Movement Tricks with NPCs

The summoning command can be used to speed up your play of the game. To minimize your online time (but not game time) you can summon most of the NPCs you want to move. Movement through travel is much slower if one is hauling a large entourage around. Thus if you ever need to move a lot of NPCs from one place to another, you can send any you don't need immediately ahead by summoning them there, keep only a handful with you and save yourself a lot of movement time.

If your family are a worry, you can use the "summon NPC to fief" command to get family members out of harms way. Summoning an NPC puts them in transit for two game seasons, wherein they cannot be seized, kidnapped, or assassinated. However, there is a 10% chance of something evil happening to NPCS in transit. These include:

Robbed and beaten
Sickness
Lost
Outright death

Pregnant females cannot be summoned because of an old bug. If a child is born in transit, it can appear just about anywhere on the map. If your PC dies while your heirs are in transit DON'T choose a new heir, you will be stuck in transit until the sysop can clear you. Wait till the next season, it's easier.

Use this technique if another player is particularly angry at you and is going after your family. One player, in just such a situation, had his entire family in transit continuously for four years. Think of it as if the family had gone into hiding, which is fairly historical.