I've said before that one of my goals for the Whiterock campaign was to support players and characters dropping in and out from week to week.  Because real life sometimes gets in the way of gaming, and if you wait for everyone to be available, maybe you wait too long and your game dies.

I don't particularly like artificial moves like teleporting PCs around.  And I'm not a big fan of turning PCs into NPCs ("sorry, your PC died last week while you weren't playing").  So how do we swap PCs around?

The primary plan to achieve that was to have a mostly safe place (the town of Cillamar) where all the PCs hang out between adventures, and then try to get them back there at the end of every session.  Then if someone can't make it next time, their PC is safely back in town.  And if someone new joins the party, the party met them in town.

So far, I'm zero for one at getting the PCs back to town between sessions.  It took almost the whole first session for them to get to Castle Whiterock, the main adventure location, and then the rest to scout up to the gatehouse door, and they have the time pressure of a kidnapped apprentice to rescue.  And it looks like one of the four players who played last week can't make it, and we have two new players who probably can.  So, how to we pull the swap in the field without being too cheesy?

As long as the party has a clear path to the exit, pulling a PC out is pretty easy.  In this case, the PC whose player can't make it had some intra-party conflict during the last adventure.  So he might leave in a huff and go back to town alone.  Or me might be given a time-out and sent to guard the party's rear.

Bringing in more PCs is more difficult, especially PCs that the current party hasn't even met (at least not in play).  But in this case the party has a patron who asked them for help, and it's entirely possible he asked a couple more latecomers to join them.  Maybe he sent them along with a note.  Fortunately the PCs are right near the entrance, so it's plausible enough.

I have a plan that will work this time, but I worry that things will get silly if we have to keep swapping PCs outside of town.  Fortunately players love shopping for new traits and new items, and town is (almost) the only way to do that, so I suspect that most of the time, it won't be hard to get them back to regroup.