Expy / Tabletop Games

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• As a meta-example, many players tend to base their Player Character in the game off some other character in fiction, generally known to others they play with. This is a common and generally accepted as fun practice, but there are some characters who tend to get exported much more commonly than others to the point of being seen as cliche. For those, see Overused Copy Cat Character.
• Anima: Beyond Fantasy: No, Clover◊ is totally unrelated to Albert Wesker and Lazarus◊ has nothing to see with Sephiroth, why do you ask?^note And it's just the tip of the iceberg.
• Blackbirds RPG: The Oligarchs in general are clearly inspired by the Apostles, but Ailis is this for Rosine specifically. She's the youngest of the Oligarchs, possesses a moth-like true form, and has a habit of abducting people by drawing them into the forest to transform them into insectoid monstrosities.
• From Dungeons & Dragons and its settings:
  • In 4th Edition's default setting, the Nentir Vale, The Raven Queen is a gender-swapped Expy for Kelemvor from Forgotten Realms. Also, Bane is an expy of the Bane from Forgotten Realms.
  • The Forgotten Realms have a few themself: King Azoun IV of Cormyr is pretty obviously King Arthur, especially with regard to the whole "Sleeping Sword" thing, which parallels Arthur's "Sleeping King" myth pretty well. Arthur's coat of arms was a golden dragon, Azoun's is a purple dragon, etc. Also, Yamun Khahan was a very obvious expy of Genghis Khan.
  • Ed Greenwood has admitted that Sune (the Forgotten Realms goddess of love and beauty) is the Greek Goddess Aphrodite renamed^note The name Sune is the name Venus, the Roman equivalent of Aphrodite, backwards and without the V. Likewise Chauntea, goddess of agriculture, has been admitted to be based on the Greek Goddess Demeter and Ilmater, god of suffering and martyrdom, is clearly Jesus in the cross minus the cross.
  • This can happen to monsters as well in D & D and Pathfinder. Some are, of course, based on mythology, but consider the balor◊ and Tolkien's balrog◊^note Very likely is the same as halfling, that was used instead of hobbit because the latter was registered - according at least to the first Monster Manual..
    • Kytons certainly showed influence from Hellraiser and Pinhead in them, and Pathfinder makes them into Cenobites.
  • Paizo, creators of Pathfinder, have hinted that the goddess Pharasma is an expy of the Lady of Pain from D & D. Appropriate considering the history of the game.
  • Valeros the iconic fighter is an expy of Madmartigan from Willow. His iconic portrait is a mirror-flipped version of Val Kilmer's portrayal of the earlier character; both are warriors quick of tongue and almost as good as their boasting.
  • Since almost every culture in the Mystara setting is a Fantasy Counterpart Culture, the creators have not been shy about including culturally appropriate Expies such as Manuel of the Plains, a masked vigilante from a Spanish-inspired culture who is an obvious Zorro expy.
  • The Ravenloft game setting is swarming with expies of classic characters from Gothic literature. Dracula, Dr. Frankenstein and his creation, Jekyll & Hyde, and so on: they're all there, sans serial numbers, disqualified from being Captain Ersatz only because the originals' copyrights all expired ages ago.
  • Mr. Witch and Mr. Light from The Wild Beyond the Witchlight, owners of the Witchlight Carnival were described by the writer as a collective copy of Mr. Dark from Something Wicked This Way Comes. It's really more of an homage, though, because while they share some traits (the magic carnival, fancy suits, eloquent manner), they're both good-aligned Shadowfell elves rather than a sadistic Emotion Eater demon-thing like Mr. Dark.
• The Banebrood from Megalith Games's Godslayer, an evil race of Beastmen and mutated northern tribesmen who worship demons and the foul energy that manifests from an unholy moon and use that energy to infect others with a mutating disease. Seems like the company are fans of Chaos.
• Hellcats and Hockeysticks' official setting, St. Erisian's School for Girls, is St. Trinian's (English girls' boarding school where the only rule is that there are no rules) with the Serial Numbers Filed Off and magic and weird science added.
