My favorite NPC (non player character) is a fighter named Agnor we picked up in the Fire Temple (I think) of the Return to the Temple of Elemental evil. He'd been a mercenary, and was doing it for the pay, not because he'd believed in raising the ultimate evil to come and rule the world or whatever. So he surrendered and then ended up coming along with our adventuring party as we sallied forth through the rest of the temples, and eventually he and Brigid hooked up. He's the reason Brigid didn't end up killing the party's wizard during a vampire fight, when the vampire case "Dominate" on her, she of course failed the save, and got to stabbin'; Agnor ended up getting her into a grapple before the final damage was done. But anyway, I'm sure after we "won" the Temple, they rode off into the sunset and lived happily ever after, as retired adventurers do. They do, right?
Though we've had other magnificent and memorable ones.
There was Berias (sp?), an evil minotaur cleric who would provide services for you, healing and otherwise, and of course for a price. He was fascinating, to say in the least, and though none of the party were specifically of his faith it seems to me we spent a lot of time hanging out at his church.
There was the guy who I think was an antipaladin, or at least should have been, who had big black metal plate armor and rode a war elephant (or was it a mammoth?) that he'd covered in chains and tattoos and clearly the animal was in some kind of terrible pain which the NPC used to direct its fury when ridden into battle. I don't think we ever knew his named, just knew he was called The Bastard (the name Marchester comes to mind, was my fiancé's character's name, not the NPC's), but he was something of a foil to my character Penny; he also met a good end, interestingly enough, stemming a tide of something Really Fucking Bad as the players got out of the area. Marchester might've had something to do with that.....
There was Firogg (I know I'm spelling that wrong), the right hand of the town's leader in the D&D game we played last summer. Firogg was a ferocious creature, a leashed threat, who knew his purpose and knew it well. He himself was not a political entity, he was wielded by one.
There's a pair of dragons, not because they were a pair but because of the nature of the story: He-Who-Dwells, and the dragon my character gave her name to, She-Who-Goes-to-Face-the-Enemy. He-Who-Dwells, once resurrected, ending up killing the other, and he fought the mutual enemy with us more than once.
There was Whistler, a mute...monk? we had with us in one of the first games I played with our friends Tim and Mahria (maybe THE first game?) Though he did not speak in words, he was a supportive entity, and we all fucking loved that guy until he met his untimely end.
And currently, there's Imgwin, a one-armed female fighter in our Princes of the Apocalypse game. She's cheerful, she's useful, she drinks too much and she's fun (maybe because she drinks too much, who's to say?) The party has a certain camaraderie, and Imgwen is certainly involved with it.
EDITED TO ADD: And Fithel. I forgot his name and so didn't include him. Fithel was a cleric in a game where we had a limited number of classes to choose from (we were all "fighter types", I think) and the party came into possession of a number of their community's artifacts. Poor Fithel. He survived 'til we stopped playing the game, anyway, but I'll always remember our encounter with a carrion crawler, wherein he got paralyzed while pointing at it in horror....so stayed literally paralyzed, pointing in horror, for an extended period of time.
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