Please be careful with spoilers from major campaigns, particularly Curse of Strand cos I’m playing through that atm please thank you 😊
I’ll go first…
I’m running a homebrew pirate campaign and I have a character called Rusty Ben who’s great fun to play. He’s a warforged in the form of a skeleton made of rusted iron. He wears a pirate hat and he has a stuffed parrot nailed to his shoulder. He’s a great sailor, who never tires, or eats, and he even keeps watch as he ‘sleeps’, because warforged. He’s also handy with repair work, so he’s a valuable member of the party’s pirate crew. He’s very friendly and speaks in a kind of silly Southern US accent. When he asked to join the party’s crew, he held put a gold piece and said “I can pay my own way!”. They declined and one of them gave him a silver piece as wages. He was bowled over by their generosity. Another player offered him a copper piece as well, and he got all serious and said, “No, no… let me earn the copper piece.”
He acts as a kind of sailoring guide for the party. He has worked aboard quite a few pirate ships, until he was aboard one that sank in battle. He walked for a long time across the bottom of the sea and eventually found an island and just walked up onto the beach, where he met the crew of The Candlestick Maker’s Revenge and joined them, which is where the party met him at the start of the campaign. They took passage on that ship to get to the island chain that is the setting fornthe canpaign. He’s one of my favourite people that I’ve ever made up!
I at one point had a pair of NPCs travelling with the party. One was an Orog (which is like an orc/ogre hybrid) and the other was an Elf Archer who rode a Winter wolf. The two NPCs both had good reason to trust each other but only so long as the party’s interests aligned with theirs. Orcs and Elves in my setting are very mistrustful of each other, and it was fun to frequently present the group with interesting choices where these NPCs were arguing for different options. The PCs wanted to keep them both around because they were both reasonably powerful companions, and they knew that the boss at the end of the adventure was an adult dragon, so they needed the help, which meant they had a mechanical incentive to keep these NPCs away from each other’s throats.