This is RPG-ology #98: Clones, for January 2026.
Our thanks to Regis Pannier and the team at the Places to Go, People to Be French edition for locating a copy of this and a number of other lost Game Ideas Unlimited articles. This was originally Game Ideas Unlimited: Clones, and is reposted here with minor editing [bracketed].
Robert Leo Weston is something of a friend of mine. He co-authored several of my best songs, and we spent many hours discussing theology and games. We never actually had the opportunity to play together (although he did roll up a character)–the Gulf War snuck up on us, and he was sent into combat. When he returned, he was off to college and on to a job at the New York Times. I heard [recently] that he and his wife were across the street from the World Trade Center when it was hit, and that they already had a contingency plan in place for what to do in the event of a terrorist attack. So I have kept some tabs on him even though we haven’t spoken in all this time.
I mention him not merely because I think of him often, but because he is a perfect example of a trick I’ve come to find very useful in my games. I used him for it just recently. I was running a game on the Multiverser forum [here] at Gaming Outpost, and suddenly I needed to bring in a character with combat training and experience; and I was going to need to remember his name, because he was going to become involved in the story for quite a while. So I thought of Bobby–Bob Weston, who had worked hard to qualify for the Green Berets and then discovered that they had mostly been relegated to honor guards and embassies, so went on to become an Army Ranger. The non-player character I needed for my game became Sergeant Robert Weston.
The beauty of this solution may escape you at first. The obvious part is that I was not likely to forget the name of a good friend; as we mentioned in Name-monics [a] month[s] ago, these little tricks can make it so much easier to remember a detail. But I was using much more than Bobby’s name. Bobby was a soldier; he was a soldier whom I knew. He had talked a bit about things he had done in training and in the field. I knew something of how he thought and what he did. Thus I had not merely a name but a character. When I came to a situation in which I needed to know how my soldier would react, I could ask myself the simple question, what would Bobby do? I might not always get the right answer, but it would put me on the right wavelength. Bobby would not have done what I would do. I could find another person who was not me, but whom I knew well enough that I could pretend to be him, at least in small spurts.
I have known hundreds of people. Many I don’t know as well as I knew Bob, but there are many I have known better. I have known young people when I was young and older people then and now. I could easily call to memory Mr. Larrat, the elderly scout leader who always had a thermos of Manhattans with him on camping trips to help relax; my cousin Peter, whose gentle spirit seems so pastoral; Professor de Furia, for whom arrogance was at times a necessary teaching tool; Bill Friant, who seems so slow and yet always has the brilliant insights. Family, friends, teachers, co-workers, students, children–all the people I know can make wonderful templates for people I create; and if my players don’t know these people (frequently they don’t), I can use them pretty much intact.
You don’t have to stop with people you know. I’ve seen plenty of Bruce Willis movies, and although he doesn’t always play the same character he plays characters who can easily be adapted to a lot of game worlds. Star Trek and Star Wars contain character types that can be emulated–most of us have been emulating some of them since we were kids. Actors and characters can often be translated into game terms. Jack Nicholson’s Joker is a wonderful villain; if you dropped the voice and replaced a few of the giveaway phrases, would any of your players recognize him? You’ve got a wealth of characters in books, movies, television, plays–you know these people; what would it really take for you to reproduce them?
And when you use the people you know who are unknown to your friends, you’ve got so much more than the personalities. You’ve got the voices, the mannerisms, the expressions, even the names.
People spend money buying supplements, and spend time fleshing out non-player characters by one system or another. This is not always wasted time; a well designed major non-player character is a wonderful creation. But every one of us has within our minds a vast collection of ready-to-use character templates. The hundreds of people we have met in our lives, from the faint memories we have of our kindergarten teachers to the guy next to us at work, are all available for us to borrow for our games.
It’s not like they’re going to read the book someday and complain that you included their image without permission. You’re clearly not trying to get them perfectly presented–you’re writing fantasies about someone like them. The beauty is that you can use what you know of them to create someone like them.
[Next week, something different.]
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