DMs. Tell us what your cross-campaign characters are.

[dascarletm]

I have them, other DMs I know have them. Sometimes they have the same name, sometimes it is just the same personality.

I'm talking about characters that you or your DM has, that seem to show up in almost every game they run. They may or may not be carbon copies, but when you hear the voice or the demeanor you think, "Ah this is the X character."

I'll start.

The Siggard
I don't know why I named this guy Siggard, but this is the character I try my best Eastern European accent with. Personality wise, he is very unaware or uncaring about social niceties. It's hard to describe him, but he usually tries to become the best friend of one of the PCs. He isn't very coy about it.

The Pompous Magician - Sylphanis
Almost always an arcane spell-caster, and always pretentious. This person usually incites the most rage in my wife. Whenever anyone fails at something this one points out awful the plan was, unless it was his plan. If it was his plan, it of course was the fault of a PC screwing it up.

The Creep - Bjorn
I do a really good voice for a creep. It's so good that my wife feels creep'd out by me. She describes the voice as "greasy." I usually ensure this character has some sort of plot protection. Not in that he has a divine shield, but killing him will usually be counter productive. The original was the son of a Norse noble that my wife's character was going to marry. (For political favor).

The Uncaring Gruff Guy - Grug
Usually an orc or other monstrous race, this guy just does not care... about anything. The original was a half-orc cook. I put on a low rasp voice and speak very little, with the bare minimum of words required to reply when asked anything.

These four character almost always show up in a campaign when I DM. What recurring characters do other DMs employ?

[Geddy2112]

Our table is pretty open about shameless copypasting our previous PC's, other players NPC's, and with permission, other players PC's. For almost 2 years our sessions have been a giant inside joke and homages to previous sessions.

4 npc's that always show up are the redshirts:

Hosed and Screwed These are the redshirts that packed heat, rolled a series of 20's on every check and attack, took beatings from dragons and lived to tell the tale. They first appeared in an old campaign as two "carry the party crap" redshirts. We asked for a name, and the DM, expecting them to die instantly said jokingly "Hosed and Screwed". When the party was attacked and almost killed by a psychic tree, these two manage to nat 20 the will save against mind control and using improvised weapons, kill the thing. They lived almost the entire campaign pulling similar feats of awesome. Anytime a redshirt or 2 redshirts save the day, they are renamed Hosed and/or Screwed

Dips**t and Thursday These are the opposite of Hosed and Screwed. Although they can be any NPC temporarily with the party, they are usually people expected to be halfway competent-they might be trained sailors, caravan guards, low level mercs, town guards, hunters, usually people with a level in a PC class. Yet, the minute things go south they are as durable and reliable as wet cardbaord. Survive or die, they are forever referred to as Dip**** and Thursday.

[XionUnborn01]

I only have a couple of recurring characters.

Roar Bindingle-Ogre Half Dragon: He has various iterations and he's always either a mayor, king, or someone in a similar position. He's not exactly smart but very charismatic and enjoys cooking. He usually shows up as either part of a diplomatic process or sometimes as quest giver.

Rogiin: He's usually a big bad. He first showed up in an epic campaign that dealt with time travel so I use that to mess with characters. He's extremely arrogant and doesn't fear anything because he's hiveminded himself with other hims on other times. Basically when he shows up you can guarantee that he'll be back but his build will be way different. I use him to create a recurring character to anger the PCs for a few levels.

Happerdag: A gnome tinkerer who may not personally be present but his odd inventions show up frequently.

[Thealtruistorc]

The Revolutionary For some reason I always manage to work at least one major character into my campaign who wants to overthrow the powers that be. Most often, he manifests himself as a lonely guy with one or two loyal friends and an inability to get people to genuinely respect his opinons I feel kind of sad for him and that's why I keep bringing him back.

The Compulsive Writer Diaries are a fun plot hook for me, and I always like to have a character who records his findings about monsters, histories, or other matters in a journal of some sort. My favorite was a Kobold Druid named Noknok the Green, who left a diary full of war stories and commentary about powerful enemies that he had faced in the territory.

