I got to recently test Alexandrians Law of the Conservation of NPCs - advice to make equivalent NPCs a repeat appearance of an old NPC - and the results came out well. I'm writing it up to following Gorgon Bones first best practice and "Record your hobby experience."
I first saw it actually done at table as part of a Ravnica mini-campaign run at the local games society during a lull in the pandemic - the DM there took a bunch of pre-written adventures and what was in the book and bolted them together to make a mini-campaign. He wove it all together by making the same archetype be the same NPC - all the Vedalken Izzet Wizards became the one guy, different Dark Elf Findbrokers were merged, etc - and it was remarkable effective at making the whole thing feel connected. There were some serious groan moments when we realised we were going to have to talk to certain NPCs with a really lax view of workplace safety which is good, they stuck in our mind.
For the open table Brancalonia game I am running at the same games soc I am trying to do the same. With very rare exceptions, the pre-written adventures scattered through the Brancalonia books assume you are travelling all over the realm and visiting lots of different places - so you rarely hit the same places twice. This is fine, not actually a problem, but I thought to try having some of the NPCs and locations pop up again to try and make the place feel deeper. Last week was the first live-test of this and it worked very well.
It was a good test session because I needed to mod the adventure anyway - we had run out of time the last session with 3/4 of the adventure done - they had stopped at a good point but there was more left to do: they had rescued the damsel in distress but still needed to free her from a curse. So I had a piece of an adventure but not a lot. To fill out the session I went back to a previous session and a sequence I needed to cut for time and brought that forward, stitching the two together to have enough for the one more session. This seemed like the perfect point to try making it all more coherent not just as a single session but also into the campaign as a whole.
The bits were the finale from The Divine Sow and the siege sequence from Penumbria Jeez Festival - most of the work needed to be done on the siege sequence. As written it ought to have happened at a village they had visited far away, instigated by some never-before-met gang of blood-thirsty bandits. To shift the whole thing sideways, I reset it to the village from Bride of the Bigat and changed the antagonists to the gang from Treasure of the Bigat. Happily, I had two returning players at the table that night - most conveniently one of them had played through both Treasure of the Bigat and Bride of the Bigat with me and so recognised the villains when they turned up and was recognised in turn by their leader as someone they owed vengeance to.
This worked pretty well - swapping out written features and NPCs for similar ones that had been seen before lost nothing and had the unanticipated benefit of activated a bunch of player knowledge allowing me to offload exposition to players telling other players what they knew of this place - great to change up the dynamic of my the DM expositioning at folk.
So far the roster of adventures run have been:
* Rugantino (L1) BC
* The Forest of Howling Boars (L2) BC
* The Red Carnival (L2) M
* The Good The Bad and the Marionette (L3) BC
* The Treasure of the Bigat (L3) JA
* See Acquaviva and Die! (L3) BC
* Big Trouble in Borgoratto (L3) JA
* Bride of the Bigat (L4) JA
* The Divine Sow (L4) M
* Penumbria Jeez Festival (L5) BC
BC is the Brancalonia core book, JA is Jinx Almanac and M is the Macaronicon.
I talked a bit before about pulling rumours and consequences out of those adventures to make hooks for other adventures, this is broadly more on the same theme of making a collection of standalone adventures mesh together into a coherent world.
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