In our first campaign together with my current group, my PC found a depressed reanimated skeleton that was chained to a table. I pulled the head off so we could take an information source with us as we crawled the dungeon. Then we kept him after we left the dungeon and named him Horatio. It became one of the major NPCs in the rest of the 18 month campaign.

Since then Horatio has made cameos in at least 4 campaigns. He’s become a fixed point in our universe. He even played a small roll in taking down Iymrith when we did Storm King’s Thunder.