The Crippled Mage The idea behind this character is that they possess obscene magical abilities, but can't leave a certain area. This varies from wizards tied to their sanctum to clerics who actually have duties as a local preacher that can't be interrupted for adventuring. They may be good or evil, but they always seem to make the local world orbit around them (just as they can make lots of other things orbit around them, most notably summons and ballista bolts). In many ways, they are sort of fun to roleplay ("we all swear fealty to the strange man in the tower, but nobody has ever seen him. I doubt that he's even a man"), and add a little bit of mythos to the world wherever they may show up.

[Crake]

I tend to try and shy away from having NPC archetypes in my games, though I do have recurring NPCs that are cross campaign, at least to a small degree.

Magnus - If anyone's ever used the idea of "Dragons of the great game" from MMV, my world has something akin to that, only on steroids, and everyone's playing, even if they don't know it. Magus is one of the great dragon lords and sometimes appears in different guises to gently nudge the players in a direction that will benefit him in some way, most often appearing as a very well dressed young man in an almost impossibly clean, white suit. He can also be found cleaning up the messes of his wife, Marybelle.

Marybelle - If players happen to come across Marybelle, they're either very lucky, or very unlucky, depending on the season. Having a very seasonal mood, Marybelle is a shining beacon of good in summer, and a hedonistic demon in winter. Catch her in spring and she'll probably just mess with you for fun. Rarely ever directly encountered, the players are more likely to meet her through one of her familiar's Tali, the traveling cat godess (really just a tibbit familiar with the ability to cast powerful enough spells to pose as a god to bumpkin mortals thanks to being the familiar of an epic spellcaster).

The Von Altenburgs - Should the players ever find themselves in the largest city in the game, Sarona City, they will likely hear about the Von Altenburgs very quickly. The oldest and most powerful noble house in the region, the family is actually a conglomerate of familial vampires, who refuse to turn any but their own blood, having a living mortal lineage to ensure their numbers are always replenished when one dies. Then youngest of their kind are the most likely to be met out in the city, currently Claudia and Fi, two sisters of the same generation and turned within the last few years.

Elaina - Lauded as the Platinum Dragon of the famed Dragon's Roar guild, she travels the world in search of challenges to meet her skill. Quite possibly the most powerful mortal warrior in the whole world, she is capable of feats unimaginable by most folk. Despite all that, she has a soft side for pretty things, and is usually very quiet unless angered.

And most recently, I re-introduced the following pair in one of my games

Scarlet and Amber: Scarlet and Amber are an unlikely pair, a succubus and a lillend. Placed together from the time of their creation, the two have never known life without the other, each cancelling out the other's moral nature, Scarlet the succubus tempting Amber the Lillend into doing fun, but sometimes unintentionally cruel things, while Amber convinces Scarlet to not do utterly irredeemable acts of evil, resulting in the two of the both being Chaotic Neutral, depsite their alignment subtypes. The two are quite young for outsiders, and, having grown up without any mentors or role models, the two are often seen as incredibly naive by others due to their mannerisms and reactions to various stimuli (especially food), but under the surface lie two powerful and competent warriors. Amber is a master of the desert wind style, possessing the famed desert wind scimitar herself, and able to eviscerate any foe with a thousand cuts as she dances around them, while Scarlet is a powerful binder, able to borrow the powers of long forgotten heros and villains, and even those of fallen gods.

[torrasque666]

Bomar the Baker: This guy shows up in every game, named specifically Bomar the Baker, and acts as either one of two things. The bumbling town fool, or the mysterious wanderer. Usually shows up when the party is having trouble advancing the plot to give some hints, always in the form of bread.

[Naez]

Sonja the Wild Mage
Originally a 4e PC from a campaign I ran. I loved the roleplay the player put into it and the characters randomness and ability to cause anything and everything to happen that I have her make joke appearances in every campaign I've run. Sonja is a halfling sorcerer who disguises herself, exceedingly convincingly, as a human child. So far in her appearances she has rammed a car into a giant mushroom, crushed a criminal beneath a shipping crate, and summoned disney characters to do a sing-along in a tavern. she's a useful tool for when the characters have derailed and I need a random event to point them back to the main story or just when I feel the need to inject a little humor.