• Interstitial: Our Hearts Intertwined is based off of Kingdom Hearts, so naturally every core playbook is based on a character from the series.
  • The Chosen is Sora.
  • The Connected is all the various Disney characters.
  • The Dark is Xehanort.
  • The Discarded is Riku.
  • The Displaced is the residents of Traverse Town whose worlds were consumed by Darkness.
  • The Friend is Donald and Goofy.
  • The Light is Kairi.
  • The Mystic is Mickey, Master Eraqus, and every mentor across the series.
  • The Other is Roxas and all the other Nobodies.
  • The Anachronism is Young Xehanort.
  • The Amalgam is Sora again, or Terranort.
  • The Linksmith is Namine.
  • The Prodigy and The Knucklehead are more vague. Both focus on physical fighting, with the former focusing on rivalry and the latter on foolhardiness. This describes a lot of major Kingdom Hearts characters.
  • The Memory is Xion.
• Magic: The Gathering had its old planeswalkers, who were super-powered - too super-powered to appear as cards. In particular, there was Jaya Ballard, Task Mage, the sassy female fire mage with goggles, a hair-trigger temper and a tendency to solve problems with fire. Then they created the Planeswalker card type, and wanted to print Planeswalkers, but they couldn't drop the storyline power of existing old planeswalker characters. So they printed Chandra Nalaar, a sassy female fire mage with goggles, a hair-trigger temper and a tendency to solve problems with fire. Jaya Ballard was iconic for getting flavour text quotes like "Of course you should fight fire with fire. You should fight everything with fire." She doesn't get any flavor text quotes these days, but Chandra gets a number of very similar ones...
  • It's implied that Chandra was taught by Jaya herself, going so far as mentioning Jaya's name when recalling one of her lessons.
  • Magic also does expies of real-world mythology and literature in some of its settings. This is most obvious in Theros, where there are expies of specific gods and heroes as well as expies of the cities of Athens and Sparta, and an expy of the Trojan Horse.
• Mecha Vs Kaiju, in its FATE version, gives statblocks for Not Zilla Kaibutsu, Ghidorah-inspired Sanshuseki, Gamera-derived Kameyuu, and Hedokoku, who most seems to resemble Hedorah in being a monster fuelled by pollution. Others are mentioned in backstory, such as the moth monster Senshuga.
• Mutants & Masterminds has a truly massive list of comic character expies in its Freedom City setting. With very few exceptions, they range from not very subtle to carrying large signs reading "INSPIRED BY SUPERMAN" or "NOT GHOST RIDER WITH A DIFFERENT NAME, REALLY".
• The Crystal Planet, a third-party setting for Pathfinder, is about the mineralites, a race of sentient gemstones with bodies made of Hard Light and gravity, fantastic pseudo-magical technology, a strict caste system, and the ability to fuse with others of their kind. In other words, it's a pretty blatant take on the Gems from Steven Universe.
• Pokéthulhu has many expies (often double-expies) of characters from both of its "parents": Randy Carter (Ash Ketchum/Randolph Carter), Derleth and Bloch of Team Eibon (Jessie and James of Team Rocket), and Pikathulhu (Pikachu and Cthulhu).
• Sentinels of the Multiverse lives and breathes this. Let's look at just the core game, for example: the heroes consist of a Flying Brick who serves as a team leader (Superman/Legacy), a speedster who's accomplished in a technical field (the Flash/Tachyon), a gun-encrusted powersuit operated by a Military Superhero (War Machine/Bunker), a shadowy gadgeteer vigilante (Batman/Wraith), a god of an old pantheon empowering a contemporary mortal (Thor/Ra), an aquatic warrior (Aquaman/Tempest, although Tempest controls weather instead of sea life), a bald psychic woman (Moondragon/Visionary), a nigh-immortal warrior using a pose of savagery despite being actually pretty well-informed (a heroic Vandal Savage/Haka), and a man whose low body temperature requires him to live inside either a suit or a frozen room (a heroic Mr Freeze/Absolute Zero), with the last one, surprisingly not based on a comics character, is a winged woman who is devoutly religious and verges on being a Knight Templar (a Living Saint from Warhammer 40,000/Fanatic); the villains are a vengeful genius with an alliterative name/title combination who rules a small region in Eurasia (Dr. Doom/Baron Blade), a rogue AI that has numerical iterations and eventually becomes a hero (Brainiac/Omnitron), a superhuman supremacist with a Quirky Miniboss Squad and elemental powers (Magneto/Citizen Dawn), and a conquering alien warlord who has enslaved countless worlds (Darkseid/Grand Warlord Voss, although Voss doesn't have Darkseid's raw power). This is just the core set. There are, either out or in the works, seven full expansions and a cluster of mini-packs, many of them containing multiple other Expies.
