This series covers the thoughts that go behind my Adventure Preps. I don’t go into details as my players read this blog, but I try to showcase the key challenges and choices I face every time I sit down in the days before we play.
Game week again!
For those who don’t know, our group usually manage to play every 2 weeks (with a few canceled games). Our ‘season’ usually spans from the end of August to mid-December, where we break for the holidays. Then it starts again in early January to peter out somewhere in May as everyone’s thoughts turn to vacations.
During summer months we usually get together once or twice to play a one-shot or micro-campaign.
We’ve adopted this formula ever since I moved back to Montreal in August of 1999. This make us going through our 9th RPG Season. Two of them were a Gurps Fantasy Campaign and the rest was D&D 3.0/3.5. In that time frame we played 4 full ‘in season’ campaigns and one aborted summer one.
Why am I telling you all that? Well, one of the common things in all these campaigns apart from the second D&D campaign, which we managed to ‘finish’ by revisiting it after an 18 months hiatus, were canceled mid-season (much like any Geeky show with potential on Fox) usually because of waning interest or when we got our hands on radically different source books we wanted to try.
With the advent of D&D 4e and it’s apparent compatibility with our group’s tastes in gaming (i.e. Trope-driven Action Fantasy Roleplaying), its a given that our current campaign is going to hit the curb by the June.
But here’s the key difference from all my other campaigns: since it’s death is announced, a mere 6 sessions from now, I can start planning for an honest to goodness end for a change.
So for this week’s adventure prep, I’m not just focusing on the next game’s scenes, but I’m actually trying to bring the campaign to a satisfying conclusions for all of us.
As you may know, I’m still playing an adventure that’s loosely based on WotC’s Expedition to the Demonweb Pits, which I’ve hacked quite a bit.
As the plot now stands, the PCs have recovered both Demon Slaying weapons that are to help them in the upcoming trans-planar conflicts.
As written the story remains rather weak so I decided to assume fully my hacking of the adventure and combine this with some End of the World trope of my very own… all in 6 sessions.
So here’s my high level plan for what’s coming.
Session 1: All out Assault on Ptolus by Bad guys, PCs go scout on Lolth’s plans in her realm.
Session 2: Players return from Demonwebs while Bad Guys trigger the mother of all Oh S#17 moments on them!
Session 3: A re-orientation session where PCs explore their new reality, reassess their priorities, check on their remaining allies and start planning on salvaging the situation
Session 4: Players secure the means to stop World’s End and head up for final Showdown
Session 5: PCs Crash the Ultimate Evil Pajama Party and slay some more Demonic butts
Session 6: Standing over a mortally wounded world, PCs ponder on its healing and the choices that need be made to save what can be saved.
Roll credits, drink a toast to 7 years of awesomeness and put 3,5 D&D books on Ebay.
I’ll leave you with that. Needless to say, if I can pull this off without being exceedingly railroady, this campaign may very well be one of the most memorable we’ll have played.
This week’s game is also going to be a tribute to Gary Gygax… I’m going to call it Knee Deep in Darkness! Ohhhh yeah!
I might skip tomorrow’s post depending on how much work needs to be done on the game.
Anyone else having thoughts of concluding their campaigns?
I’ve concluded a few campaigns successfully. Often by coming back to them after some breaking point where I got burned out or where the game fell apart by some reason. Usually I try to make short story arcs so that I can move forward to an ending if I foresee game death. Long story arcs or big ideas are hard to play out successfully to the end.
I’m kind of intrigued by the idea of an “ultimate evil pajama party”.
Good tip John…. We usually just play as long as we feel like it stringing published adventures one behind the other, spiced up with some of my own… until it breaks apart for various reasons…
Stay tuned for some fiendish pillow fights man! 😀
Well, we are just finishing the outer fane in Return to the Temple of Elemental Evil. After 9 months of dungeon crawl, even my die-hard crunchy optimizer’s are looking for a change of pace. My party has pretty much chewed up the mines and spit them out, but I’m running a group of 9 PC’s and one cohort.
I usually double the hit points of most everything, just so everyone gets in a shot. I occasionally ramp up the encounter to match their abilities, just so they don’t get too complacent, and I’ve been handwaving a lot of lower encounters.
I’ve been planing the final BBEG for a while. Originally, I was going to drop about half the party before allowing them to win. Now… the big T is getting out, followed by the destruction of Greyhawk and all the planes, just in time for 4E.
I just checked the calendar, and it looks like my group has 5 sessions left before 4e (which I declared a while ago to be the stopping point.) The next adventure will have to partly be finishing the last dungeon. Unfortunately, there’s still a lot of ground I wanted to cover. The game doesn’t quite have the climax feel yet, and already is seeming a bit rushed.
Piper: RttToEE is quite the epic… if a bit dreary module… I really like your plan to blow up Greyhawk… a Great way to finish this!
Dave: Why not salvage some of your ideas for the 4e campaign… 5 games is long enough to plan a memorable Coda to your campaign!
Planning to blow up Greyhawk…
Does anyone else see this as both very appropriate and very inappropriate, given the timing? 😀
Ah, yes, we’re gonna end ours soon. Not because of D&D 4.0, but because our campaigns usually don’t carry on between seasons (it’s no fun coming back to characters and a setting you no longer care about) and I would love nothing more than to end it. The season HAS officially ended, but we got an entire roleplaying con to wrap things up.
The armies of the good have assembled, and the heroes are marching with them. They’re not gonna fight the war with them, though, because they have the much more important task of toppling the big bad in his tower. I admit to pulling a LOTR here and letting the armies be ‘nothing but a diversion’. The players are in for a long dungeon crawl, with a little diversion in form of a “what will happen if you lose” vision inspired by this site. Cue epic and seemingly impossible boss fight at the end, with some deus-ex-machina in the form of a NPCs heroic sacrifice, and the playing field is evened. Boss dead, tower collapses, the NPCs are nearly crushed in process, but a dragon somehow shows up to. Some honoring of all the dead are done, whereafter some land and titles and stuff are given to the players.
Looking at it, that actually sounds an awful lot like LOTR.