My idea on the NPC generator is to write a table with rules for generation and the amount of characters to create for those rules. The rules will be composed of skin color, height, muscle, gender, if adult, teen or child, while the names will be picked from another table once (associated with the gender and if adult, teen or child statuses). Each generated character will be saved with their attributes in a table which you can load and visualize the character (a character browser) and save again ontop of the generated one (for a fine tune).
This is the approach we are working atm for our game. Once all NPCs are done we assign their names to the quest composer and also get the position they are supposed to be found in the world during that particular quest step.