• 7th Sea is full of these, as well as No Celebrities Were Harmed versions of historical figures. The most obvious one is Captain Reis, perhaps the most powerful character in the world, who is a bloodthirstier version of Captain Hook from Peter Pan. The back of the second edition rulebook flat-out encourages players to make their own expies: "In other words—you are d'Artagnan, Milady de Winter, the Dread Pirate Roberts, Jack Sparrow, Julie d'Aubigney and the Scarlet Pimpernel all rolled up in one!"
• In Strike Legion, everything is an expy of something from another sci-fi or fantasy setting. The game not only shamelessly rips off other settings, but then it takes those same things and exaggerates them.
• Most of the Icons of 13th Age embody fairly standard RPG character tropes like the Emperor, the Archmage, the High Druid and so on, but the Great Gold Wyrm is pretty clearly Bahamut from Dungeons and Dragons with a different scale colour.
• The High Elves from the original Warhammer game, on top of being fantasy Ancient Greeks/Atlanteans, are also expies of the Melniboneans from The Elric Saga. Xenophobic elves with pointy helmets who live far away on a large island and use dragons (who have the unfortunate tendency of sleeping for very, very long periods of time) as their ultimate military units; continuing the trend, you have High Loremaster Teclis as an obvious stand-in for Elric, as a sickly sorcerer-prince who needs to regularly imbibe magical potions to be able to stand and fight.
• The factions in Warhammer 40,000 were originally little more than faction-level Expies for Warhammer Fantasy factions. Although they've tried to tone this down a bit — for instance, by phasing out the Squats without explanation, then finally saying they were just eaten by the Tyranids — there's still obvious parallels. Empire —> Imperium, High Elves —> Eldar, Dark Elves —> Dark Eldar, Tomb Kings —> Necrons, Chaos --> Chaos (duh), Greenskins —> Orkz, Dwarfs —> Demiurg (a Tau-allied race), and to a lesser extent, the Tau in general. The Tyranids are an exception — there's been some awkward attempts to equate them with the Lizardmen, but it doesn't really work out.
  • When it comes to playable factions, the Adeptus Mechanicus are the tech-savvy Dwarf-analogues who ally with humanity despite a heavy dose of conflicting cultures, the Genestealer Cults are subterranean infiltrators that mimic the Skaven with their focus on heavy artillery and monstrous infantry, the Tyranids are a Keystone Army reliant on both hordes of expendable flesh-puppets and horrific monsters like the Vampire Counts, and the Tau act like the Lizardmen, being a strictly-stratified caste society working for the Greater Good whilst following the directives of the mysterious Ethereals/Old Ones.
  • An example of a smaller background race in the setting is the Hrud, who are practically expies of the Skaven in many ways. At least as far as the fluff regarding them gives away. Both are rat-like humanoids who live in sewers in various places, and both use warp-plasma based technology and are scavengers, plus the addition of similar social habits. It is highly unlikely that they will become any kind of major faction in the tabletop, however, since Games Workshop are heavily opposed to the idea of having Warhammer 40000 as simply Warhammer in space, due to the removal of the Squats, the original Dwarf expies. Though with the re-introduction of the Squats (now dubbed the "Leagues of Votann") in 9th Edition, "Warhammer in Space" seems to be making a comeback.
