When I stop to think about it, I've played in or run very few 'proper' campaigns, at least in the way most people think of them now.
Early D&D was very much a series of adventures with characters drawn from a pool depending on who was available and what the party needed. The closest we ever got to playing a linked series of adventures was the classic G modules at college (we bought them out of club funds and three different GMs took it in turns to run them. I was set up to continue with the D modules, but we never got that far).
Even when we started playing Call of Cthulhu, it was similar. I ran whichever investigation I'd just bought or written. I did seed references to the Shadows of Yog-Sothoth campaign, and some of the investigators joined the Silver Twilight, but that's as far as it got. In fact, they never even suspected that the Silver Twilight had any sinister intentions, and when they found the Shining Trapezohedron in an abandoned church steeple in Boston, they handed it over to the Lodge for safe keeping John Scott was delighted.
Since then I've managed to run a BECMI* campaign set in Mystara. This was for a gaming club, the successor to the Kirklees Military Modelling and Gaming Society. It was still a bit 'adventure of the week', but there was a clear goal and end point.
Likewise, I ran a 3/3.5 edition D&D campaign, again set in Mystara. This was a series of plot arcs, but the final one, the module Night's Dark Shadows, was unfinished.
Because then we moved to fourth edition, and we actually managed a ten year campaign with foreshadowing, character arcs, a proper ending and everything.
I'll admit that it started out as just trying the system by playing Keep on the Shadowfell. But once that was done, and it was clear that we wanted to continue, I did actually have a plan. Well, I planned up to the end of Heroic Tier, then as that approached I extended the scope to cover Paragon Tier. As Epic Tier loomed I took various plot threads and brought them together to provide, I hope, a suitably epic conclusion.
I even managed to include references to events that happened in the previous campaign as some of the players had taken part in that. The feeling that they had influenced past history was very empowering to them.
But none of these get my vote today, party because most of the early stuff had no real design, and by the end of the 4E campaign I was experiencing a lot of dissatisfaction with the system. I still enjoyed it, but it had become hard work, and that colours my memories of it.
So I'm nominating a campaign that I played in rather than one I ran
The best campaign I've ever played in was a Golden Heroes campaign run by Grim.
He based it in our area, and while the first few sessions were fairly low key, it became apparent that something was happening to the world around us. The way he tied events into West Yorkshire was fun (we had a base next to Leeds Central Station; if you wondered what the current road works and alterations are, it was probably something to do with us).
But the changes, subtle at first, really made it special.
At the time I had very little comic book knowledge, apart from reading a few early Marvel titles pre teens. Now I'd draw parallels with Wolverine's disorientation at the start of House of M.
Eventually we traced the changes down to one character, now I'd describe him as a slightly less malevolent Mad Jim Jespers. We eventually realised that we had just as much control over the changes as he did, and set things back to rights. Or to a version of 'right' that suited us.
Highly enjoyable and marvellously fascinating, a tribute to a system that is great at reflecting it's genre, and a GM who really understands the system and the genre, but is not afraid to twist it to fit his own vision (rather as we did to end the campaign).
It also keyed me in to the joys of running games in a familiar location. He'd run a game before which was based on us playing fictionalised versions of ourselves.
I now try and find a way to localise most games I run, obvious fantasy excepted.
Which brings me to my honourable mention, my own Delta Green campaign. Without Grim's localised Golden Heroes campaign, it would never have happened.
Much as I like the Delta Green's background, I wanted it set in the UK. I developed my own organisation, called simply The Section (which may be a cover, or a replacement, for PISCES, which definitely exists in my game world). I used a mix of published scenarios reworked to fit and case files that I wrote myself. It all ended rather messily in Wales, but that's the nature of the game. The action was all set in places that I had at least a passing familiarity with, with several major events happening in West Yorkshire.
Now I'm looking forward to running Rivers of Yorkshire.
*Basic, Expert, Companion, Master, Immortal. An acronym for the 'not Advanced' Dungeons and Dragons rule set and it was published in parallel with first edition.
It was originally released as a series of boxes, named as above, which were essentially tiers of play. Yes, you could reach Immortality.
The whole lot was later collated into the Rules Cyclopaedia.
While I'll stick with 5E, partly because it's so accessible, and there's a lot that I think they've got right, I'd definitely run BECMI if there was a call for it.
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