Many have advised to start the next campaign dealing with the aftermath of the catastrophic event the heroes failed to prevent. It is good advice, that I'd like to complement with the idea that you don't need to have the follow-up campaign taking places decades after the first. If the heroes died at the last step of the campaign, there is strong possibility that they had become high-level enough to be known in the setting, and if they barely failed, have an interested third-party (or their patron) start taking those 25,000 gp diamonds out of the treasury to cast True Resurrections.
What I'd expect as a player is... to trust my GM to do his best to narrate something cool.
As a GM, I have successfully:
a) restarted a campaign 4 years after, after the players naughty word-up while fixing the eldritch, world altering machine. Sure, they saved the world, but things had changed. So now, they play in that strange, slightly different world, as reincarnate of the formers heroes, starting to notice things as amiss as their destiny was left unfulfilled.
b) restarted a campaign immediately after, because it was in a world were the court cleric could cast True Resurrection and the king wouldn't lose his whole Round Table because of a stroke of bad luck.
c) (my favorite)... Enter team B! In the campaign, PCs had liked a few NPCs henchmen/adjuvants working for their patron. In the follow-up of their TPK, those NPCs, endowed with specific abilities fitting their characterization, all volunteered to help the patron in the dangerous mission of retrieving the corpses of the late heroes from the den of the evil mastermind, so the patron could put to good use his prized artefacts: a series of Raise Dead scrolls. It was a much lower magic setting, so they had to run as the B-team to meet the 10 days hard limit on Raise Dead.
If there is nothing cool that can come out of a TPK, I'd avoid a TPK and have the evil guy take prisonners to know if they operated alone or if they are part of a larger conspiracy. "You all wake up in a cell" would follow. As a bunch of talking head powered by the evil BBEG's awful necromantic ritual if you're into horror fantasy (and can come up with a credible scenario where the characters regrow a body quickly).
What I'd expect as a player is... to trust my GM to do his best to narrate something cool.
As a GM, I have successfully:
a) restarted a campaign 4 years after, after the players naughty word-up while fixing the eldritch, world altering machine. Sure, they saved the world, but things had changed. So now, they play in that strange, slightly different world, as reincarnate of the formers heroes, starting to notice things as amiss as their destiny was left unfulfilled.
b) restarted a campaign immediately after, because it was in a world were the court cleric could cast True Resurrection and the king wouldn't lose his whole Round Table because of a stroke of bad luck.
c) (my favorite)... Enter team B! In the campaign, PCs had liked a few NPCs henchmen/adjuvants working for their patron. In the follow-up of their TPK, those NPCs, endowed with specific abilities fitting their characterization, all volunteered to help the patron in the dangerous mission of retrieving the corpses of the late heroes from the den of the evil mastermind, so the patron could put to good use his prized artefacts: a series of Raise Dead scrolls. It was a much lower magic setting, so they had to run as the B-team to meet the 10 days hard limit on Raise Dead.
If there is nothing cool that can come out of a TPK, I'd avoid a TPK and have the evil guy take prisonners to know if they operated alone or if they are part of a larger conspiracy. "You all wake up in a cell" would follow. As a bunch of talking head powered by the evil BBEG's awful necromantic ritual if you're into horror fantasy (and can come up with a credible scenario where the characters regrow a body quickly).
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