Campaign End

[JoeGKushner]

So how have you ended your campaigns? I was rereading "Down in Flames", a small book for CORPS that talks about various ways to end a campaign. it's written for a modern game/setting, but has a lot of ideas that would work well in any setting with a little work.

Some stuff doesn't even require an update like having weather changes killing off the planet, meteor strikes, wrath of god, etc...

 

[Psion]

As I was stating on the Necro boards to this question, my last epic level campaign came to a nice halt, and then we made the mistake of restarting it and then leaving it dangling because some players moved.

I'm not a big fan of the "Down in Flames" approach. It sounds like fun sometimes, but more often than not, the world outlives the characters, and a single campaign can be a stepping stone for the world.

(I can't help but think of Larry Niven. After considering and writing an outline for bringing his Known Space setting down in flames -- with some cool ideas, I might add -- he wrote a bestselling novel in the setting.)

 

[Henry]

So far, I have participated in approximately TWO campaign endings.

In a D&D World War I campaign I played in, we ended when Adolph Hitler and his ally, the Avatar of Corellon Larethian, were finally beaten by our team of commandos in a hard-fought yet victorious battle. We were soundly hailed for our actions.

In a Star Wars d20 game I ran, I pushed the Yuuzhan Vong war to an early conclusion by having a hidden base which cultivated the Ithorian plant life which most of the YV's biotech was susceptible to. Whereas in my timeline as in the books, Ithorr was destroyed by the Vong, in my timeline a traveller from the future foresaw the outcome and placed a hidden base with this resource. The PC's were successful in ultimately tracking it down and defeating the Vong sent to find and destroy it.

In both, the climax was planned beforehand, and the campaign was limited in size. We knew roughtly how many sessions we were going to run, and had fixed what the final goal would be.

 

[reveal]

I have DMed 2 campaign that actually ended.

1) FR campaign. Group is 10th level, actively searching a dungeon for the BBEG. Unfortunately, one of the group, a pretty kick-butt monk, ends up failing a save and starts hallucenating because of some yellow mold. She ends up thinking the rest of the group are enemies and proceeds to kill them, one by one. A few minutes after she comes out of it, the BBEG comes out and kills her instantly with a spell. Pretty anti-climactic and I felt really bad about it.

2) Year later and I'm running a d20 Modern campaign. The end sees the BBEG in a meeting to, essentially, move into the Terran realm (FR was his original realm) and will probably take it over. The group stops him and kills him, releasing his hold on a certain female monk who had become his thrall. In the end, the group not only killed the BBEG and stopped him from taking over the world, they were able to save their original group who had become thralls. The original group wrote them later and thanked them.