The end of a campaign

[Dredwulf60]

I was thinking the other day how games typically end, by nature of the medium.

Most games tend to go until the player characters all die or the players (or GM) lose interest.

Most movies and TV-shows get an official wrap-up. A real ending of some kind.

I've had some exceptions, where there is an epilogue of sorts to the last game in a campaign, where the battles have been won and the player characters settle into a retirement of sorts.

Has anyone else had games that have glorious or even simple end-caps?

[garhkal]

I had one for an adnd game, where the DM had set it, that once the LAST of our party, hit "Lord" status, and started to build their keep/tower/church, that's when the campaign ended.. Then we restarted it, 10 years later (IN Game), with all knew PC's.....
There was a Vampire campaign, that ended with the Sabat, seizing the town we were all living in, and ruining all of our havens..We'd failed MISERABLY to stop them...
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Confucious sayeth, don't wash cat while drunk!

[Whill]

Actually there are a lot of TV shows that get cancelled without proper ending. Although rare for movie series, it occasionally happens, such as the Amazing Spider-Man series (We never found out who killed Uncle Ben because the third film in the series got cancelled when they rebooted Spider-Man as part of the MCU).


I love having grand final adventures to campaigns. The primary purpose of roleplaying is the co-creation of stories, and it is even better if there is an ongoing story with a climax and ending. I need closure.

My first campaign ended with a time travel adventure where the PCs were suddenly blasted to an awful future where the film heroes all died in a battle at some unknown world called Endor, and the PCs had to severely cripple a Death Star to get back to their own time and prevent that awful future from occurring.

In another, one of the PCs epically sacrificed his life to save the rest of the group and Adar Talon (an original adventure).

In a sequel campaign to that one, the last adventure had an epic battle on Tatooine that result in the PCs killing Jabba the Hutt and Boba Fett to rescue Han Solo. The epilogue of that adventure had the PCs about to launch a strike force to Endor (this campaign world obviously diverged from film canon).

In another campaign world that diverged from film canon, a hunter guild of PCs assisted a Rebel attack on Coruscant that involved a battle against the Emperor. Most of the PCs died but the Emperor's spirit was captured with a Force crystal and put inside of a non-Force-sensitive Gamorrean hunter. The two surviving hunters turned over the Gamorrean to the Alliance who eventually paid 2/3rds of the bounty.

I ran a campaign that ended with a tragic adventure where the PCs all died one by one over the course of the adventure, and it ended when the last PC found himself in a dark ally face-to-face with Vader.

I've ran the Minos Campaign from GG6 and other published campaigns that had grand final adventures, sometimes tweaked for more epicness. I really love to see an ongoing story reach fruition.


I've also ran a couple major campaigns (and a few minor ones) that had no epic final adventure because they were purely episodic campaigns with no metaplot. One of those lasted four years. In those campaigns it was hardly ever the same exact set of players/PCs from one adventure to the next, because they were more of, "we are playing with whoever shows up to play". These are not my preference and it has been a while since I've done one, but I haven't closed the door on that completely.

And I ran a solo sequel campaign for a veteran PC of my first campaign, and the campaign ended unexpectedly when the PC crossed over the Dark Side. So an end cap of sorts, yes, but a tragic one.
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Star Wars D6 Damage

[Grimace]

I have never had a Star Wars game end with a glorious or wrapped up ending. They all just fizzled out.

I DID, however, have a Fantasy D6 campaign wrap-up in glorious fashion after 2 and a half years of playing. It was excellent, and really the only game that I have ever had actually finish at an acceptable and definite ending.

[MrNexx]

[garhkal]

[Urban Spaceman]

We were 4 or 5 adventures shy of ending our 10 year long campaign when Corona hit. We've played 1 adventure on-line, but it's doesn't really suit our group, so were on hold until the world lets us meet back up.

Every other campaign I've played, in every system has just fizzled out, so I really want to get this over the line!
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"The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't."

[Dredwulf60]

In some cases, I had a potential ending on the horizon...

