With so many hero options at this point, it would be great if there was a way for a player to (temporarily) substitute his/her hero during a campaign, complete with rules on whether and how to transfer or reset the hero's abilities, and with terminology for the switch that fits thematically with a campaign.

Any ideas or previous posts on this? I searched the forum briefly and could not find comments.

I know of a couple variants where the heroes play with a "guild" of heroes, but those variants also have rules that enforce permanent hero death (a hero is actually killed, so must be replaced with someone else.) The trickiest part of swapping out heroes is keeping the XP level. There also has to be some cost associated with switching, otherwise the heroes just get the ability to tailor their party to each quest.

The guild idea's got the wheels turning! Let's assume no permanent death to start simple.

During each shopping phase, the party is offered a random mercenary for hire. The party has option to hire the mercenary for some gold and XP. Gold could be pooled across the party, but not XP (only pooled within those with archetypes same as mercenary's).

For each quest, party decides their starting heroes. Mercenaries stay out of play until a hero with same archetype is knocked out. Knocked out hero can swap instead of stand-up, with same dice rolling to decide health, stamina, etc.

I'd say a swap should not cause a loss of XP, items, abilities, or gold. And I'd say no revive can cause a swap.

See any major ambiguities or holes? What about Heroic Feats? If the incoming hero did not previously use her Feat, but the outgoing hero did, should the incoming hero not have hers?

I tried using a "Career Mode" Variant at one time.

https://community.fantasyflightgames.com/topic/138731-career-mode-thoughts/?hl=%2Bcareer+%2Bmode

Quite frankly, I though it worked fairly well with the Core game's Campaign. It has balance issues though as the OL will eventually gain more experience.