Finishing A Campaign - Thoughts?

[BiggusGeekus]

Something has to blow up and it better be big.

Can you draw? If not, how are you fixed for cash?

What I'd reccomend, and this is easy because I'm spending your money and not mine, is some kind of big tower or whatnot called The Nexus of the Souls. Change the name if you want. It has to be big. Like, Sky Captian and the World of Tomorrow big. And you'll need to buzz by the art forum on ENWorld and shell out some pay pal bucks so you can get someone to draw it for you.

What the tower does is act as a waypoint for divine power. This is where souls physically pass through before joining the great Taco Bell in the sky or whatever it is Barsoom uses for a hereafter. Now....

Ky'in, the insane goddess once cast from the world and imprisoned-

... is going to buy it when the Nexus goes boom. Her divine essence will infuse the party, giving them a power-up that's big enough to handle....


Ghendorik, legendary dragon-sorcerer of ancient terror-

He knows the secret to restoring the Crystal Veil, a shield that protects Barsoom from....

And horrible things are crashing down from the stars, -
And it appears that whatever magic is employed to make Barsoom habitable in the first place is failing-

Combine these. Fix the shield by killing lots of monsters and taking their stuff. But before the shield is fixed, they will have to journey to the Positive Material Plane and steal the Lifestone that will heal....

the super-powered child of destiny-

... and then the kid says he's sorry.


Again, you'll need visuals. I suggest either a lengthy internet hunt, or buying yourself some art from the ENWorld art guys. I would personally suggest one exotic locale per player and either give them to the party members as gifts or ordering them as a kind of panorama that you can frame.

I can't really make a good suggestion on how to end a 7 year game. I don't think anyone can. Best of luck, man. This one is going to be tough.

 

[barsoomcore]

Sorry I sounded so despondent there. I'm not, actually, but I can see how folks are interpreting what I wrote in that way.

I don't really need ADVICE -- not knowing what's about to happen is my standard operating procedure, actually, so that's fine with me. Frankly, if I KNEW how it was going to end, I wouldn't bother running the game.

My players are insanely clever and devious s-o-b's, so I'm not WORRIED about how they'll get out from under. These are the folks who merrily turned one of their own into a VAMPIRE so that they could get across the continent in a shorter timeframe, remember?

I guess what I'm looking for are more stories from folks who have wrapped things up, and just some general "Yeah, that's tough, letting go," commiseration.

You've encapsulated my feelings very well, Psion. I've spent seven years seeking closure, and I think that if I then re-open things ("Hey guys! Here's a whole new set of baddies!") I'll just cheapen the whole story.

One potential future campaign is actually set in the pre-history of Barsoom, when uber-powerful bad guys were actually in GREATER supply than they are now. I'm thinking of running an EXALTED game in this setting, where the players can either be Solars or Abyssal Exalted.

We'll see.

 

[Psion]

Come up with some sort of plot device by which the PCs succeed.

Or, if your players are creative and you are feeling brave, you can throw some random artifacts and plot elements at them and see what they can come up with the save the world.

The most obvious scenario for success to me, though, is to play one power of the other, or even ally with one of the villains "Turn them to good" (the "Darth Vader Scenario")

Perhaps one villain, wary of the others, tries to create or take control of a weapon that could be used againt the other villains, and the heroes conspire to take control of it. (The "Legion of Super Heroes versus Darkseid" scenario, for any who were forunate enough to be legion fans back in the day...)

 

[Kid Charlemagne]

I wrapped up a campaign in a long-term campaign world a couple of years ago, and I can see where you're coming from. I ended up decding to redeisgn the world from the ground up to take into account all the things that I had noticed that I could have done better from the beginning - including setting up a lot more potential areas of conflict so that the setting could support more than *one* main story. I try to not have my stories be "end of the world" stories so much as allowing changes that can lead to other storylines.

 

[barsoomcore]

Yeah, that's a great idea. Already in progress, sort of. See, over seven years I've developed an inordinately large number of "dunno quite what that is but it must be something" things in the campaign, and part of going back through my megabytes of notes is looking for such things and coming up with ways to integrate them into what's going on.

Ferex, one of the primary religions on Barsoom was allegedly started by seven brothers, who heard the voice of god and founded the seven tribes of the Narid. That's a little detail that's just been hanging around since the very first days of the campaign, never really meaning anything.

Well, whilst sojourning upon the Ghostwalk, our heroes encounter a strange series of thrones. Now, there's ALWAYS been an Iron Throne in Kish, and a Peacock Throne in Luc'Davarionne, and I always had a notion that maybe there was something going on there, but I never bothered defining it -- precisely because I know how helpful a bunch of "loose threads" are at the end of things as you're trying to wrap it all up.

