Campaign's End

[BowStreetRunner]

Just a bit curious, how do your campaigns end?

I've been in a few that never did reach a conclusion - we would leave at the end of one session without realizing that circumstances would soon arise to prevent the game from continuing. There were a few that died after a party wipe or near party wipe where players were just too discouraged to attempt the same campaign again. (In fact, my favorite ending to a RPG actually came after a near party wipe in a game of Cyberpunk: Night's Edge with the last surviving character holed up in a motel room sitting in a chair facing the door with his shotgun across his lap, smoking a cigarette and drinking a glass of whisky waiting for the bad guys to come. The player asked that we just fade to black at that point - that is how he wanted to remember it.) But most of the campaigns I've been in had scripted endings - from riding off into the sunset scenarios, to the big award ceremony scene (like in Star Wars IV), to the whodunit revelation (like in old detective stories when the villain is unmasked).

So what sort of endings have the rest of you experienced?

[Draconium]

My group ended their first (and so far, only long-running) campaign by facing off against the armies of the Lower Planes in an epic battle. Or so I was told, because unfortunately, I was unable to attend that session. :smallfrown:

(Although one of the characters from that campaign later went and joined another high-level came, and she ended up as basically queen of everything, so... :smalltongue:)

[Rakoa]

We had one campaign end after a TPK, in which the PCs fell to a mercenary group hired by a group of Evil wizards. Talon's Crew, they were called. Just some fairly typical goons from a module with some interesting tactics involving hidden spellcasters and undercover spies. The party fell for allll of their tricks, and some bad rolls resulted in a very dead party. They did manage to take out the leader of the group and a representative of the wizards that they were working for, though.

Anyways, the player's then agreed that Talon's Crew was awesome, and with my blessings took on the NPCs as their new characters. So maybe it wasn't technically the end of that campaign? Depends on how you look at it. It certainly went in a different direction after that, though. Talon was resurrected by the Evil Wizard Group in exchange for the body of their representative (so that he, too, could be resurrected).

[Fizban]

Players flake out before finishing the campaign. Followed by semi-hostile takeover, then aggressive abdication, then DM declares an excess of plot creep so we start a new one, then DM declares he has no time for DnD anymore and the already straining group falls apart.

In more detail: I ran Red Hand of Doom for I think a little over a year, losing and replacing half the players but continuing on until just a couple sessions before the end of the campaign when 2 of the 3 remaining gave up. Just didn't want to try finishing it when other life stuff was happening. More than a year later the longest running player from that game invites me to one he's just started, I bring in a couple players who don't flake out and he DMs off the cuff for a while which drives me nuts so I take over and start running World's Largest Dungeon. Which basically bombed in the other direction but gave me the opportunity to push one of the other players into the DM seat so I could play a class I'd been dying to play. He started with a module but spun off into a bunch of original plots and we ran for at least half a year until he decided it wasn't going well, so we started a different module instead. A couple months after that while tensions were high due to drama between me and one of the other players, the DM decided to go back to college and quit DnD, and with stuff unresolved and no forced meetings to continue I lost all my friends. Very sadface :smallfrown:

So I haven't had any campaigns reach any sort of ending at all. I could try and get a new group together, but it's ridiculously hard to find even one person willing to commit to showing up at day and time, let alone four, and when all my experience says they'll just flake out anyway why should I even bother?


But more in the spirit of the thread, here's at least the points where they left off:
After the wizard was killed from behind and the battle sorc firealled himself to death instead of fireballing the enemy, the surviving Dark Paladin and Cleric of Narcissism were left with scant days to stop the ritual that would summon an army of devils to the material plane. With no 11th hour alliances to be had, things looked grim. . .

After committing a number of blatant acts of terrorism, kidnapping, and extortion (all to help the Good rebels they'd quite forcibly joined), the party was poised to kick off a revolution, storm the castle, and then hit the seas in their totally legitimately acquired boat. One member couldn't help but expect a terrifying swarm of unstoppable demon bugs to come screaming out the forest at a moment's notice, but on the bright side he'd at least cured someone of long running emotional scars without even noticing :smallcool:

Having survived some close scrapes and establishing a safe base camp by allying with the wardens of the dimensionally locked prison dungeon, the party was prepared to venture forth into the next region looking for a way out. The drow infesting the zone were pushovers, but when a twisted ooze horror nearly consumed their most powerful magic-user (and did consume all of his equipment and armor), they suddenly weren't so sure this was a good idea.

When examining a massive complex powering an artifact capable of viewing anything, anywhere, at any point in history, a great shaking is felt and the guardians that had driven off one of the most powerful wizards on all of Faerun begin to awake.

Following the direction of someone who once fought the cult of the Elemental Eye to search an old temple for signs of new activity, the party came upon a dilapidated old building full of sleeping warriors. The warriors were members of the cult, immediately dispatched with great gutso and little threat as they were caught unarmored, surrounded, and outgunned, but gave little hint as to what might be going on.

