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Now if ever an NPC played a much larger role in a pen and paper RPG than originally expected by me as the then game master it was this here pegasus named Slowdrops.
The original intention was for him to serve just two purposes.
Firstly, he was to be a somewhat crazy tinkerer to provide our acrophobic earthpony character Graystan with a "Sturzstoppler" (roughly translated "fall stopper") as he would call his newest invention that is what we would call a parachute. Secondly he was to wear the black uniform with the sign of the organization our group was working against. Far from being part of that organization, his telling that a pegasus had sold that uniform to him (whe he bought because he was fascinated by the material (not the typical kind of cloth)) was meant to be a first clue that the characters of our group were going to meet another NPC again, whom they had met before.

Slowdrops however turned out far too interesting and far too popular with the players to stop at those two tasks and he became a whole storyarc of his own (the end of which our group may have yet too experience as of now (February 2018)). One thing that became utterly clear the moment anypony talked to Slowdrops was that he had an utterly messed up concept (if any) of time. Not only would he sometimes switch tenses several time within a single sentence, but sometimes he would also casually talk about things that were going to happen in a few moments like they had already happened (and sometimes make preparations for them) or talk of things long past like they were present or future or of things so far in the future that nopony could possibly know about them without thinking anything of it.
At one point he sang the Cloudsdale Anthem as sung by Spike which would be more than a 1000 years after our characters. When then one of our characters asked him about that song Slowdrops was both, utterly confused and utterly confusing to our characters by pointing out that he couldn't have sung that song because "the dragon has not hatched that will have sung that song in the Chrystal Empire that is not yet brought back now" (or something along those lines). Our RPG is set less than a decade after the fall of the Chrystal Empire.
Far from being a prophet of any kind Slowdrops doesn't realize there is anything unusual about him being aware of stuff that is going to happen or about him constructing things to prepare for these things. He also stays clear of being omniscient or of seeing the future as something clearly defined and unchangeable.
In spite of being almost impossible to understand as a character he was about as helpful and selfless as any character could be and at the same time "self" seemed to be a concept that he seemed to have limited understanding of. The one thing where his understanding of "self" seemed to come through and where he seemed adorably insecure was in his crush for Cloudtrotter (and I hope it was a bit of a triumph for the players that their encouraging Slowdrops led to him to confess to Cloudtrotter who in turn loved this character of fractured mind over many a handsome pegasus suitor).
Slowdrops is an extremely creative inventor, but possibly some of the stuff he builds and constructs without ever claiming any ownership to the ideas are in fact not his inventions at all.
There is something positive about this ever cheerful character who most of the time (the exception being his courting of Cloudtrotter) acted with the confidence of one who has alredy seen what is going to happen. Yet at the same time he may also be one of the darkest and saddest plotpoints in the adventure that I mastered for our group. For at the very end of that chapter of our adventure (while Slowdrops was giving a ride to our characters in a kind of zeppelin he had sawn together from uniforms of the group of antagonists our group is working against (turned out the material from those uniforms was just what he needed to construct a zeppelin that would hold the lighter than air filling)) Slowdrops suddenly sang a song that gave a good idea of what happened to his mind.
Thing about that song was that at one point earlier in the story a NPC was only just begining to compose a song about a scientist, Professor Ludwig Sturm, who was her brother but now works for the antagonists our group is fighting. The song refers to Professor Sturm as "old winged wirebeard" and it stongly implies that Slowdrop's mind (concept of time and of self at least) were shattered by that professor's experimenting with old magic in ruins (rumored to be of centaur origin) near Cloudsdale and using it on the foal that Slowdrops was at the time.
Sung to the melody of Hoist the colors, this is what Slowdrops sang:

The old winged wirebeard
Took a foal to his home
He told him tales of distant lands
And times that he would roam

[Chorus]
Yo ho, had he run
And shunned old winged wirebeard
His mind would still be here today
Unscattered and unhurt

The foal was very curious
About what he would tell
And followed old winged wirebeard
To the ruins below Cloudsdale

[Chorus]

The came to the ruins and wirebeard told
The foal how to proceed
To uncover all the mysteries
He would help, he said, in need

[Chorus]

But something went wrong and the young foal
Saw everything there was to see
Of past, present and future times
And the foal's mind ceased to be

[Chorus]

All there was, is and will be
was more than one mind could hold
Gone was coherence and order of time
For science a foal's mind was sold

[Chorus]

Old winged wirebeard left his home
And descended to Canterlot
They say old wirebeard lost his wings
And that the foal he just forgot

So Slowdrops presumably in a moment saw everything that ever was, is, will be and probably (since I stayed clear of declaring future as something set in stone) could be, given the respective decisions. It left him in a condition in which he was quite lovable (I don't think the other players liked any other character I made up for the adventure as much as him) but with a totally different and inexplicable perception of everything.

For the background I used one kindly offered by oxinfree which I just edited a little to make a wall and the ceiling look like they are part of a cloud building. It was mentioned in the RPG that his laboratory (unlike usual Cloudsdale buildings) had a solid wooden floor installed (courtesy of Cloudtrotter's solid cloud spell) so any tools or things Slowdrops might drop in his chaotic laboratory woulnd't just fall through the clouds and all the way down to earth.

Upvotes at import: 5 | Stars at import: 3
Posted previously at: 2018-02-11T21:46:21 | Posted previously by: malte279