Dungeon Master: Ending Campaigns

Beginnings are hard, but so are endings. As a Dungeon Master, you want the campaign to end well, your players to be happy and for campaign stories to be told for years to come. However, they can be extremely tricky. Will you ever come back to those characters again? What do the players want their characters to do after? Do they want a slow ending with a wind-down and time to look back on their campaign fondly, or end on the high of an epic situation? With that in mind, I hope to share some of my experience and hope it helps someone out there.

Slow or Quick Burn Ending?

An important choice to make is between a slow or quick burn ending. A slow burn allows reflection, to think about where things started from and where they are now, and maybe tie up some loose threads. Some people really like this kind of thing. If you do, it really helps to show the direct results of player's actions. Maybe show a city that was destroyed at the start of your campaign now rebuilt, though not yet achieving the same grandeur. It can also be a time to show the results of some less than good actions and the lasting consequences. Not everything that happens immediately after will be because of the players, but having a good portion of it helps. I also find that it tends to be what players want in their ending. If you go too far away from that, it starts feeling more like setup for another campaign instead of closure for this one. You also don't want to turn it into a lecture and instead keep your players acting through the ending. Even for people who like a slower ending, there is such a thing as too slow and too long. You want to address the important details but not to waste time.

There is also the far rougher approach of ending things almost right after the climax. Leave the details of recovery and what the player characters do up to the imaginations of the players. Instead, you might do some minor thread tying but very little. If the climax happened this session, the rest of the campaign is finished this session as well. The good thing about this is that it wraps things up on a high. This, of course, also depends on how well received the climax of the campaign was. If the response was lukewarm or worse, it might be a good idea to go for a slower burn, particularly if your players have no strong opinion one way or the other. I say might because it could also just make things worse. The idea is to not do too much more than you have to when ending quickly. Let the story told until now speak for itself. Being in the dark can be a good thing.

Beware Unmet Player Ideas

Chances are that your players have ideas of where they want things to go after they stop playing. Neatly summarizing that kind of stuff without their involvement often ends badly because it's about their characters. They don't want you to tell them about what their characters did. They want to tell you what they would try to do and you to put obstacles in their way. However, I find that this kind of collaborative storytelling is harder at the end of a campaign because of the scale involved. A campaign's path is composed of many checks, events and decisions. Trying to work with this at a higher level has a way of summarizing details. However, your players care about details, particularly where their characters are concerned. They know them better than anyone. Something that might sound fine to you might go completely against what their character would do in their hands. It might also seem insignificant in scale, but to a player that spent months or years in their character's head, it can be jarring to say the least. Campaign epilogues are not an easy thing on the Dungeon Master side.

The Next One

Will the same characters ever come back? It can be quite awkward to backtrack on previous epilogue explanations of what happens next because you didn't expect that there would be another campaign. It can also be an unintentional shot in the foot to your next campaign if you have to start plotting around your epilogue, particularly if you didn't give it too much thought ahead of time. If you feel that there might be more or aren't sure, it might be a good idea to just wrap things up quicker and not to focus too deeply into specifics that occur after. That way, players can imagine where things go from there if there is never another session, and the Dungeon Master has a far easier time if the characters ever return. Of course, the players will go after what they wanted for their ideal ending but in this way collaborative storytelling is maintained instead of the Dungeon Master deciding the ending. You may also decide to make your next campaign take place in the same world and those old player characters may make appearances (this is also a matter of taste as some players love it and some completely hate it). Best to ask permission first to avoid difficulties if you decide to do so. You can, and in fact I prefer to when using player characters, ask your player about what their player would have done and said in that situation.