[Malimar]

The two games I've been in that finished, rather than simply petering out as people stopped showing up or the DM stopped being able to play:

One ended in a TPK. It involved a.) me starting to get bored of the campaign and b.) the scout carrying 8 gallons worth of flasks of lamp oil on his person into the high-oxygen environment of the Plane of Air, into combat with a vampire factotum who had prepared scorching ray that morning. (The wizard survived the explosion, but lost the subsequent 1v1 duel with the vampire.)

The other, the Rise of the Runelords adventure path, ended in success. We defeated the BBEG and my witch claimed the Golden City of Xin-Shalast as a vassal state and put the dragonblooded sorcerer and the druid in charge of it as Duke and Duchess of Xin-Shalast. The bard and the dwarf monk retired to Magnimar to start a bar, and the samurai returned to his homeland (with my witch promising to vassalize the samurai's lord at some future date).

[martixy]

I've had only 2 campaigns conclusively end with some kind of semi-satisfactory resolution. And 1 more that ended abruptly cuz the DM wasn't very good at planning(or DMing) so when the end of one of his arcs came everyone just gave up on the campaign rather than suffer through each other further.

But the other 2, were with my regular group. And I say semi-satisfactory for the following reasons:
1. Ending in a very fun series of escalating boss-battles, which concluded with fighting a 100+ ft. high demon titan, where I got literally vaporized literally 5 seconds before the end(1 round) cuz a particularly bad string of rolls. Hence the semi-part.
2. A long campaign where everyone just lost interest in the end. We had just been through an epic 3-way battle between an army of giants, an evil cleric+dragon duo with an army of their own and the defenders of a major city in that world being assaulted. So we got together for a final session where we established sort of a diplomatic solution(though I don't remember any details) and that was the end of it.

I'm hoping to break the "meh"-streak this year, but we'll see.

[Calimehter]

Recent campaigns have been few and far between and tended to sputter out due to RL issues before any kind of resolution can even be built up to. :(

Back in the glory days, most of our long-term campaigns ended with success of the kingdom-saving variety, but we had a few anti-climactic endings too. The one that really sticks out was a lower-level campaign based around a voyage of discovery and the long trek back. After a dozen or so sessions of overcoming crazy obstacles, the party made some bad decisions and had some bad luck when they were literally within sight of their homeland and ended up with a TPK. That could have been a real downer, but because we were using the same setting for the very next set of games, the PCs had a lot of fun running into 'artifacts' from the deceased party that gradually filtered back into the kingdom, so the players I am still in contact with from that one have some very good memories of that set of games.

[erok0809]

I've finished two campaigns, one as the DM, and one as a player. In the one I played in, the party (level 7, sort-of low magic) managed to basically singlehandedly eliminate an enemy army encroaching on the capital city, saving our country and putting most of the mcguffins in our control. This army, by the way, was being controlled by a previous advisor of ours, who had studied an evil mcguffin too hard, went insane and evil, and decided he wanted all the other mcguffins for himself, so that was fun. We gave a few mcguffins back to the army general who was our boss, and then split off to do our own things, but keeping an eye out for if we're needed again. That should be a future campaign, if the 5 of us are ever back together long enough to play it out.

As a DM, the campaign ended with a final battle near the Veil of Souls with the party against the BBEG and a few handpicked minions after a two year timeskip (bad planning and unwillingness to retcon major events required the party to level quickly). When the party prevailed, they took the artifact mcguffin the BBEG had that, when combined with the complementary one the party had, had the potential to ruin the plane to the sage who trained them over the last years and had him lock them away separate forever. The party went on with their lives, to live as mostly unsung heroes, but using the associated wealth from their adventuring to live out their dreams.

Overall, I was satisfied with both endings, as far as I know so was everyone else involved. I had to rush mine a bit because I was graduating from the college I played at so I couldn't exactly continue. The player one had to end for the same reason, but that one wasn't rushed the same way. I really want to continue playing in that world, I just don't see it happening any time soon, unfortunately, since we all live far from one another now.

[Bonzai]

It depends on the DM. We have a stable group, and we rotate running.

Me: my campaigns tend to finish. My longest one started at lvl 1, and ended at Lvl 23. There is an organic stopping point were the story is ended.

DM 2: his campaigns also finish. He runs premade mods, and we usually wrap it up and start over around 15th lvl.

Dm's 3 &4, usually lose around 8th or so, and the campaigns fizzle out.

[AuraTwilight]

My last 3.5 game ended with the party utterly winning in every conceivable way. That entire multiverse can't really be adventured in any more because they exalted it into a Noblebright setting.

[thorr-kan]

The Friday Night Gaming doesn't run generally run campaigns; nobody has the time. Instead we run one-shots or a limited-arc adventure. We're running the Scooby-Doo gang in CoC right now. It seems to work for us. Occasionally characters get revisted.

The only campaign I've ever DM'd is to run is a 2ED Al-Qadim for this group. It goes in cycles. I run until life prevents me from paying it the attention it needs and we reach a good breaking point. When I'm up to it, I cycle it back in. We keep revisiting it, and the players keep making me pull my hair out with their shenanigans, so it seems to be working...

I'm starting to get that itch again.