RPG Theory – End Game and Beyond

I’ve been running a campaign online since spring 2020 under the name of Shadow of the Dragon Queen. It’s the Tyranny of Dragons campaign with a lot of home brew elements added, the ‘Shadow’ part referring to a number of PC plot elements like adding Netherese mages and Unseelie Fey and nothing to do with the Dragonlance adventure book they released long after I settled on this name for the game. Finally in 2024, it was heading towards the final chapter.

So I sat down with my notebooks of the past four years, reviewed the scribbles of half formed ideas and notes on the PCs and their adventures. Finishing a campaign of this magnitude was not something I had done often so I did not want to end it without throwing in all the cool moments I could. Here’s roughly how I broke it down:

Elements I wants to make sure happened in the Final Chapter / Final Battle

1. Encouraging the Players to use all those limited resources they had saved up.
   There was a lengthy review of their loot list. There’s a real problem with one shot potions never getting used and some magic items had been bagged and forgotten about when shinier items took center stage.
2. Cut scenes involving locations and NPCs connected to the PCs
   It was time to review that list of NPCs and place them somewhere in the line of attack. Leading up to the Final Chapter, I name dropped a few of them and even prior to that I had used a Title Page on Roll20 with most of these NPCs represented on it.
3. Showing that the actions of the PCs had influenced the Final Battle
   This included their impact on the armies that had gathered and individual NPCs. Some of this manifested with the PCs arming the NPCs and factions with extra magical items that the party didn’t use. There was also a little bit of metagaming to put into plain words what each success or failure had done to the enemy resources as well as dictated how many troops each faction was able to muster on the field.

Throughout the campaign we had been making feedback part of the regular session, celebrating something cool or entertaining that had happened and periodically checking in with things they wanted to see more or less of and a wish list. It provided information that I tucked away in the campaign journal for potential plot hooks and items to introduce. As we were following a prewritten adventure, even with the home brew, the final ending had been foreshadowed pretty clearly. So I asked the players to think about three things

1. If their character survived, what did they envision as their retirement plan in a world saved from the threat of Tiamat?
2. If their character didn’t survive, what did they want to pass on as their final message?
3. If their character was facing unavoidable death, what kind of final heroic act would they want to see happen?

Finally, what was the future of the world going to look like? We were going to be saying good by to it and the characters we had played for several years. It deserved an epilogue.

1. Returning to the game world at 1 year later or 10 years later to see the long lasting consequences of the campaign ending under the condition of PCs winning or losing.
2. What would the world look like if the PCs failed in stopping Tiamat. I did a little brainstorming in my campaign notebook about some of the notable locations and NPCs and what would happen to them under the Reign of Tiamat.
3. Did any of the outstanding plot lines require resolution or were they satisfactory as unanswered questions like those who escaped the final battle and the outcomes of those who perished in the Final Battle

In the end, the heroes triumphed and even the mini war game of the Factions and Dragons proved victorious. Each player in turn spoke to where they were going and what they were doing now that the crisis was over. In between a few notable NPCs who connected to the PCs were spoken of (like the NPC who used to be on the town watch with the lizard folk PC was promoted to watch captain to fill in the spot of an NPC murdered by the Bad Guys; as he polished his new badge of office, the new recruit shows up, a lizard folk NPC that had helped the PCs early on). And the final scene was a flight of dragons of chromatic and metallic flying as one, the major consequence of defeating Tiamat’s avatar being a removal of an alignment compulsion to dragons metallic and chromatic.

Did I put in everything I wanted? I’d say I got pretty close and I’d like to think I gave the PCs opportunities to say goodbye to their heroes and the world. Some of them said they would like to keep playing these characters to level 20 but I wasn’t ready for that. We rode this story through to the end and for that I’m proud, but as it was things were getting more complex and super heroic in scope of items and spells. From there, it would take something significant to return to this story and these characters and this world we had built and honestly I was satisfied with what we managed to do and the lessons I learned along the way.