Tell me about your best (and worst) campaign endings

[Silver Moon]

Two that I'm familiar with:

Best: The group had been playing for two years and had done a lot of short modules linked together with an overall theme of defeating a corrupt Priest/King. They managed to not only defeat him but to turn the kingdom over to the legitimate heir and were all declared heroes. The DM decided that any follow-up to that would be anti-climactic so declared that particular campaign over and the game resumes the following week 100 years later with new playing characters who are the descendants and followers of the original heroes.


Worst: Cornered in a dungeon by powerful foes, three heroes having fallen (one dead, two unconscious) with only a few dozen hit points left among the remaining four party members the party Wizard unilaterally decides to have the party go out in blaze of glory. He declares that he is snapping his Wand of Fireballs in half, which according to him will cause a massive 320 D6 fireball. The DM agrees and the dungeon explodes leaving no trace of anyone or anything.

 

[Caliber]

Its tough to say, but looking just at what I've run I'd have to say ...

Worst: 3E has just come out and I convince my group to jump to it from Alternity. Of course, since this is my idea, I'm stuck DMing it! Lucky for me, WOTC comes out with the AP, starting with Sunless Citadel and working its way onwards, and I jump into it with gusto. The party jives and levels up, moving up the modules slowly, as I fill in the blanks and string them together, giving a vague-ish storyline across it all.

And then we come to Lord of the Iron Fortress. I'm not sure if my party somehow became underpowered at some point or what, but the whole slog through LotIF is extremely rough, with nearly a character death per session.

So the player's come upon the eponymous Iron Fortress, and, seeing the large iron golem guarding the entrance, decide they'll be smart and sneak in. By disintegrating a hole in the back wall. I have the whole fortress laid out with 3D tiles and they point out where they want to blow the hole. Which, of course, is the throne room for the BBEG, and his Pit Fiend friend. A meteor shower later and suddenly I'm minus one party. Damn. (On the upside, we still joke about "hey, lets blow a hole in the back and sneak in!")

Best: A short, one or two session game I ran once. Telling my players I was going to convert over a bit of the Conspiracy X campaign setting (for those not in the know, think every crazy conspiracy you've heard, even the contradictory ones, is true) and run a one shot, I stat up several different characters for everyone to play. Calling the game d20 Horror, all the usual horror tropes are there, including the mad scientist (whose player gets some hidden behind the scenes knowledge.) Apparently, he accidently released some zombies on the island. Oops! These aren't your DnD zombies though ... one bite basicly means your through, and as the player's try to slog their way through the small island they are stuck on, their numbers dwindle down as more and more become infected.

Finally, running for their lives, the remaining characters arrive at the dock on the island, a hundred ravenous zombies from the local resort coming after them. They begin untying a small yacht when ... the mad scientist goes nuts (as his notes instructed him to do.) He had been dropping hints the whole time to not being "all there" but no one commented, and when he turns everyone is suprised. A full battle breaks out, with the BBEG being ... another player!

Completely without my fudging, one man manages to survive, setting himself out, adrift on the ocean. Such a fitting ending for such a strange campaign.

 

[Kid Charlemagne]

Worst: The campaign's mystery (in Fading Suns, a sci-fi game) was solved by the DM's girlfriend's PDA. I'm only slightly exaggerating.

 

[crazy_monkey1956]

Big endings for homebrew campaigns are always a little difficult to fully explain without copious amounts of back story...but I'll give it a shot.

Now, before anyone shoots me for robbing the PCs of the super-cool end moment, keep in mind that I only had one PC, my wife's, and that we both treated several of the NPCs as if they were fully blown PCs. With that in mind: (um, also keep in mind that this was on the verge of epic levels).

The PC and her companions are fighting my version of the Githyanki Lich-Queen and her minions on the "bridge" of a six-mile long, dragon shaped flying vessel. In order to close a gap in the Plane of Shadow and prevent a full-on invasion from the Far Realm, all of the Orbs of Dragonkind had to be placed in their "control nodules" and activated by, according to a strict reading of the directions, "the hand of a god." Now, an incorporeal, regaining his power but not quite there version of Vecna was watchng the proceedings and taunting the party by reminding them that whoever activated the device would be utterly destroyed...

The NPC bard, who had managed to acquire the Hand and the Eye, reminded Vecna, that the device didn't require a god to activate it...just the Hand of a God.

Thus was the gap in the Shadow Barrier closed, the Githyanki defeated, Vecna utterly destroyed, and all lived happily ever after...well, until the next epic threat comes along.

