[D&D; Any Edition] Finishing Long-Running Campaigns

[Lappy9000]

Just tonight, my group and I finally finished an Evil Campaign that brought the party from humble Level 3 to powerful Level 13. Even better was the fact that everyone seemed to have a great time throughout, and the ending (along with Epilogues of later character exploits) was satisfactory to all involved.

That brings me to the point of this thread: Have you ever finished a fairly long-running campaign? If so, what was the ending like? Was everyone in the party pleased with the results (possibly excluding those who died along the way...but not necessarily)? How many levels did the party have to slug through?

[LOLC2k]

Just tonight, my group and I finally finished an Evil Campaign that brought the party from humble Level 3 to powerful Level 13. Even better was the fact that everyone seemed to have a great time throughout, and the ending (along with Epilogues of later character exploits) was satisfactory to all involved.

That brings me to the point of this thread: Have you ever finished a fairly long-running campaign? If so, what was the ending like? Was everyone in the party pleased with the results (possibly excluding those who died along the way...but not necessarily)? How many levels did the party have to slug through?

While back we played from 1 to 21. was good fun even though most of the party was cheesy powerful. I had a Dwarven Sorceror/Eldritch Knight/Spellsword... casting in mithral fullplate with no asf was fun.

I even got a completely nonsense feat allowed in that him retardedly strong. The ending itself was pretty good, we killed the big bad, although to be honest it was anti-climatic. The epic lich type creature just couldn't stand up to our numbers, and gated in solars are always fun.

[Saph]

World's Largest Dungeon. Party started at level 1, I joined at level 3, campaign finished at level 18. Mostly core-only. Took two and a half years, counting breaks.

The final battle was pretty cool; unfortunately, there were so many demons, devils, giants, and high-level spellcasters on the enemy side that the DM couldn't properly handle them all.

Highlights included:

• Half the party getting wiped out by a single wail of the banshee spell.
• My character using the Candle of Invocation that he'd been carrying around for one year (and that everyone else had forgotten about) to gate in a Solar which raised the dead PCs before getting killed itself by a gated-in Pit Fiend.
• The rogue sneaking off at the beginning of the fight and returning in mid-battle . . . riding on a Titan's shoulder. She'd rescued it from where the BBEG had been keeping it imprisoned. It proceeded to mop the floor with the demon army that had been supposed to reinforce the BBEG.
• The enemy sorcerer dropping an acid fog on my druid, and my druid responding by casting a shared resist energy, taking a form with blindsense, and using the fog as a shield while he summoned a steady stream of creatures. The fog ended up helping us so much that the enemy caster finally had to spend an action to dispel it.
• The 16th-level party ranger killing the 20th-level BBEG cleric. Note that he was a core-only TWF ranger with average stats and no equipment except for a couple of decent weapons. Probably the biggest surprise of the whole battle.

- Saph

[Kornaki]

Best campaign lasted about a year and took us from level 1 to between 27 and 36 (depending on how often the player showed up). Actually my barbarian (by the name of Ogg) basically controlled the game by the end, since the DM decided that gloves that would let me double my strength for a short period of time each day would be balanced. Highlight of the game: We had to fight a cobra demigod (600 feet long, etc). It opens up combat by biting my barbarian, instantly sending him into a coma. No problem; my sentient armor takes control, triggers the gloves and I full attack for 800 damage.

The name Ogg was retired after that game, and in all subsequent games he's been a deity :smallcool:

[rokar4life]

The name Ogg was retired after that game, and in all subsequent games he's been a deity :smallcool:

nice

in my first campaign my wizard, instead of simply killing the BBEG, killed him, donned his crown of evil, and resumed his plans to take over the world(my party didn't like that, but i killed them so it didn't matter)

[Squider]

My Dm's Campaign has been running for eleven-odd years, same world. play goes in cycles from level 1 until level stupid. then we roll our kids and start over.Apparently they've been running since first Ed. and going though transitions like OoTS #1, for every edition. I joined two cycles ago, both have been 3.5, and it doesn't look like we'll make the jump to 4th for a while.

After each cycle Pc's become NPC's. our Former Characters have gone on to be everything from kings, to gods, to BBEG's.

Last campaign ended with my barbarian destroying the worlds largest city by accident. I was huge sized, [I]Iron Body'd, and an earth elemental. Some 75,000 pounds. I was dropped on this city, via an enemy teleport, from orbit.

I survived, although nothing else did, in a crater stretching across the countryside. and thanks to my landing armor, I landed on my feet.

[shadzar]

when i gave long running campaigns i usually don't ever end them.

What happens is the current party retires. The decide to let the next era of adventures take up any future challenges, and might even be met by that new group of adventures somewhere down the road.

So the campaign will live as long as I or one of my players do and continues to run in that world, or worlds it is set in.

This means that no matter what you did as a player your character will live on. Depending on circumstances you may even pick it up an play it again from some point in the future with the character a little rusty, should they be needed as an NPC. But the entire party would not just pick up and journey again after retiring.