So ANYWAY, when I was casting about for something cool on the Ghostwalk, I thought, "Let's do something with those Thrones". Off the top of my head I decide there are seven: Peacock, Iron, Jade, Wood, Silk, Blood and Gold. Some are busted and they all have weird attendants and apparently relate to some actual chairs on Barsoom, but are also part of some ancient mystical mechanism. And that's cool and gets the players all confused which is always fun for me.



Anyhow, our heroes escape the Ghostwalk and are investigating these thrones, looking for connections. I don't really know where I'm going with them at this point, but whilst planning a session I wander across my Religions of Barsoom notes and notice that there are seven brothers. Seven thrones. So I decide that the Naridic names of the brothers (which I've had since day one), TRANSLATE into Imperial Kishak (the lingua common of Barsoom) as Bird, Iron, Stone, Tree, Silk, Blood and Gold.

I didn't make up new names for these brothers, mind you. The names have been there since before the first session of Barsoom. Now there's a crazed seer named Sharina al-Sharina beni Howetait who's also been around since before the first session ever ran, and our heroes encountered her before but over the past few years the only news on her is that she's been captured by the Kishaks. One of the curious factoids about ol' Sharina is that she is the only surviving member of the priestly order of these seven brothers.

And thus, she is connected to these thrones.

I guess. The PCs are about to bust her out of Kishak prison, anyway, based on that theory. I like it, so I reckon I'll come up with something. Thinking currently is that she knows how to talk to the freaky-deaky creatures that have been trying to explain the PCs how to use the thrones.

I STILL don't know what's actually going on, but that's a very very big part of the fun, for me. But it IS very satisfying that little notes I made seven years ago (hey, seven years, seven brothers, seven thrones...) are proving instrumental to the entire cosmology (and the actual narrative) of the game. I AM confident that in the end, I'll look like a genius.

Important tip, kids: Make up more stuff than you need, but don't make it up too much. Leaving yourself wiggle room is how you keep from going crazy.

 

[MoonZar]

Well i have a suggestion to finish this.

The group can do something or find something that will make the gods and evil vilain to fight each other in the final session. Maybe they would like to kill each other to know who's gonna destroy the world.

After all evil turn on each other so easly...

After the slaugter none of the archevil will survive and the world will be almost completly destroy but will eventualy rise from the ashes.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

Ending a campaign is indeed a tough thing...since you're asking for some commiseration, here you go.

Starting off with the miserable:

I just told the players that we were done. That I was exhausted of ideas for challenging them. They really didn't like that. I was pretty burnt-out at the time. They were all high-level and pretty well settled in. We fixed things slightly by having them come up with what happened to their characters after the campaign ended. That was our first real campaign, and I'd like nothing more than to be able to go back and end it properly. But all of the players but one are scattered to the four winds.

I agree with Psion that re-opening a campaign can be precisely the wrong thing to do:

The PCs overthrew the evil tyrant and restored the good queen to the throne (it was a Hamlet inspired-plot). They were lauded as heroes of the realm. The campaign lasted a single summer. Later on, we tried a follow-up adventure, but the magic was gone.

The Poetic:

I was moving away, so I had no choice but to end the campaign. Somewhere I have a notebook filled with nothing but notes for the ending of all the games we were playing. Anyway, the PCs who owned a bar together discovered a clue that the one character's long lost father was still alive. The campaign ended with them locking up their bar and heading off into the sunrise in search of the father.

Our current D&D 3e campaign is probably going to be left behind in favor of Castles and Crusades. I too am trying to come up with a good way to end it so that if we ever do come back to it, we can pick up playing again, but if not, it won't feel like the game was just left hanging.

 

[Psion]

I STILL don't know what's actually going on, but that's a very very big part of the fun, for me. But it IS very satisfying that little notes I made seven years ago (hey, seven years, seven brothers, seven thrones...) are proving instrumental to the entire cosmology (and the actual narrative) of the game. I AM confident that in the end, I'll look like a genius.

Exposure to my wife's tastes in movies (i.e., muscicals) has me wanting to throw "seven brides" in there, and giving this thread a really surreal twist in my head...


And they were sobbin', sobbin', sobbin'...

 

[iwatt]

Look at your players. Cater to their needs/desires. Some players don't care about dying if their deaths have meaning. Some just want to survive. Others want power. The thing is, your players have been essential in building barsoom as well, or the setting wouldn't have lasted as long as it has. So they deserve to end on a note of sattisfaction.

Personally, as a PC in your game confronted with 4 superpowerful evils, I'd be tempted to destroy the world myself. You know, so that none of the bastards could win. But I'm a petty, petty man sometimes

 

[barsoomcore]

All we need now is Seven Samurai, Seven Chances and Seven. Which are ALL on my DVD shelf, by the by.