100 Patrons and What They're Not Telling You

Every job has a second job inside it, and it's the patron's.

Nobody hires adventurers because things are going well. The person across the table has a problem they can't solve themselves, a reason they can't take it to the watch, and a version of the story they rehearsed on the way over. This is a book of one hundred of them — in back rooms, manors, guildhalls, temples, council chambers, towers, camps, alleys and cottage doorways — and each is offering your players a job that is not quite the job they'll end up doing.

Each entry gives you three things:

• The offer — who they are, what they want done, and what they're paying, as the party hears it
• What they're not telling you — the truth, for your eyes only
• The thread — what happens when the party finds out, or when the gap between the two starts to matter

That third line is the engine. A patron with a secret turns a fetch quest into a story, because the moment the party learns what they're really carrying, they have to decide who they're working for.

Organised by where the patron holds court: In the Back Room · At the Manor · In the Guildhall · At the Altar · In the Council Chamber · In the Tower · In the Camp · In the Alley · At the Cottage Door · The Ones Who Shouldn't Be Hiring. Numbered 01–100, so you can roll d100 whenever someone needs to walk in.

System-neutral. No stats, no reward tables, no assumed setting. Fees are named in coin and left for you to scale. Works with any fantasy TTRPG, and most of the patrons port straight into other genres. Most of them aren't villains: they're people who've decided the party doesn't need the whole truth, and about half of them are right.

13-page A4 PDF, cleanly typeset in two columns, print-friendly.

Vol. I — 100 NPCs Who Are Lying to You, Vol. II — 100 Rumours — and What's Actually True and Vol. III — 100 Shops With Something Wrong With Them are built the same way. A free ten-entry taster is on the same store page.

Written with the assistance of AI tools, then curated and edited for the table.