[Solidarity]

For the longest time, I'd given the party bard a seemingly normal small sized black pudding that they found as a pet to an orc chieftain the party'd slain. They named it Grubnuck Junior (after said orc) and lugged it around many places. I hadn't told them after 2 campaigns that it had levels. It randomly helped them out of a squeeze by teleporting the entire party out of danger once. Ever since then they'd loved it. We begun the third campaign where I had them all play as premordial gods of a sort, using the Incarnation Homebrew base class made by Zaydos back in '09. An npc ally of theirs who was also an Incarnation of Time, Fate and Teleportation was permanently turned into a black pudding by an antagonistic Incarnation of Slime, Madness, and Destruction. It was fun to see their jaws drop.

[Genth]

Khosh Dulgat Possibly a rare instance of the actual same physical character, Khosh started out as a Half-Orc Paladin of Sarenrae. He's fought in the Mendevian Crusades, and is currently possibly been thrown by a demon into a different reality entirely, and is a Paladin/Oracle gestalt.

Derrick Jeffson and Jeff Derrickson, or possibly only one, or maybe both Originally, in a Dark Heresy game, were just going to be a pair of NPCs who were "those two guards". However, my put-on-accent for them was so similar, my players questioned if they were two guards or one guard. Then they started to appear in different games. Like Pathfinder games. The current theory is that they are multiversal singularities who are in fact immortal. I also roll a d% every session I GM if guards are likely to appear. Above a certain %, said guards will be the twins.

[vorpalvolta]

The Taveller: Tav, My old Changeling Beguiler/Cabinet Trickster/Mindspy from an Eberron campaign we played years ago. Spent most of the game trying to convince the DM that he was in fact the deity The Traveller. The rest was spent getting lightning bolted by the party every time I impersonated a member of the Order of the Emerald Claw, out drinking dwarves who believed my water was ale, and attempting to accept offers of phenomenal cosmic power from intelligent artifacts.

Soon I'm going to have him set in Golarion when I DM (he IS the TRAVELLER) after all. He'll be the Head Inspector of an intelligence agency who commissions the party to find him a spaceship and unwittingly open a wormhole back to Eberron, over Cyre. And they'll get to discover what caused the Day of Mourning- them :P

[Svata]

Grom: An ogre barbarian who is nearly always in the first (or nearly so) encounter the players face. Always adjusted for level, and he has one of two builds, either a glaive-tripper, or a greatsword charger (without pounce. I'm not that evil). The charge build is used at higher levels, because he always power attacks full, and almost always misses. If he hits, though, I doubt you'll feel it. Hard to feel much when you've been cloven in twain (hence the use at higher levels, when resurrection is little more than an annoyance). I use him to guage the players' tactics and learn how to tailor encounters for them.

[Quertus]

Sprout the Porter As a treant with 6+ bloodlines, Sprout is immoral (in that he will never die of old age, because he suffers -100+% xp penalty past level 6, which is still racial levels for him). As such, Sprout is always around for the party to hire, to carry their goods for them. Sprout likes to hear the stories that adventurers tell, and sometimes dreams of growing up, to have adventures of his own.

[erok0809]

The Powerful Observer: I tend to have someone who doesn't die from old age, or at least lives ridiculously long, that's done most of everything they could do, has reached ridiculous heights of power, and now simply watches the world around him. Most often, he won't enter into events but simply watch, trying to see the patterns in history. He does serve as a last line of defense for the plane, should existence itself be endangered. When the PCs meet him, he tends to be a quest-giver/mentor to one or all of them, but in one case, he ended up being the BBEG. I have actually used the same character for this a few times, but other people have filled this role as well.



I haven't used this next one in multiple games yet, only the current game, but I absolutely will when I run my next. The idea came from a song of the same name, and this thread.