    • As of its printing, Games Workshop has some funky canon out now that makes them look like weird spine-like jellyfish people (which is actually quite plausible when you...). Although they still have some Skaven elements (photophobia, cavedwelling, Warpstone usage), they also have some new canon junk like a God Pantheon, a curbstomped god who was shattered into psychic shadow spheres called Umbra via Slannesh (who else), and some weird time-distortion, warp-radiation field of narminess which they constantly radiate about themselves.
  • Also, the Imperial Arbitrators were recycled from an abandoned Judge Dredd tabletop game.
  • Nearly everything in W40k is an expy of something from another setting. Aliens vs Starship Troopers vs Colonial Marines vs Terminator vs Robotech vs Elves vs Orks vs Demons etc... While the original game was largely Warhammer Fantasy in space, the current iterations of W40k are closer to "sci-fi trope deathmatch".
    • While being essentially the Tomb Kings from Warhammer Fantasy, the Necrons are also clearly Terminator expys. Rules like "I'll be back" are pretty obvious clues.
    • The Tyranids are pretty clearly expies of both the Xenomorphs from Alien and Bugs from the Starship Troopers movies, depending upon the subsetting.
    • For example, Genestealers and general indoor fighting of Tyranids is heavily based on the Aliens film. Space Hulk was Aliens, the board game.
  • Special Characters:
    • Khorne, a War God whose favoured warriors are called berserkers, his bloodletter daemons are described as "blessed dead" and is associated with the exhilaration of battle? And in Warhammer Fantasy, he commands daemons who collect the souls of the dead, his realm is named "Kreignihalla", and his symbol looks like a Valknut◊? Hmmmm. Sounds familiar.
    • Commander Farsight was a prominent leader of an Empire's military forces. He eventually led some of his brethren in a rebellion against the powerful ruling cast, whose whims most Tau serve their entire lives. He is also known as O'Shovah. There's also his red and white mecha and mysterious past.
    • Ghazghkull Thraka's early history is based on Adolf Hitler's: he was a lowly Goff (the Ork clan known as being militaristic and serious) boy who got severely wounded and then had visions of Orks conquering the Galaxy, just as Hitler was just a German (stereotypically known as militaristic and serious) corporal in WWI, got severely wounded and... well you know the rest.
    • On the other hand is Lord Castellan Ursarkar E. Creed of Cadia, who is Winston Churchill, down to the cigar, with some elements of General Patton thrown in. Fittingly, Cadia is a Fantasy Counterpart Culture for Blitz-era Britain.
    • Trazyn the Infinite is Doctor Doom if he were an alien space robot.
    • Sly Marbo of the Imperial Guard. A renowned Catachan Jungle Fighter who works as a lone operative, and through his legendary skill in stealth, sabotage and guerrilla warfare has taken on entire enemy forces and emerged victorious. In one of his most famous exploits, he took out an Ork Gargant single-handedly. In case you haven't clued in by now, he's a mix of Rambo and Solid Snake.
    • Doomrider is a one-dimensional expy of Ghost Rider, if he were a Chaos Space Marine-turned-daemon prince.
• Taking it full circle, Warhammer: Age of Sigmar has the Stormcast Eternals, who are Games Workshop's own Space Marines recycled as Norse myth's Einherjar.
  • It goes even further with the character Sigmar Heldenhammer who was first created for Warhammer Fantasy, had an Expy made of him for 40k in the God-Emperor of Mankind, and when Sigmar returned in The End Times and continued into Age of Sigmar he took on several traits from his sci-fi counterpart.
• One of the supplement books for Werewolf: The Forsaken, Skinchangers, has a character in it called Shuichi Kurama who is serving as a Host to a fox-spirit named Yoko. The manga/anime series YuYu Hakusho has a fox demon named Yoko Kurama who was mortally wounded and took refuge in the womb of a pregnant woman, Shiori Minamino, and was reborn as her son, Shuichi Minamino. On top of that, the physical descriptions and personalities for both Shuichi Kurama and Yoko Kurama are very, very similar.

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