Description Economy: Quick NPCs

You often have to come up with NPCs on the spot, and want to avoid falling into the rut that all your bartenders are sullen or all are hearty fellows. For example

Captain Jack Starling, CG high-elf fighter 1 (ex military) "Rely on me, I served." 

Brave, Wasteful. Blonde locks, muscular; wears chainmail, longsword, throwing axe; no bow

Goals: combat humanoids to become an Eldritch Knight

Secret: ashamed he lost his whole squad to orcs; will rage attack them

 

Mini-NPC vignette

 
Name, Alignment Race Job  Typical Quote
2-trait character; brief looks. Optionally, goals, secret.

Character is more important than looks. Character, goals and secret are the most effective way to help you roleplay them. In later D&D you can infer how they look and are equipped from stats, armor class and weapon. 

To quickly invent character, I use a table of personality traits on my DM screen, in pairs of positive and negative, and roll twice on that. Gary Gygax provided such a table in Keep on the Borderlands, and it worked well. He also did provide more elaborate tables in the 1e DMG, but I like the simpler one better. I tweaked it to something like this

NPC personality roll 2x d20, d6 (1-3 / 4-6)

1. Driven / Lazy 

2. Brave / Cowardly 

3. Kind / Cruel 

4. Cheerful / Morose 

5. Courteous / Rude 

6. Honest / Deceitful 

7. Forgiving / Jealous

8. Hedonistic / Sober 

9. Helpful / Egotistic

10. Proud / Servile

11. Sensitive / Heartless

12. Careless / Cautious

13. Nosy / Solitary

14. Peaceful / Angry

15. Prankish / Contrary

16. Modest / Bragging

17. Generous / Greedy

18. Talkative / Taciturn

19. Trusting / Suspicious

20. Wasteful / Miserly 

Language and Dialect

One good way to make your NPCs more memorable is to use dialects. This also can help to characterize various races. Obviously, in how far you can do this depends on your talent with language. Chris Perkins is very good in this, as are (unsurprisingly) the voice actors from Critical Role.

I tend to use my home regions dialect for rural folk, french pronounciation for elves, italian pronounciation for drow. For dwaves I grumble.