as part of a quote-unquote "social experiment" held in a moon colony, designed to study cults, indoctrination, and how skewed information spreads. JANICE wasn't aware of this until she became an artificer and started messing with her programming out of curiosity, and, well... she went into a full-fledged breakdown after that, completely deleting the part of her programming that prevented her from harming others. Since she's a "caretaker bot" and that do-no-harm protocol was an integral part of her programming, she malfunctioned like hell, killing several of the people behind the experiment before getting sent to Chronopolis.

Don't worry! JANICE has been at Hotel Nowhere for seventy years now, and she's processed (read: repressed) a lot of that trauma. And she does care deeply about the people she helps, so you get a very protective psycho robot on your side. Fun!

Ashley Nikola "Ash" McCaffery

Ash is your typical bisexual tiefling warlock, who just so happens to be a former private eye from 1942. They act as the concierge of Hotel Nowhere, which means that most of the time, they just sleep at their desk and occasionally offer witty anecdotes and bad advice (and yes, they're absolutely inspired by Juno Steel). Also, they're dating JANICE. It's surprisingly wholesome.

Because I committed to the noir-movie aesthetic, Ash grew up in the poorer neighborhoods of Chicago. Their mom died when they were a kid, and while their father wasn't a jerk, he kind of closed into himself after his wife's death, leaving Ash unsupervised more than enough times. The day after their nineteenth birthday, they witnessed a famous actress known as Lily Livingston get shot... and they then immediately discovered that Lily happened to be a necromancer, who'd already made the decision to become a lich. The two solved her murder, and Lily became Ash's patron, creating for a hell of a duo. Ash got sent to Chronopolis eight years later due to them trying to root out corruption in the CPD and almost succeeding, but they had a pretty good career prior to that little incident. Even if that career was mostly helped due to several relationships with reporters.

Ash is a fun character, and their parent-kid dynamic with Lily is equally entertaining (even if I haven't gotten to officially play it). There's just something so compelling about a detective who's both incredible at their job and terrible at it—and yes, I am a fan of the Pink Panther movies. Even if Ash is more of a Nick Charles/Benoit Blanc type than Clouseau at heart.