The Hero of Rhyme: A world-famous Bard/Seeker of the Song, who is known for not carrying a weapon or shield. He used to play a lute, and still carries one; however, he doesn't use it much any more. He has taught himself the art of rhyme, and now doesn't use a sword and shield because he knows his flows are good enough to kill.

Mechanically, he uses Nonverbal Spell to change the verbal components for all of his spells to rap lyrics, so it doesn't even seem like he's casting spells. He simply seems like he's rapping and the spell effects happen around him, mostly choosing spells that do sonic damage or other sonic effects. He'll also use the Seeker of the Song's Burning Melody refrain to spit his "sick burns."

[Toilet Cobra]

Over many campaigns, an arcane caster named Karloff (first name, family name, clan name, or even once the title of "The Karloff") shows up. Originally a character of mine that was killed and brought back as an antagonist by the then-DM. Since then, Karloff's been an archmage, apprentice, Lich, otherworldly alien sorcerer, wandering hedge wizard, and stage performer. The unifying theme of the Karloff, whatever form he/she takes, is that they have a great deal of power and a good plan of some kind, but fate and their own hubris always conspire to ruin them.

The Karloff is in unofficial retirement now. The last time he made an appearance, the players basically rolled their eyes and went "Oh geez, it's this guy." They knew better than to get involved with his (well meaning, but of course doomed) plans. I guess the fun of dramatic irony wore off for the players after a half-dozen appearances, but I still like Karloff. He may show up again someday... perhaps with a new name, but still with plenty of talent, hubris, and a mighty doom awaiting him.

[Doomeye56]

Cliff: perpetually 12 years old and getting dragged into all the hyjinx. Started out as an orphan taken in by a priest of pelor who was made the squire of a 6 int 20 cha Barbarian after he killed the priest for not not not molesting Cliff. Cliff was then made to lead raiding parties against Orc armies and other fun things before sacrificing himself to dethrone Gruumsh. he then showed up in A Galaxy Far Far Away as a starship pilot transporting a crazy bunch of ex jedi as they tried to save the galaxy. even later as senator in the galactic senate in a distant future. before showing up as a pirate during the American Revolutionary war.

[Castlewood]

Mine tends to be a rogue/wizard named Toby Nimblefingers who depending on the campaign steals from the party or sells magic items to them. (He is a halfling and tends to lie constantly so the players never know when he is telling the truth.) The players love him though because he has crazy stories that give the characters a new adventure most of the time.

[Gwaednerth]

They rarely cross over directly, but there are some running shoutouts

Ozymandias Ozymandias was a character from the first campaign I ever wrote. The actual campaign was (in retrospect) awful, but I was very fond of Ozymandias. He was an ancient hero of legend until he was betrayed, and had finally come back to get revenge. His plan in the campaign was pretty meh, but I wrote pages and pages of backstory that I alluded to throughout the campaign through legends and so forth. Since I have so much material to go on, and I enjoyed writing it so much, I put little allusions to him in all my campaigns. Usually it's just dropping one of his titles or pseudonyms in an appropriate setting; there'll be a small shrine to "the beastslayer", or someone will mention "the red prophet".

Heidegger He's never really the same character, but I stole the name from a philosopher a couple campaigns ago, and I liked it so much that I try to sneak someone named Heidegger into every campaign I write. Most recently he was a scheming Archduke, but he's also been a corrupt merchant prince and a knight.

Edit– I just realised there's a third one
The Greyclyffes The Greyclyffes are a noble family from an early campaign of mine. I am currently working them into another campaign. There is only ever one Greyclyffe who is actually decent (in the original it was Jane Greyclyffe, in the current one it's Gwydion Greyclyffe) and all the rest are equal parts decadent and treacherous. They are basically the epitome of fat, squabbling nobles who are more focused on their inheritances than their family.

[Vhaidara]

Lako Shadowhand: This guy runs everything in my setting. Literally. He has infinite cosmic power, and the first thing he did with it was screw up everything in the multiverse. Now he hires adventurers to fix things for him. When asked why, he answered "because you guys are better (and cheaper) than Netflix"

My games tend towards the silly side of things.