This last fortnight, I finished two massive campaigns. Both of the games have been running since 2020 and so together represent about eight years of effective play. This meant a level of pressure – a story is often only as good as its ending. As you can expect, I spent a long time thinking about how they should conclude.
As both endings unfolded, I learned lessons about how and what we should be looking for in our conclusions that are worth unpicking. So I’m going to look at the final lessons these games taught me. I will start with my long-running D&D campaign, Blending Of Shadows.
The Campaign
I’ve mentioned Blending before. It’s a game I’ve talked about in the column many times, talking about how games change and move over their lifetime. It started as a pick-up game during the pandemic, watching the adventures of a group of undercover operatives in a fantasy world and quickly became a travelogue, where they unravelled a nations-wide conspiracy that had to be stopped.
In the end, the fate of nations was dictated by the actions of a brave few, and then the game became an organised war effort and an interplanar quest to overthrow several tyrants. It finally calmed down, and we decided where these characters were going to rest. It did the whole gamut, taking us all the way to level twenty. As a result, I needed to do a few things.
I needed to give this massive, sprawling epic the respect it deserved. I’ve been running D&D games for three and a bit decades now, and this is the only game that has gone this distance, levels and commitment-wise. I consider it a massive milestone in my RPG career; I’ve always wanted to have that one huge D&D campaign that feels like a series of epic novels and this has definitely been that. I can tick that box, feel like I have accomplished a thing and move on. If I come back to D&D, I don’t want to do this with it again, I would rather tell smaller arcs and tales. So, knowing that this one may be the last massive D&D game, giving a capstone to this moment in my life is important.
And I messed that up. But we’ll get to that.
The Setup of The End
We’d finished a massive combat with the dragon high lord and his children: A sprawling fight involving a ragged group of heroes crashing out of the astral plane in a surprise raid in the middle of a war, taking the fight to five ancient dragons and their demigod father, all at once. Then I’d taken my foot off the gas on purpose. The players had a lot to resolve. This game had over a hundred NPCs and had travelled through a dozen nations – we needed to take time to visit all the places and characters the players wanted to for one last time.
So we had an arc that finished the game to equal Tolkien’s endings. The players travelled from place to place, putting some final small pieces right with the world and talking to NPCs, inviting some of them to a wedding that was meant to be the centrepiece of the last session.
So, let’s just look at what I am doing here. I’m giving the players a chance to resolve things they want to, dictate where their characters end and slowly let them say goodbye to things. It became a series of sadder and sadder but more and more meaningful goodbyes. The players got experiences that moment of transition and live in it. Feel what their characters were feeling. In focusing the ‘camera’ of the campaign on goodbyes and not turning away to action beats, I’m just giving the game a natural state of wind down.
The Final Moments
The last session was a series of goodbyes and reassurances to the players that their actions had made the world a better place. It’s important to let players know that their characters had a narrative impact on the lives of people in the world during an ending. I was doing a lovely job with this, and there were some emotional moments of people calling back to old events that caused psychological damage they’d suffered and healing.
Eventually, everyone separated, and we cut ahead a few months to the wedding. I didn’t dwell on this completely but instead used it as a way of bringing old friends together and allowing the players to describe themselves in their finest at a lovely event. The players got to describe themselves in a happy moment, and then each did a flash-forward scene that took place in the next 25 years or so. This was crucial in giving the players a sense that their characters’ lives would be comfortable from now on, they didn’t have to worry about things in the fiction going wrong. This is maybe the most important thing to establish in the fiction of finishing the game – That we are leaving the characters in a place the players agree gives them closure.
The Mistake
So then, for some reason, I skipped forward 25 years and put a scene with a cliffhanger in to finish the campaign. Looking at all this now, I can see the folly here. I have just set up the narrative to be a safe end for everyone, and I undermined that in one two-minute cut scene, throwing a safe future into disarray. What a fool. What was I thinking?
Well, I wanted to promise these players, who had loved this world, that we would come back to it in some form or another and I had a plan for this; we weren’t just never going to see it again. It was a promise that after we’ve done another game, we’d be coming back, at least for a little while. In my head, I was using the cut scene to resurrect a much-loved NPC and keep that flame alive.
But the players took more from the scene than I intended: They saw new threats on the horizon, maybe the NPC had come back wrong and corrupted? Perhaps the world they were in was doomed! I instantly realised my mistake, and after a long conversation with a player who also happens to be my partner, I issued a statement about the cut scene, revealing that it was meant to be a lead into a small-stakes adventure and we didn’t have to worry about it.
This, of course, left a dirty taste in the mouths of all concerned. I felt like I’d ruined the game, questioned my decision-making as a GM, and honestl,y for a hot minute, was prepared to just never go back to that world – I was done, my dopamine was totally destroyed. I’m still cautious about the idea of running a game that runs long enough to inspire these kinds of feelings again, lest I risk too much.
I did a similar thing once in a Mutants & Masterminds campaign and it only just landed right so let me say this here and now as a piece of advice – no matter how tempting it is to give a hint to the future or a sequel, no matter how excited you are a about a cliffhanger – DO NOT do this. It will never land right. In over a hundred campaigns, I’ve never seen this work. Focus on the thing that is happening in front of you. End the game you are playing. That cool idea you have for a cliffhanger? It will wait until the opening scene of a new game. Where the players feel like they have the power to do something about it.
A week or so out from it now, I think the game will be remembered well. People loved that campaign, and the memories will be about the great moments and characters we met during our adventures, the family made both in and out of the game. In time, I hope we remember that rather than the fact I gambled it all and almost lost. See you all next time, when you’ll see a very different set of lessons happen.
Creative Commons art credit: Consumed dragon by ThemeFinland, Dragon Jaws by Jeff-InkStain, and Azure Dragon by CreepyGreenLight87.