 

[shilsen]

Worst: The campaign's mystery (in Fading Suns, a sci-fi game) was solved by the DM's girlfriend's PDA. I'm only slightly exaggerating.

You really need to give us some more details than that.

So start spilling!

 

[NCSUCodeMonkey]

You really need to give us some more details than that.

So start spilling!

Hah, ditto . I want to hear this one.

 

[Mokona]

An artifact had stolen most off the magic in the world for thousands of years. Spells were very rare outside the sphere of the mages who controlled that device. Upon the climax of the campaign, the party reached this magic-absorbing item.

1. The rogue wanted to free magic from captivity so everyone could use it again
2. The forsaker (an anti-magic class from Masters of the Wild) wanted to destroy magic forever
3. The paladin wanted to return magic back to its creator in heaven (because mortals obviously weren’t ready for the responsibility yet)

The rogue and the forsaker both suffer magical backlash leaving the paladin able to get his way. Magic is removed from the world, temporarily (well for at least a thousand years).

Atlantis-style...the continent where the final battle took place sinks beneath the waves.

Years later I read the Dungeon Master's notes (she wrote all her prep down prior to each session). The note said: if the rogue gets his way then the room sinks into the ocean, if the forsaker gets his way the city above the artifact sinks into the ocean (thousands of elves die), and if the paladin gets his way the entire continent sinks into the sea (killing millions!).

[ed. - I played the paladin and we all assumed that the climatic sinking of "atlantis" was part of the story. I was shocked, and dismayed, to learn that only my choice caused such terrible destruction.]

 

[pogre]

Best - A WFRP campaign that ended with the last surviving PC cutting the head off of a demon-possessed emperor.

Worst - TPK involving goblins....

 

[Kid Charlemagne]

You really need to give us some more details than that.

So start spilling!

Hah, ditto . I want to hear this one.

Let's see if I can do this one justice...

We have had a rotation of DM's for a long time in our Saturday gaming group, but a while back we were low on options, so we allowed one of the players (against our better judgement) to run a Fading Suns game. Fading Suns may be a great game and setting, but I'm forever scarred.

Players included myself, eris404 and Dread October (from these boards), and a couple of other players, one of who was the DM's girlfriend. This last bit was not in and of itself a problem; she was a casual player, but smart and fully capable of quality play. Her PC had some kind of uber-PDA computer device that might have had some limited AI (think like the computer on the Enterprise in Star Trek).

We were on a planet in some god forsaken backwater section of space. The DM's girlfriend's PC was there with her mentor, my character was a member of the ruling noble family, another PC was a priest of some kind, and I don't recall the other characters too much.

The mentor got himself murdered somehow, and a series of deaths started occuring. This is where the trouble started; mysteries are tough to run as it is, and the DM wasn't super experienced. We started investigating, and it started to become clear to me that the DM had decided on the specific clue that would break the case wide open, but wasn't going to do much to help us find that clue. He was willing to let us blunder around asking questions - literally for session after session. No other clues presented themselves.

This went on for - I'm not exaggerating - perhaps seven sessions, without a whole lot to break things up. We had lists of suspects, but never really found any evidence of anything. At one point we managed to come upon a perpetrator in the midst of commiting a murder, as we had staked out a house in order to catch the perpetrator in the act. THe bad guy bit on the bait and attacked, and we moved in to intercept.

He was wearing powered armor (way over our heads technologically) and had an invisibility field generator of some sort. He kicked our butts face to face, and we still didn't have Clue One. Or even an idea what he looked like. Or if he was a he. Or even human.

Shortly after that, I think we pretty much came up with some sort of "sweep the problem under the rug" kind of solution to the mystery, and decided to go off-world. The DM kind of realized (way late) that he was losing the group, and that he wanted to wrap up his pretty little mystery, and so we got to hear an "Hercule Poirot" mystery-solving speech... from the DM's girlfriend's PDA.

I think we had one more session after that, and someone decided to step up and run a game other than him.

This all came to mind a little while back when someone on our groups email list was trying to remember the name of some fighting feat from the Book of 9 Swords, and thought it was called Setting Sun, or Fading Sun, or somethign like that, and I replied that "Fading Sun is the feat where you sit around for 100 years and then your PDA solves the mystery."

Sigh.

Perhaps some day I'll tell you all why wagons are evil.

 

[Wystan]

Okay, Why are wagons evil?

Is this like gazebos?