Epic characters brought back to beginning levels

[Maliki]

I actually had a character start in a campaign with a similar backstory, The party was fighting the Big Evil after it had opened a vortex to the negative energy plane, so as our characters fought we were losing levels. As the backstory went at the end my character used a wish spell to end the threat, but our party had all died in the process. In the future the Big Evil had returned so a wizard used some type of spell to bring back the heroes who had defeated him before, but due to the negative energy at our final battle we all came back at first level, and without any equipment. Our memories were quite fuzzy and though we felt familar with each other none of us knew any specifics about the other characters.

It was a great start but the DMs life(school, work and a new girlfriend) got in the way and the campaign only lasted a few sessions.

 

[Tav_Behemoth]

This is one of the things I've had in mind while creating the New Iconics -- B3's forthcoming series of characters that are statted out, equipped, and fleshed-out from 1st level through epic. Because this will let you have all the character sheets prepared in advance, it'd be super-easy to do a campaign where you play one scene in which the PCs are 20th level, then play out a flashback to when they were just starting out, etc.

It's a lot of work to prep the characters, esp. doing their equipment at higher levels (although I made some Excel spreadsheets to help out; PM me if you want 'em!) - but it's also fun, and if the players get to design their character for every level of play, they'll feel like they have control over the character's development even if they have limited or no control over what point along his lifeline they'll be playing.

I was thinking of writing a time travel adventure for which the New Iconics would be the pre-made characters - a kind of "unstuck in time" scenario - but there are lots of equally great ideas for using characters across all levels in this thread! To venture into Open Calls territory for a moment: if anyone wants to write up a module along these lines, I hope you'll consider Behemoth3 as a publisher, 'cause this is something I'd love to release.

 

[kitoy]

I did this to my party for a one time adventure once and they loved it. Their characters were converted from 2e to 3e at 10th - 12th level and they had progressed to the low to middle 20s.

They had an adventure that took them to another plane and when they emerged from the portal I handed them 2nd level versions of their characters. I had an archive of my website from 4 or 5 years ago, so I was able to do a 2e to 3e conversion of their characters from around that time. Half the fun for me was in converting the characters, but I'm odd that way.

It was lots of fun, I ran hordes of orcs and some low-level critters I got out of Dungeon that they would normally wade through. Seeing these once-mighty characters running from orcs gave me a nice warm feeling inside. Once they went back through the portal, they were back to their epic selves.

I would not recommend doing this to high level characters permanently, but as a one time adventure, it was a blast.

 

[Jürgen Hubert]

The Expanded Psionics Handbook actually has a very good way for this - they have a PC race called "Elan".

Elan used to be normal humans until a secret society of psionicists recruited them and turned them into one of their own thanks to a mighty psionic ritual. Now they have access to psionic powers, incredible resilence to damage, and a virtually unlimited life span (1000-2000 years) - but they have to start over at first level again.

So... would you give up your epic levels in exchange for a vastly extended life span? Well, how old are you?

Better make sure that all your epic-level enemies never find out about this, or else your new career as an immortal is going to be short-lived...