3/5/01 “Drew Id” sean_atlas@yahoo.com
As someone else mentioned, it can be hard to create a plot that is designed to be funny, but you can take a basic plot and fill it with NPC's that are designed to be funny. The best advice I can give is to have the goal of the small side quest be something stupid, but important to some people, like kidnapping the princess's dog, or something like that. Then throw in the stupidest NPC's you can think up, and then make them even stupider. NPC's that bicker and insult one another are good, as are NPC's that can embarrass the PC's. Also, NPC's that will absolutely refuse to admit something (or that can not be convinced of something) that is otherwise extremely obvious. An example would be a pickpocket that is caught red-handed with their hand stuck in a PC's pocket and they can't get their hand out, and yet the pickpocket denies that they were doing anything wrong, even under the most extreme questioning.
One NPC I created a while back and have never found a good spot to bring into an adventure was an old retired (and slightly crazy) fighter, who had been knocked unconscious by some bandits on a country road. When he woke up, he was convinced that he had died, and that he was now a ghost, and that he could not pass on to the afterlife until he had avenged himself. What was worse, is that he believed that he could make himself invisible, and would often pick up objects, such as someone's mug of ale in a tavern, and then walk around the room with it, moaning “ooooooooh”, like he was a ghost, and then set it back down again, because it was part of his occasional “required haunting duties”. He was convinced he would walk through walls, could not be harmed by normal weapons, could not enter holy areas, etc. and no amount of arguing and no amount of obvious evidence could convince him otherwise. For instance, if you pointed out that you could see him when he was “invisible”, you were obviously magical and you didn't count. He lived on the outskirts of some village, in an abandoned farmhouse, and the people there had gotten used to him and tended to feed into his beliefs, which just made it worse.