Ending an epic campaign

[svensven]

Good afternoon,

This evening we are having one of the final sessions of a 13 year long campaign. I feel like it should hurt more. We started out roughly every 3 weeks back in 2000 but have struggled to get in even 6 sessions a year here near the end, mostly due to kids and people moving about.

I will significantly miss my character (a Vesten explorer with a flair for languages and drunken Inish) and the story has been top shelf but I am afraid I won't know how to feel when it's done.

Any of you folks been players in an epic campaign that came to a close? Any advice / anecdotes?

Matt

[Black Jack Rackham]

If I'm real honest with myself, most of the campaigns I've run peter out when the players get bored (and that nearly always happens before I've run out of stories to tell). And I have never been involved with a campaign that lasted 13 years.

What I do now instead is break the story into parts. If I have some overarching plot I want dealt with that will take a long time, I have a couple of shorter goals, each of which is achievable within say, a few years (of once a month playing, since we do a rotating schedule of games).

A good example was the Intrigue campaign I ran last time I did 7th Sea for the home group. They were brought together ostensibly because a local lord was going to get married (noble heroes showed up to mooch, commoners showed up because the lord needed more servants, etc.) and each had a secret agenda they also wished to complete (either given from their secret society, their family, or self-imposed)

Their adventures took the form of dealing with personal stuff, making preparations for the wedding, dealing with those who wished to stop/advance the marriage for their own gain. All of this was just a prelude to the bigger adventure of what happened to the noble subsequent to the wedding. HOWEVER, we got to the wedding just about the time players were grumbling they wanted to look for something else. So, we finished with the wedding, which coincidentally, solved all their various personal agendas, and voila, we were free to move on to other things with the option to come back to these characters at some later date.

I guess you could also call this living campaign the same kind of thing, save that there are really 3 campaigns (the 4th being a continuation of each of the first three). And the thing that's really going to keep this going is, there are so few adventures in a year (not like the 12 I'm used to doing).

[salamanca]

My players had trouble remembering their own names let alone what happened the previous week. If we had run a game monthly, they would have forgotten they were in a game at all. So, nope. Never played an epic campaign. Played in a few billed as epic that really meant players were too powerful to die. But players in my area just won't commit to it. I recommend you sit back and realize that your character is looking at long future of nothing interesting (relative to his past) ever happening again. Instead he will fill his days telling young folks at the bar absurd tales (that happen to be true) and getting patronizing nods.

[Black Jack Rackham]

Svensven, You have an update for us?