Last night I ran the last session in our long running 4E D&D campaign. We have been playing for a while, one of the players summed it up personally as "eleven years, seven jobs and three character deaths". In that time we've also had a wedding and two house moves (and a house fire). Not all happening to the same person I must add.
Whilst we haven't played continuously for that time, blog readers will recall that we took a few weeks off this summer to try a series of board and skirmish games, and we had a rule that if we are missing two or more players (or of course if I am unavailable) then we pass. We also took all Bank Holidays off, so that was another good few sessions missed. Still, we probably got close to 40 sessions a year over eleven years. You can do the maths.
Although I once planned to play up until 30th level, in the end we stopped at level 23 (they deserve to level up at the end of the last adventure), and the final arc was literally to save the whole of reality. Or at least the version of it that their game was set in.
That's not how it was planned though; we began pretty much when 4th edition was released and played through the introductory module, Keep on the Shadowfell. I re-jigged it to fit into Mystara, the world of the BECMI D&D system (often known just as 'Basic' or the Cyclopedia Edition). I've played in this world for many more years, indeed one of the players (T'Other One) played a 3/3.5E campaign in the same world, and events and characters he knew from that provided background to the current campaign, in an easter egg kind of way rather than a 'you must know this' way.
There's a lot to talk about regarding plot and why I made certain decisions, so I've broken the campaign down into the three tiers of play that 4E uses, and there will be a post about each one.
You can find the Heroic Tier post here, Paragon Tier here, and Epic Tier here. I'l sum up my thoughts a bit later in a post #'nd of campaign meet-up' here.
There is also a post discussing how I crafted the various encounters throughout the campaign here.
Note that I have altered the way I am presenting this, there was just too much in one post, and I wanted also to analyse the campaign as I went.
Whilst we haven't played continuously for that time, blog readers will recall that we took a few weeks off this summer to try a series of board and skirmish games, and we had a rule that if we are missing two or more players (or of course if I am unavailable) then we pass. We also took all Bank Holidays off, so that was another good few sessions missed. Still, we probably got close to 40 sessions a year over eleven years. You can do the maths.
Although I once planned to play up until 30th level, in the end we stopped at level 23 (they deserve to level up at the end of the last adventure), and the final arc was literally to save the whole of reality. Or at least the version of it that their game was set in.
That's not how it was planned though; we began pretty much when 4th edition was released and played through the introductory module, Keep on the Shadowfell. I re-jigged it to fit into Mystara, the world of the BECMI D&D system (often known just as 'Basic' or the Cyclopedia Edition). I've played in this world for many more years, indeed one of the players (T'Other One) played a 3/3.5E campaign in the same world, and events and characters he knew from that provided background to the current campaign, in an easter egg kind of way rather than a 'you must know this' way.
There's a lot to talk about regarding plot and why I made certain decisions, so I've broken the campaign down into the three tiers of play that 4E uses, and there will be a post about each one.
You can find the Heroic Tier post here, Paragon Tier here, and Epic Tier here. I'l sum up my thoughts a bit later in a post #'nd of campaign meet-up' here.
There is also a post discussing how I crafted the various encounters throughout the campaign here.
Note that I have altered the way I am presenting this, there was just too much in one post, and I wanted also to analyse the campaign as I went.
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