After 4 years, 16 days, and 14 levels, the party finally defeated my final villain. They successfully prevented the return of the exiled gods and earned the highest honor in the land.
I am an extremely tired GM. Time to take a few weeks off, then start planning the next campaign.
Well done friend. Getting a squad together for four straight sessions is hard work, let alone four years. Rest well.
My latest campaign of about 5 years wrapped up just late last year too. It’s a great feeling when people have done what they feel they needed to do and you sunset a campaign.
This year I have started as a player in a new campaign. It’s weird not having to prep for a couple of hours before each session.
I can relate to that so much. Switching gears from GM to player is a real struggle for me at times.
What surprised you most about how it all played out?
The way the party kind of adopted the recurring mini BBEG. He was designed to be a recurring villain , showing up near the end of act 1, and was supposed to be the final boss in act two.
He had done some truly vile things to various members of the party, but apologized for them each time, spoke to them as equals, and was overall a fairly amicable person, at least if you can discount the kidnapping and torture on one players father, and the murders of another character’s entire tribe.
Late in act 2, they discovered that he was under a compulsion to serve the whims of the big bad, and I had assumed it was going to lead to a confrontation where they killed him, then went after the BBEG. Instead, they went on a whole redemption arc for the mini BBEG, found a way to break his compulsion, and went on a long quest to free him from the control of the BBEG.
It was kinda inspiring, again except for the multiple murders and other truly vile things this guy did. It was certainly not the outcome I was expecting in a campaign specifically bent to focus on moral grey areas.
Chekhov’s Compulsion
Sounds like you did a great job
How much planning does that take?
I am something of an over planner, but it took me probably 40 hours to get the themes and major plot points nailed down for all three acts. Then, probably another 40 to flesh out act 1 to the point I was ready to bring the players into the sandbox.
For the first year, I was then spending about 3 hours of prep time per session to tie in all the character backgrounds and weave them into the narrative. After the first year, it was down to probably an hour of prep per session unless they were about to transition between acts, or a major character story was happening.
That’s really cool to me. Your being a story teller, writing a series. Add in the player spontaneous and that’s got to be pretty fun, I imagine
It is a great deal of fun and tremendously addictive.
I want to play. No one I know plays though. So I live through you guys here haha
Uncountable.
A single intense session can they’re take an entire weekend of planning as your primary task, depending on how you run your table. It can take longer.
I remember the big fight from my longest campaign ever.
Arranging tokens, having charts set up for pre-rolled checks for the most common bad guy actions, drawing up maps, planning out the “big” minions’ actions, the actual bbeg’s actions he intended, the kinda of minions and their sections of books marked and ready, organizing miniatures for the sections that would make use of them, checking character sheets to make sure I could keep the important parts in my head, and more.
I think I worked for two weeks getting it all set up, an hour or two a day mostly, with the two days before set aside for getting everything finalised and physically set up, and those two days were pretty much an all day thing.
And that’s with me already having had a good chunk of that info in my head. Back then, I could quote off most of the recurring monsters’ stats, and the main bad guys too.
And then the players look in the big dark cave, and John turns around and says, I’m getting really bad vibes here, let’s skip this one, and the party agrees and continues to the pub looking for another adventure.
Don’t even ask me about the side trip into a dragon cult’s lair when my kid and the group I was running decided to completely ignore a dozen preplanned hooks and go haring off through the woods instead.
Unless they plan to stay out of caves forever, then eventually they’re going to stumble into the one that you have planned…
After a weary day of traveling, the group finds a nice tiny cave to sleep in for the night. While asleep, a wolf attacked and shocked John. John rolled a 1 on his constitution check and then rolled a further 1 on his emotional check. John now has a permanent fear of caves preventing any further cave exploration.
The caves are alive and have developed a taste for poor John. They yearn to feed, and their howls sound through the night like gusts of wind through the trees.
John knows the hopelessness of inevitability. Some day, they will find him. Some day, he will wake up deep in the bowels of the caves, and his cries will add to the howls of the caves on the wind.
Wow, that’s such an achievement. Has got to feel good to see it all come together
It really does, and there are always some loose dissapear into the weave over the course of a campaign, but there is a huge high from pulling years of work into a final epic encounter and conclusion.
Plus, the debrief at the end where players can ask all the questions about loot they missed and which characters were actually doppelgangers is always fun.
So you’re not going to try being a player for a change?
I recently joined a second game with a different group as a player, so I still get my individual play time. Some of my players will also likely run one shots or small adventures in the interim while I do the next campaign prep, but they are adamant that they don’t want to run any long form stories.
Ah that’s cool. I always feel bad for DMs that don’t get to play themselves
