I'm writing some scripts with pdlua that I want to initialize multiple instances of. I've declared my class and all of my variables as local and am not using any receivers. Whenever I update a variable within one object, the variable changes within every object, making them identical, and rendering my code not re-usable.

What could cause this?

it would help if you could post your code. make sure you are modifying variables in the object's table, using self. e.g. self.variable
http://www.lua.org/pil/16.html