Where to store the bad guys?

[AEIOU]

The beautiful thing about RW is you can do whatever you want. For how you would like things to be organized, create multiple cast lists -- Enemies, Friends, Unknowns, Monsters. That should work for your needs but I speak from experience when I say you are painting yourself into a corner with this method.

(Un)fortunately, another beautiful thing about RW is that it makes it trivial to create complicated campaigns and plotlines. You know, where the enemy of your enemy is your friend, even though they're your enemy. My worlds are shades of grey. My villains are sometimes allies. People switch sides. I think you can see why containers become less useful the more involved your campaign becomes.

The general recommendation is to NOT use containers for anything that can change or could belong to another container.

Monsters (and spells and poisons and class info and feats and and and) go in my Mechanics section. For me, they are just generic numbers with rules attached to them. They normally don't have names. If I give one of them a name, they have changed in importance and I may create a new entry for them that goes into the region's cast list.

I have a lot of bit players in my world -- the local baker, the kid that delivers messages, the queen's handmaiden, that guy in the bar -- that are just there for fluff. They don't need stats beyond who they are, what they do and how do you identify them. They don't qualify for a full entry. Instead, I keep a list of all NPCs in the region as a table in my Cast List entry. This gives me a quick reference to everyone and where they can be found. And I can always make a full entry later if the NPC becomes more involved.

[Cornelius]

This is how I deal with over 400+ named NPCs:
I play a King Arthur Pendragon game and we play more the events of a family than that of a single character, so all the aunts, uncles, nephews and nieces are there. To keep track of them I have given each a topic entry. Unfortunately this gives me over 400 entries.

I use the containing ability to group the NPCs. So I use this mainly as a visual aid. so I can find them quickly again.
I started out to group them by family. So I made a Group:Family entry where all members of a family are placed.
I noticed that this still created a large number of entries and so I group them by ethnic and region. for the last I used the Group list type.

This gives me the ability to quickly find the NPC.

Some issues I had to deal with:
- Wives: Do I change their location or not? As in the Pendragon world a wife becomes part of her husbands family I change them from their parental family to the husband's family.
- Non landholding knights and families. I started out with only landholding families. their main holding became their family name. So non landholding knights had no family name. I placed them under the family of their wives, in essence becoming part of her family.