Thank you for those links. Those animations are nice, I could use them as an alternative but I was not thinking of adding climbing and jumping at this point.
The locations players would be falling from and to, though both on the same map, are not stacked vertically, due to walkmesh limitations.
I think I will port the player to the destination, make them invisible, knockdown then drop a clone NPC on top of them. It is a bit clunky, but is hak free.