For instance, the campaign I ran where all of the PCs were part of a small-time racing swoop gang on tatooine. A bunch of teens whose main goal in life was winning the next race against the other local hoodlums and trying to keep enough money on hand for their club house expenses...hunting womp rats for money, being wilderness guides for off-world prospectors, being hired muscle from time to time.

Then one day one of the players came across a damsel in distress. She was being chased and needed help. She gave him a data disk and said to get to to her contact in Mos Espa. Then she drew off her pursuers.

True to character, the repulsor-head punk ended up selling the data disk for a good price and life went on.

Then, months later, they heard that Alderaan had been destroyed...and soon after Yavin-4. That's when the players realized they were now living in an alternate timeline.

I told them that the schism happened because of that disk...it had a list of rebel agent identities...the empire got it and captured the agents who WOULD have stolen the Death Star plans...before they did.

Later, the Empire started to come down hard on the outer-rim. Large garrison was established on Tatooine. The players decided they didn't like that and started harassing the empire, small-scale at first, like in the movie Red Dawn.

Eventually they got skilled and successful enough that the rebellion that the remains of the Rebel Alliance started sending them equipment and special forces to help train them.

The plan was to eventually have the swoop gang get recruited as a special platoon of speeder-bike scouts and finally leave tatooine for other planets as full military characters.

Perhaps to serve a pinnacle role in an Endor-like operation to really take down the Empire.

But the game ended before they ever got officially joined the rebels.


Another campaign arc was my Jedi Padawan campaign.
Starting just after the battle of Geonosis, every character was a padawan whose master never came back from that planet.

The goal was to follow these characters as they tried to complete their training...become Jedi generals leading clone troops.

the campaign was to end shortly after Order 66....with any survivors having 'won' an epilogue.

A key point was that every player character who died was gone...they made up clone commander characters who were there to support the remaining jedi player characters.

The interesting dynamic was that they all knew where this was eventually going...

But the game had to end prior to Order 66 when I had to go away for training. It ended in the middle of the clone wars... with 2 Jedi characters remaining, 4 clone commander characters and 1 padawan character who had more recently joined.

[DougRed4]

I'm jealous of those of you who have successfully had codas to your campaigns. In some cases, I don't really need to have an ending (like my ongoing 30+ year supers campaign, that is more of a large-scale world that has covered multiple teams and groups).

But for others, it would be nice to conclude them properly. Most of my campaigns go on for many years, but the only one that ever had a proper ending was a Star Trek one that I started (and ran for a couple of years) that my friend took over and took in a completely different direction. He ended up having a proper finish for it.

My Star Wars game has had many stops and starts, but it's only now getting to the 'fun part' that we'd envisioned at the beginning. The PCs have now finally committed to being part of the Rebel Alliance and were just now invited to the new base on Yavin IV. Within a year (campaign-time) they'll be able to start having adventures that are simultaneous with the events of the films.
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Currently Running: Villains & Vigilantes (a 32-year-old campaign with multiple groups) and D6 Star Wars; mostly on hiatus are Adventures in Middle-earth and Delta Green

[garhkal]

[Mamatried]

Last campaign I ran ended sort of on a cliff hanger.

Basically the campaign was about getting away from the clutches of the empire
with a stolen ship, a lambda shuttle with some added modifications.
Through out the campaign the players learned more about the nature of the
ship modifications, and made the decition to bring the technology to the rebels
through a few fight and flight missions the leayer eventually managed to get away with the ship, they managed to remove all traces of their involvement and all that.
Finally they got away with the ship, sort of the campaign goal, but as they exited hyperspace above nar shadda where they had a small base of operstions they ran a final diganosis on the ship and found that the ship had been fitted with a hyperspace tracing device of unkown origins.....
letting the players sort of want to continue on a later time

[Ray]

The biggest and longest campaign my old group had ended in a retirement party. We were big news, and we booked an entire Five-Star Hotel, with an extensive Insurance Package. Poor staff should have realized they were in trouble as soon as they saw we checked all the electives. We were running the Far Orbit campaign, so we had a lot of crew that were part of this party.

