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View Full Version : (3.5) Basing a campaign around players' former PCs? Bad or Good Concept?



Kobold_Love
2009-07-31, 01:07 AM
As someone who has had numerous beloved characters either end up in "limbo" when a campaign or gorup suddenly ends, or has had them die before they completed their goals, I have been thinking of this idea for the last few months. The basic concept is for the players to be able to bring back a past character of their choice, and I as the DM attempt to pick up where they had left off.

I imagine that if all of them had died, then I could make it so that they for some reason were summoned from the beyond to fulfill "unfinished business". By who I don't have a clue yet, or why it/they/whatever would care about the characters' personal quests to bring them back. I imagine the Grim Reaper could do this task, but again why would he?

Or, if their chosen characters never died I could use ideas from teh Ancient PCs article from Dragon #354 (see my other thread made minutes earlier). The ideas there range from them being ageless/endless immortals of old age (basically it would represent the long time that has passed since the players played their particular loved PC), to the PCs somehow having gotten stuck in the cliche stasis/suspended animation trope.


The biggest issue I see with this is that I would need to figure out why they, and their rivals/goals/whatever are now in my multiverse/homebewed world.

Also, I do not have any of their previous DMs' notes, so would this already be an idea dead in the water due to this one issue?


Any advice, ideas, or suggestions would be appreciated.

Altaria87
2009-07-31, 01:29 AM
I remember one time I did this when we decided to do an epic level campaign, so we used the PCs from a game we got bored of, but now at level 22, saying this was them after many quests, it was actually quite fun.

AstralFire
2009-07-31, 01:37 AM
I think it could turn out well. I'd worry less about the previous DMs' notes and more about what's most important to them about those characters.