Comments on: Adventure Prep: Planning Ahead for the End

By: Composite

Composite — Mon, 17 Mar 2008 20:25:54 +0000

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.

By: Graham|ve4grm

Graham|ve4grm — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 01:08:08 +0000

Planning to blow up Greyhawk…

Does anyone else see this as both very appropriate and very inappropriate, given the timing?

By: ChattyDM

ChattyDM — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 00:17:08 +0000

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!

By: Dave T. Game

Dave T. Game — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 17:24:48 +0000

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.

By: Piper

Piper — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 02:53:30 +0000

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.

By: ChattyDM

ChattyDM — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 01:43:10 +0000

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!

By: John Arcadian

John Arcadian — Tue, 11 Mar 2008 01:17:58 +0000

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”.