Recycling Characters (for Players)

Originally published October 1, 2014
It happens all too often. You've lovingly built a character for a game, with a page (or more) of back story, numerous adventure hooks, and an interesting tale to tell.

Then the game dies and you are left with a great character whose story is only half-finished.

Rather than let a good idea go to waste, you can recycle that character for a later game. But unless that next game is an exact clone of the game that just died you will need to make some (possibly extreme) adjustments. The trick is to grab what is integral to the character and drop anything antithetical to the new campaign.

I'm not sure I can generalize this idea well so I'm going to give you a couple of examples from my own experiences.

Derendel

I started creating Derendel for a 2nd edition D&D game back in 1999. He was a half elven wild mage in a world where humans were second class citizens and even half elves were barely trusted with the secrets of magic. He grew up on the streets of an elven city, abandoned by his parents, and was eventually placed in the care of a somewhat incompetent wizard/hermit. Somehow he "mastered" magic and decided to seek his fortune by going to the "Land of No Winter", a magical realm where the time did not flow normally.

We got a session into the game before it died.

Six months later, I got another chance to play him, in a 5 day marathon game using the Castle Falkenstein rule set. The GM's custom setting involved a fog clad city in which a group of people from different realities found themselves trapped. I kept the basic background and let the GM rewrite my powers. It seemed natural that his magic worked differently here. It turns out that the Land of No Winter was a desert, one from which I barely escaped with my life.

Jumping further forward to the fall of 2000 and the release of D&D 3rd edition, I found myself in one of the first campaigns starting at my college. I revived Derendel as a multiclassed rogue/sorcerer. He was human now, the half-elven bit of his history seeming rather unimportant, but had the same personality and rough past. Which city he grew up in I left unclear as well as where he had just come from. Perhaps the Land of No Summer and his inter-dimensional journey were just a dream. The important thing I kept was his nature as an outcast. But now rather it being rooted in racism, it was now how wizards denigrated sorcerers within the setting.

Derendel become increasingly cynical and less prone to help others as the game progressed. In the end he felt his efforts to help the common people (let alone the arrogant wizards and nobles) had been betrayed. I brought him back a couple more times as an NPC, this time advancing his story line 20 years to the point where now he was now a powerful and evil sorcerer king, having enforced his will on the weak easily led peasants and crushed those who dared oppose him.

Zuria Louis/Max

My second example features a character who had significant parts of her history and capabilities altered to fit in a new game. It took 12 years but she had a story that needed to be told.

Zuria Louis's Backstory (Abridged)

Zuria grew up on a farm with her parents and three brothers. The world they lived in was cold and hard, meaning long winters and the occasional hunt to supplement their meager harvest. Her father was a retired soldier and taught her to shoot with an antique laser rifle.

Her mother died when she was 10. A crop failure when she was 14 bankrupted her family. They were forced to move to the city, where her father and brother worked in the city guard. While the move was rough on her father, she and her brothers were entranced by this bustling community. Her eldest brother Ruelle married the daughter of a merchant and settled down while she and her younger brother spent their time in the market. Her brother Hakan however delved into the darker side of the city. When their father discovered his criminal activities, he kicked him out of their house and told him never to return.

Zuria joined her father and brother in the watch when she turned 18. In her efforts to make her father proud, she trained hard and became a master of unarmed combat. The last time she saw him smile was when she made Lieutenant.

After he passed away, she and Ruelle raised her youngest brother Forrest together. For a while things were good. Together they made enough to provide Forrest the education and opportunities they never had.

Then Zuria discovered some thieves stealing fuel. When she tried to apprehend them things went badly. One of the fuel containers burst. The explosion nearly killed her. As part of her recovery, her eye and right arm had to be replaced with cybernetic components. Her physical wounds slowly healed but a deeper wound had been opened.

The damage to her body made her feel crippled and less than the person she once was. She pushed her frustration into her work. She got sloppy about procedure and increasingly brutal on criminals. Eventually her superiors took notice and fired her.

For a while she struggled with her feelings of failure. Then she decided to take the law into her own hands. She became a vigilante. Criminals became to turn up dead.

The city guard moved in. The final stand-off wasn't pretty. With all of her murders, including those of several officers sent to apprehend her, she was quickly sentence to life in prison.

Her brother Ruelle refused to talk to her and kept Forrest from having any contact with her. She was sent away to where she would never been seen again.

The years in prison have given her time to think. With her combat skills and built-in cybernetics, she managed to force the other prisoners to keep their distance and carved out a place for herself. With her old life gone, she was left with a desire for freedom and the riches she dreamed as a young girl in the city. And perhaps forgiveness from her little brother.

Zuria in Play

That game, starting with a prison break and then going on to evolving to sky pirates, lasted 2 sessions. This tough broken woman, searching for redemption, stuck in the back of my head until an Apocalypse World 12 year later.

Creating Max

For my replacement character for the Space Apocalypse game I was co-MCing, I decided to bring back Zuria as a Gunlugger. Still a highly skilled and dangerous combatant with some heavy artillery, she was Blood Crazed and NOT TO BE FUCKED WITH (moves for the Gunlugger that seemed quite appropriate).

In terms of background I kept the broad strokes: former town protector, scarred in the line of duty, who fell into violence and vigilantism. I also kept the concept of a lost younger sibling who she sought acceptance from as well as a long dark period in prison.

Since the game we were involved in used "reavers", space mad cannibal psychopaths who killed and converted all they came across, I decided that the people of her community labeled her a reaver after her actions were discovered. They dumped her in the Pit, a former mine turned penal colony. She escaped. She made her way back home. People died.

All of which was backstory to her arrival on the Carnival, the ship the group was based out of at the time. The ship carrying her little sister Hiccup. To make it even more poignant, Hiccup had acquired a better balanced adoptive older sister (another PC) Switch.

Sadly that game also fell apart (or rather concluded hastily) just as Max would have had to choose between a life of violence and something new, something with a place for her sister. I will have to see if I revive this character again.

Conclusion

So I hope these examples give you some ideas for when you have a character whose story demands to completed.