Taking Off-Grid Action and Temporary Characters

To avoid the issue of players feeling that they are missing out because their characters do not have any good in-character reason to attend particular GMed events, temporary characters will sometimes be an option. These will be second characters, generated as per usual, which are only available to play for a given event or series of events. They may not be brought onto the grid.

For combat-oriented events, these characters might include adventurers delving into ruins, mercenaries defending a caravan from brigands, and so on, or even, on occasion, might open the opportunity to play those brigands, orcs, or whatever the case may be.

To give an example of how this might work, imagine that a wealthy merchant player character has grown concerned that a recent shipment of goods is long overdue. They have heard rumours of a fight on the trail. So they go to a different player character, who happens to be the captain of a mercenary company. They negotiate a contract.

What happens then is that the player of the mercenary captain contacts staff and asks to arrange an event. We work out times with them and other interested players. It so happens that there are eight mercenary NPCs in the company. So what I would do then is put up an announcement for interested players to apply to play a temporary mercenary PC. They would have that character for the event where they investigate what happened to the caravan, and for any related events, but that would be all. The characters could not come and exist on grid as regular PCs.