Hi You Guys Must Be The Party!

The Prison Cell This is probably the classic insertion method. It's a good one if you find yourself in the situation described at the start of this article, where the party have executed the wizard in the confident expectation that his player can simply roll up a new (fully charged) wizard - which you will somehow get into the scenario. Slowly, carefully, the adventurers advance into the darkened tunnel. Behind them lies Dungar's body, stripped of all valuables (the barbarians were particularly excited with the spellbook which they reasoned would make excellent toilet paper). The tunnel twists and turns until it opens into a huge cave. But just before that, bizarrely set into a wall in just the place you wouldn't expect to find a door is: A door. The warrior takes a step back and charges, smashing the door open. Inside is a man, chained to the wall. "Who are you?" barks the warrior. "I am Gardon, wizard of the 1st level and ---" "Cut the crap!" interrupts the warrior. "Have you got a spell memorised?" "Err... yeah." "You're in! Guys, cut him free." He Just Knew You! One way to solve the problem is to ignore it, using player information, a huge reality warp, chutzpah, and a hope that perhaps the other players will just let it go without complaining. A GM in my group once, with the collusion of the new player, used this technique to extreme effect. We - the player group - were in a huge mid-west truck stop, surrounded by about a thousand men and women, all of whom were dressed in leather and biker gear. We were *also* dressed in leather and biker gear. The new player character had never met us, and had no idea what we looked like. The exchange went something like this: PLAYER: I'll go up to them and say: "Hi, you guys must be the party!" GM: Ok. Guys, he comes up to you and sits by your table. OTHER PLAYERS: [Spluttering] What? If you're looking for a high-speed, low scenario-impact insertion and you're willing to accept some amount of damage to the reality fabric of your campaign then this is probably the best approach to go for. He Was Like... There (Who The Fuck Are You Anyway?) This is another method that has been used in my gaming group. It has a lower impact on the campaign's reality fabric than the previous method, but is harder to achieve and requires more subtlety. The campaign in question was a cyberpunk game of some kind. It had been running for some months on another night but had now switched to the night upon which I played - meaning that a new character had to be created and inserted for me. Where the GM was clever was that he launched quickly into the scenario in a kind of "do the middle of the story first, then flashback to the beginning" method. So quickly in fact, that no-one really asked just how my character had been introduced. We had a meeting in a bar with the patron, he offered us a job (illegal) we accepted it and then were quickly in the thick of things. Later on, when the scenario was over someone asked: "How come Jonny's character was with us anyhow?" Eventually, the best rationalisation we were able to come up with was: The group had met in a bar to see a patron who was going to offer them a job of some kind. This other bloke (me) had just turned up and sat down at their table. Each of them just assumed that he was a friend of one of the others. The patron, when he turned up, naturally assumed that he was with the group. This is the beauty of the technique. If you can get the new character in play for long enough, without the other players realising, when they finally do it's too late for them to do anything about it. They just have to try and stitch reality back together in the least bad way they can.

Now let's look at some newer methods... Back...

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