Family adventures: Ever use `em?

[SiderisAnon]

Family Adventuring Groups

I ran one campaign where every member of the party was from a village on a small island. They could play humans, elves, and half-elves only. No one was closely related like brother and sister, but they had all grown up together and all knew each other well.

The idea was that since the players kept running groups where they couldn't get along, we'd start them with a group that all got along in the first place.

 

[sckeener]

Have you ever used/encountered games where the PCs are all related somehow (by blood or marriage)? Perhaps the group's human, half-elf, and half-orc members are all half-siblings? A group of adventuring cousins?

sort of...it was a group marriage. It didn't start off that way, but it eventually became that way. Basically we all married different NPCs that were already in a group marriage. I think it is the only reason some of us didn't kill each other. The player's characters I gamed with clashed on world views. I was lawful evolution (per a dragon magazine) and they were mostly Chaotic Good.

I think my character was the longest hold out in joining the group marriage. I dated my NPC for years in the game. I didn't want to link my extended family to theirs since I already had a large family with several other wives.

Or, OTOH, has a family of NPCs taken a prominent role in a past campaign: a family of wizards, a group of grown children who work for a parent, etc?

Usually families feature in all my games...whether they are my character's or the NPC's. They are part of life and need to be represented in the games.

 

[Wik]

A few years back, in a heavily-modified homebrew, we were all playing characters who hailed from the same town. I don't remember party details, except for the fact that I was an ass-kicking fighter (a very fun character to play, actually... sort of similar to Iron Heroes' Man-At-Arms in set-up).

Anyways, the hook was that we all used to play together in this town, with a little girl named Molly. We all saw something relating to Molly's disappearance that we never shared with the others. After Molly left, for example, my character left town, apprenticed to an army officer (or was it a paladin temple?).

The campaign began ten years after Molly's disappearance, returning to our old town (mysteriously abandoned) and trying to investigate what actually happened to Molly. It was a cool campaign.