How to End Your Campaign the Right Way

Greetings gamers from all systems, places and timelines.

Every story needs a proper ending, especially if it’s one of epic proportions. And few tales are as epic as a campaign that reaches the end of its final story arc. Unfortunately, it doesn’t require a great deal of imagination to get the ending wrong.

Some endings are like The Sopranos, which left the audience thinking “WTF?!” for all the wrong reasons. Other endings may feel rushed, forced or just downright unsatisfying.

It’s like reading a book where you enjoyed every chapter except the last one – where you not only hate the author’s big reveal, but your favorite character dies a completely preventable death.

No player or DM would wish to take part in such a debacle where all of their creativity and hard work was for naught. (Especially when everything falls apart at the finish line.) After being on both sides of this equation, I would like to share some tips that will prevent your story from tanking in the 11th hour and leave everyone glad they showed up for the final game day and all those leading up to it. 

Character Choices Need to Matter 

One of the hallmarks of the awesomeness of TTRPGs is that the players’ choices can impact the world they operate in.

If the party is a group of heroes, then their selfless choices should, at least in theory, make the world they live in a better place. Likewise, if the characters are villainous, they most likely have covered the game setting in both blood and darkness.

A console game that embodied this philosophy was the original Dragon Age. After the main character defeated the big bad final boss, it gave the hero a choice of what they wanted as a reward, and then the game explained what became of all of the allies they made and assisted over the course of the story. While that seems like a simple logical progression, it made all of the key choices you made in the game matter in terms of the final outcome.

Then Dragon Age went even further and allowed the decisions you made in the first game to influence the next game by changing aspects of the game world based on what you did or did not do.

The point is that when I finished playing that game I instantly wanted to do a second playthrough using a different style of character. And while it’s unlikely anyone would want to play the entire game over again and try for a different outcome, it will hopefully leave the players inspired to create new characters so they can affect a new story in an equally meaningful manner. 

Wrap Up All Those Loose Ends 

Everyone generally agrees that character backstory and side quests can add a degree of flavor to a game. However, no one likes being in a Game of Thrones situation where the main story arc is wrapped up in three sessions but the players still have fourteen or so open plot threads. Unfortunately, in this type of situation, the side quests end up getting sidelined or forgotten about completely.

Personally, I wouldn’t want a mood killer like being at the final victory celebration for saving the kingdom where the paladin casually asks, “Hey, what do you think happened to those orphans we promised to save from that monster in the woods, anyway?” On the other side of this, it makes the DM seem disorganized and their side-quest ideas empty if there are no consequences for abandoning them.

Not to mention, if the side quest to save the orphans from the monster in the woods had an unlimited timer on it, then how in danger were they, really? This will drain the tension from side quests in future games where the party’s lord’s castle is being attacked by a terrifying red dragon, but it will have to wait because the bard really wanted to go shopping first. 

Make the Ending Satisfying 

Nothing makes the beat fall flatter in a story than the thunder being stolen from the final scenes of a long-running campaign. If you are planning to run an epic-level game, its climax should be equally audacious and as cinematic as possible. Your players won’t remember every detail of the time they saved a caravan from ogres, but they will recall a shocking amount of details of both the final battle and its aftermath. And if something is honestly epic, then it has to be equally memorable and worthy of being part of the lore that is unique to your playgroup. 

To accomplish this – although it can be a little cliché – a final showdown with the players and the BBEG is in order.

While the final confrontation can be handled in countless ways, there are two key notes I would make sure to hit in during the flow of the final act of the story:

1. The players should only be able to defeat the final Boss(es) now because the struggles they’ve endured over the last 12-20 sessions have given them the power to do so. Because, when confronting the final villain who killed the fighter’s father, he will definitely want to do it with the sword his father crafted in hand. 
2. The final battle needs to be challenging. Having the players walk in and confront the villain they’ve been chasing for countless sessions only to smoke them like a cheap cigarette is truly a disservice to both the players and the person running the game. Likewise, nothing is more awful than having the players prepare for a final battle, confront the villain, and then be crushed because the DM left the final boss on god mode. 

Conclusion 

As a DM, you owe it to yourself as both the story architect and the person running the game to have an ending you’ll look back on and be pleased with. For the players, if they liked the way the game ended, then they will be eager to create new characters and or even pull these old ones out of retirement periodically for an all-star game.

However, the choices the players made over the course of the game should always have a degree of consequence to the structure of the game itself, so this final session should (at least in theory) guide the story to a logical conclusion. If all of this was done well, the players in your group should be asking about what’s next even before the game you’re currently running ends. (And being in high demand isn’t such a bad thing, now is it?)