On Recyling PC's

For my current game "Trouble on the Way to La'Moran", I needed (wanted) a caravan full of named NPCs with distinctive personalities. I wanted the characters be easy to play, easy to remember, and hardest of all, easy to build.

So I stole my players characters from old campaigns. I've been playing with this group for a while, and I run relatively short campaigns, so there are a fair number of old PC concepts lying around. The idea kind of got going from my players reusing variants on their characters. A young doctor with an eccentric family. A Japanese officer with a fear of deep water. Then last game we reused the Japanese officer as a joke, and now I'm opening the floodgates: about half of my caravan is named after old PC's with reasonably matching professions and outlooks.

So far, its gone great. The "Nepotism" on display can be humorous at times, as players give namesakes of their old characters more than the benefit of the doubt or go out of their way to interact with or praise them. It also lets me highlight characters that should be treated as mysteries or puzzles: the remaining NPC's are more interesting, because we already know the others. It also helps with the cognitive load of trying to run 20 NPCs.

This doesn't mean that the borrowed characters are "safe" and "known" though. One of them is almost certainly a vampire. Another is likely to blow something up unadvisedly. The Japanese officer is obviously playing some sort of cat and mouse spy game with another character in the caravan (an old NPC uncomfortable ally... and you can guess which character they are more sympathetic to). I've also switched up backgrounds a little: The explosive loving lieutenant from Upstate New York is now a dwarf that smells suspiciously of gunpowder. He's still got the same name, but how much else is the same, how much else is different? The guy from New York was in love with a senator's daughter, does she have an equivalent in a generic fantasy setting with a very different core activity? We'll just have to see.

The campaign isn't over yet, but so far the character reuse has gone well.I've been really surprised at just how enjoyable the experience has been. It certainly helps with the players remembering everyone. I don't think I'll do it every campaign, it lends itself to a little playful levity, but for this campaign, its been great.

I hope you enjoyed reading this, and I hope this gives you some ideas for new NPC's in your games. Happy Gaming!