And we sent invitations to absolutely everyone we could think of!

Han Solo and Chewbacca actually showed up, and left the party five days later (the party ran... A long time) with Han pushing a passed out Chewbacca wearing a lampshade and a stolen hotel robe in a wheelbarrow.

The few crew that wanted to continue to operate as "extras" for the New Republic (all NPCs, some even named) bought out the heavily modified Corellian Corvette from the company, and went on further adventures.

For the rest of us, it was just a matter of figuring out a retirement that satisfied them.

My rather numb minded grunt PC bought a rabbit farm, and shares in BlasTech, making them non-voting shares in exchange for being part of the testing department of R&D. He got all the nice guns before they were even production ready.

[Dr. Bidlo]

I ran a campaign through college and beyond with a couple of bounty hunters set in the time of the original trilogy. They did start as typical bounty hunters, but through the course of several years they got caught up in a huge mystery that led them to discovering the ruins of the ancient alien race from which the Gree spun off. This lead to Indiana Jones type adventures, big baddies seeking the same knowledge and secrets, the discovery of the origin of the galaxy and its inevitable collapse and a grand conclusion that looped them right back to where they started on their first adventure.

I had also run a long campaign with a Jedi set after the Battle of Endor. He battles Imperial remnants and various dark jedi left in place by Palpatine to serve as his proxies before his return. I intended to conclude the campaign with the jedi facing a newly reborn Emperor on Byss. I was not able to bring the campaign to that conclusion (the "show got cancelled before its final season" like Westworld), but the last session we played still felt dramatic and final enough. The Imperial remnant directed from an 'unknown' personality from the Deep Core was finishing a project abandoned years earlier - the creation of a two-way gravshock device within the shell of a torpedo sphere. The project was completed and the Imperials had the ability to break up entire planets AND then mine the remains to create even more war machines and ships for their fleet. The last game was an attack on this torpedo sphere with the jedi leading the forces. There were swarms of TIE fighters and other supporting ships and of course there was a trech run on a weak point at a thermal exhaust port for a 'one in a million' shot with proton torpedoes. I was playing the Star Wars soundtrack while we were playing and the music timed perfectly. The point in the music where it builds up to Luke firing his proton torpedoes at the Death Star is exactly when the jedi character threw the dice for his attack - starship gunnery, plus fire control, plus a Concentration bonus, and a force point thrown on top of it - I had a ridiculously high difficulty set, but he had a ton of dice (and a tendency to count inaccurately in his favor). He just barely hit the difficulty and blew up the torpedo sphere and destroyed the Imperial remnant's super weapon. Like I said, I wanted to conclude the campaign on Byss with the Emperor, but that was a pretty satisfying end all the same.

[garhkal]

In the past 3 years up here in ohio, i've had FOUR separate groups for 2e AD&D. It seems other than the one that shutdown for Covid, the OTHER three groups, just pettered out, (my latest JUST after 4 sessions), because players now days, are just TOO USED to Pathfinder/5e, that they are either unwilling, to try other systems, OR just so SET IN their ways of how those NEW systems are, they can't wrap their heads around the mechanics FOR other systems..


So it seems i may just have to take a break from adnd for a while.. and just focus say on SW and battletech...
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Confucious sayeth, don't wash cat while drunk!

[pakman]

Interesting question.

Sadly, in looking over the years - most of them do just stop.... usually due to some kind of life changes or other event (covid killed our last SW game but it was getting near an end...).


Currently - both games I am in (one D&D, where I am a player, and my newer star wars d6 game, where I am the GM) - both have a campaign arc with a planned "end".

The DND (at least as we have figured out) when we eventually defeat an invasion from another plane - and the star wars - well, I asked the players if the were ok with an story end point - and they said of (they will determine how it ends - and there is an option to keep playing if they wish....).

I think having an arc or an end in mind - is a good thing - it certainly helps with having a cohesive campaign story arc.

(how to do this - and still maintain player agency - is itself a different topic...).

I hope both our games make it ...
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Working on massive House Rules document - pretty much a new book. Will post soon....