I’ve never added in NPCs before. Cool idea,
I don’t do anything that formal, but it works out the same.

You should write that up as an article.

I have players create a connection map as part of their session 0. I also had them create one for ancient history to populate specifics of world lore with their input. I started off with the characters in the center, and went around the table snake-style to let people add to the map. The rounds roughly looked like:

Round 1: Character to NPC (new)
Round 2: Character to Location (new), NPC/Location to NPC/Location
Round 3: NPC/Location to Any, PC to ANY (New)/PC to ANY (Existing)
Round 4: ANY to PC
Round 5: PC to ANY (new)/PC to ANY (Existing), ANY to PC
Round 6: PC to ANY (new)/PC to ANY (Existing)
Round 7: NPC/Location to ANY, PC to NPC/LOC (existing)
Round 8: ANY to PC
Round 9: NPC/Location to Any

Players can’t define how other players feel about something, but they can define how the locations/objects/NPCs feel about the players. It’s funny how certain things become very important very quickly.

As an aside, it really thrills the players when something gets added to the map. It’s a good visual sense of accomplishment for them.

https://uploads.disquscdn.com/images/2ad0dc0f735fc302a923b3a0ba983ae4b3780cacdda10afc9338edefab3ea7cb.png

Running a Session Zero for a New Campaign
https://www.tribality.com/2016/03/18/running-a-session-zero-for-a-new-campaign/

I just ran a session zero last week where I had each of the players suggest bonds to connect all of the PCs. They are about to embark on an epic quest… I’m actually running a War of the Lance campaign with player created characters vs. the pregens. I’ve committed to running the Dragons of Autumn third of the mega-adventure. My biggest worry with any long storyline is player and GM fatigue. I’m hoping these bonds will help the adventure feel like a group of long time friends saving the world.

In comparison, I’m running Tomb of Annihilation and we didn’t do much session zero work. The PCs are part of a team, but their only bonds are they got hired for a job and their backstories can’t be pulled on much with the adventure set far from home. Thankfully we’re in the tomb now and it is very challenging – so the campaign is going to finish strong.