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.
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