In this game, the main heroine will be mute. Luckily, she have two fairies representing her. It's kind of like the typical devil and angel thing floating around one's head representing good and evil, which the player gets to chose between when interacting with an NPC. Only, these fairies doesn't represent good and evil at all. One is a very optimistic character who sees good and beauty in everything, while the other is a really sarcastic and cynical character who sees flaws and stereotypes. However, neither of them are good and evil, and I'm specifically trying to create scenarios with NPC interactions where both of these characters will have a very good point.
An example would be a ghetto rapper making music about his childhood and how hard life is. The optimist fairy would focus on the importance of the message in the music, while the cynical fairy would focus on the fact that this NPC was raised in a quite nice area and had OK parents, and that the ghetto image doesn't go well with that.
Another example is a positive thinking NPC. Now, neither of the fairies believes that anything can be achieved through positive thinking (as they generally have the same basic opinion). The optimist fairy would point out that she's no "positive thinker", but still puts the focus on how some of the things in the philosophy can have some truth in it. The cynic would more focus on the bad consequences of it, like if one's success in life does only depend on how they think and is unrelated to circumstances, it's easy to blame anyone for their own misfortunes and tell them to think more positively, rather than helping them out. (She'll say it in a very sarcastic way.)
So, the fairies are definitely not good vs. evil. They just represent two very different ways to look at things. Of course, this is a smaller thing in the game, the dialogue between characters will be short and I'll do my best to make every conversation fit into three or four short sentences. What I want to do is to avoid it to feel like a propaganda game for any opinion, I specifically want to create scenarios where there's no obvious right answer, because this is a lot about how I think too; when I meet a person who belong to a specific group (religious, activism, political, idealism) I rarely see a good or evil person. I usually see someone who probably got some answers right, but I also see a stereotype that I can sometime take a cynical approach toward (though I try not to attack a person).
I've wanted to reflect that in a game for a while, and this is the right game to do it with, as even the main quest have room for two very different ways to look at it.
So, what NPC's should the player meet? They'll all need help with something (which will make the game's quests) and the player will agree to help them all no matter standpoint. It can be stuff like a "the end is near, repent" guy, or a child with an imaginary friend (though this child is a bit too old to have imaginary friends) who fell down a pit, so the player must go and bring it back. Basically, stuff that you can look at differently.