[Remmirath]

The longest running campaign I've played in that wasn't our home game lasted about a year (I think. It only happened every other week, so it didn't seem that long).
It ended by accident when the doppleganger who had infiltrated the party via doppleganging the party wizard (and party leader) slowly killed almost every one of us in an inn through careful ambushing, level drain, and then killing us. The guy playing the wizard originally (and then also the doppleganger) was really good at roleplaying, so it was a lot of fun nonetheless.
Of course, part of the way most of us died was when the other mage decided to start shelling the building with fireballs...
Actually, my character was I believe the only one who got out alive. He was an elf Hexblade (I wanted to try something new at the time. Sad thing was, he was also the best fighter in the party), and he made his reflex save, soaked the damage, and jumped out the window. I believe we were mostly ninth level at the end.

As for the home game... well, me and my family all play basically whenever we feel like it (which is at least four days a week in the evening), and take durns DMing in the same world. This started when I was eight (six, if you count the campaigns we had in the same world with other who people who later left), but it hasn't all been the same game. It goes by worlds, though, not campaigns.

The first one ended when we had to switch from AD&D version 1 to D&D 3.5. We ended it by tying up a few ends and then leaving things. My brother's character, a red dragon cleric, is now a god of chaos in the current pantheon, but most of the characters are just said to have happily retired.
My thief from that game is currently the ruler of a city. We were anywhere from eighth to seventeenth level (seventeenth being the dragon who ascended; my thief was tenth). Time-wise, it was for about ... five years.

The second one ended when everybody in the land finally turned against the party. My character was a grey elf necromancer who was basically the leader of the group, and was quite evil and, well, a complete jerk. He was fun to play, but he had an unfortunate way of offending absoloutely everybody they met, and double-crossing anyone they worked for. Needless to say, it eventually caught up with them, and they were all executed. I think the time for that one was about three years.

Then we had a new set of characters in the same world. That one ended when my half-dragon sorcerer was sent back in time where he became posessed by an extroardinarily powerful psionicist (who was apparently also some kind of god), and then when he returned to the present the guy in his head went stark raving mad and destroyed the world. This part only took a year or two - not quite sure on that. Maybe not even that. It went pretty quick.

Our current thing is a very long-running mixed D20 Modern/D&D 3.5 game which started out with D20 Modern PCs at 1st level, and now has all sorts of things from between 45th and 65th level. We're gearing up to finally try to seal away for all time the powerful god-killing race trapped in an alternate dimension (that are, of course, starting to break free) that we've been sort of working against since very near the beginning. It should be the most satisfying ending yet either way it goes.
I believe the character who gained the most levels during the course of the campaign was my elf mercenary, who started out at 3rd and died at 50th fairly recently. (Yeah, we've had a fair amount of turn over. And a lot of characters a piece. It's kind of crazy, but it's a fun kind of crazy.) And this one has been going for four years.

Unfortunately, every other game I've played in with another group has lasted maybe three sessions.

[Tempest Fennac]

I've only DMed 1 game which lasted to the end. It was a solo game for a new player who was an LA 0 Lizardfolk who had Battle Sorcerer levels with normal Sorcerer spellcasting (I've seen that variant used before). The campaign started at level 1 with the character not knowing why she could use magic. She then discovered it was because of an artifects which Elans (whach were extinct in this world) had accidentally wiped themselves out while researching a way of creaating Arcane versions of themselves. (The orb which gave the Lizardfolk her magic was created as part of a time warp device which would hopefully allow some Elan survivours to get to the player character's time to avoid extinction).

After sub-quests involving demon summoners and pirates who were after the oil on a ship the player was travelling on, she got the keys she needed to activate the time gate to pick up the Elans. Before then, she ended up killing the chief of a Goblin tribe who was at war with her tribe (the chief's son was killed by the player near the start of the game, and the Goblins eventually realised that a Lizardfolk was responsible). The chief used a Paladin-like class which the player had created, and the player put herself in charge of the Lizardfolk tribe after the chief, who was killed when fighting Goblins, was revived by the player.

She then went back into the past to retrieve the Elans before fighting wrestling booker Vince Russo as the last boss (I wanted the plague which was wiping the Elans out to be a representation of pure chaos and I thought Russo would fll that roll well). The player won and we decided that she would spend the rest of her life attempting to improve the and expand the village.

Considering it was also my first time DMing, along with the fact that I'm uncreative, I think it went really well. The campaign ended with the player's character hitting level 10, and I was thinking that skipping forwards into the future to use her again could be fun. (We ended with brief summaries of what various NPCs did after the game ended. I thought Answers from the Great Beyond by REM summed up the campaign well.)

[Capricornus]

The one long-duration campaign I played in so far (3.0-3.5 from Level 1 to 12) that came to a conclusion ended because the DM was moving away, but he gave us a great finale before he left. It culminated in us receiving as a reward for defeating a Pit Lord one Wish each, which we all used for awesome story reasons since the campaign was over anyway. My character, the Half Elf Ranger/Rogue/Sorceror (long story) used hers to find the location of her missing Elven mother, while the Dwarf Fighter, who had grown to be a good friend of hers, used his to teleport the two of them to her location and future adventure off-panel.

The campaign I'm running currently, which has been going from Level 1 to Level 21 so far, is about to wrap up with the party taking on an evil goddess. Should be fun.