Favorite campaign that you ever played?

[Whisper-Kitten]

So years ago my friend Chason started a game that he called "The Rod of Law" (<----Get all the laughs out of the way, you perverts), which was an evil campaign. We were tasked with helping the dark wizard Thanatos retrieve seven pieces of the rod and thus giving him ultimate power. Of course, since we were evil, we were constantly plotting against him and each other all the time. I think the first game set the tone for how the campaign would go from then on. So we were in the village of Thatacher, which was the village that supported the castle we were in (Ebonkeep), and I am questioning the mayor, Leyland. Who is a weasel of a man and quite obviously skimming off the tax money that he is supposed to collect. Failing several intimidation rolls, I simply punch him in the face. Sounds good, right? The problem is that I had a crazy-high strength score for the level, and I nearly killed him. Actually, I think that I did, but the GM sort of fudged his stats to keep him alive. Anyway, one of the other players, Brian, decides that we are not being evil enough and casts thunderwave at a group of people, killing them all. Several of whom are children, whose corpses the Necromancer, Steve, then went about reanimating in front of their horrified parents. Our fourth player, Brandon, sort of wandered off into an ambush and nearly died. Which is something that happened quite often with him over the campaign. We never seemed to get our footing and were more like the Three Stooges than a group of evil adventurers. Still, it is my favorite campaign of all time. So what about everyone else?

 

[Reynard]

I ran a multi-generational campaign that started as "you are the young would be heroes in this small village" in 2E AD&D that, through play, defined a whole world and ended as a Mutants and Masterminds 2E supers game in the modern, magic reawakened version of that world. At the 20th anniversary of the game, I secretly brought back players who, because of distance, had left the campaign for a massive Crisis on Infinite Earths event. It was glorious.

Not long after the campaign finally fizzled as many of the core players had personal stuff that was incompatible with getting together.

 

[sevenbastard]

Hmmm mostly I DM, but as a player

Both from the 90s

A Victorian Horror campaign that started as Mask Of The Red Death but eventually became a entire homebrew system.

A 2e campaign that was supposed to be a dungeon crawl, but we got off track made enemies with the thieves guild and got killed. My buddy and I still are bitter 30 years latter.

 

[Thierry-Advent]

My homebrew solitary D&D BX campaign called The Silver Mines of Daggenford. Played 5 characters from level 1 to level 6. It started as a simple exploration mission in the abandoned mines, but quickly it bloomed into the uncovering of an evil secret cult with many ramifications. The cleric was the son of the local lord, there was also political intrigue, assassinations and a war. At the end, each of the characters went his/her way. The Magic-User retreated in his newly built tower to do magical research; the paladin became the steward of the border keep she saved from an ogre invasion; the cleric became the local lord, married the ranger and they had twins; the thief took control of the local guild. The heroes of Daggenford retired. Very 'classic' but satisfying as a solo campaign. It lasted 30 two-hour sessions. I've never been able to replicate that.

As a player, the campaigns I played in never amounted to much. DMs abandoned their own creation after 3-5 games.

 

[billd91]

For published campaigns - probably Masks of Nyarlathotep. Played through it spring term 1989 when I was in college. We completed it, successfully, and all it cost us was, I think, 12-14 PC casualties - some dead, some with tenuous sanity.

For home brew, we played a global war AD&D campaign during the winter of 1987. Some of us were on break from college and had literally nothing better to do that play D&D. We all had multiple PCs in the campaign engaging in different missions in different parts of the swords-and-sorcery influenced setting my friend had created.

 

[payn]

Kingmaker PF1. My Bard became the king and it was pretty glorious. We had a lot of interesting encounters and development im guessing were not typical of the campaign.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

I'm mostly a GM, so this goes back a way. Probably either a Dragonlance campaign back in the AD&D days, or a 1e Shadowrun campaign.

More recently I was really enjoying a Descent into Avernus campaign, but the DM for that petered out about 1/3 of the way through. Didn't even tell us the campaign was over, just stopped scheduling sessions. That sort of thing is a big part of why I mostly stick to GMing. I know I finish what I start, and am consistent.

 

[gtwucla]

The Age of Worms campaign from the Dungeon Magazine for 3.5e. Granted we only really played the first module and it actually ran all the way up to level 20 over 12 modules (i think?). Very first TTRPG game I played and it ran for over a year. We never breached level 7 or so and played on the edge of our seat the whole time. I literally had dreams with certain characters like Allustan as if they were real people. My GM would write like 20 pages of possibilities and we'd run though like 5 of them before moving on to the next thing nearly every session. Would kill to be in my twenties again and doing that once a week.

 

[Umbran]

Probably a Mage: the Ascension game I played in grad school. Three mages and a werewolf try to get by in Los Angeles. Wackiness ensued.

 

[John Dallman]

The GURPS 4e occult WWII campaign's first strand. 14 years of monthly sessions, going all the way through the war. Two spin-off stands with different GMs are expected to last at least as long.