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Ending Campaigns

by Mike on 8 March 2021

At some point our RPG campaigns end. Hopefully they end at the conclusion of the campaign's story. Unfortunately, many games end due to real-life circumstances such as scheduling difficulties, GM burnout, players leaving the campaign, and other reasons.

When we do reach the narrative conclusion of our RPG campaign, it helps to know what makes campaign conclusions awesome. I've been very lucky to reach satisfying conclusions in dozens of campaigns over the years and refined down the tips that made those campaign endings wonderful.

Here they are.

Big Final Battles

Often the best conclusion we can have in our more combat-focused RPGs games is a nice big boss fight. Good final battles give our campaigns a nice big high-energy peak.

But building great final battles is hard. That's why Scott Fitzgerald Gray, James Introcaso, and I partnered up to write Fantastic Lairs which gives you twenty three big bad boss fights for your 5e games. Scott Fitzgerald Gray, Teos Abadia, and I also partnered together to write Forge of Foes which further discusses what's needed to run great boss fights.

Here are a few specific tricks for running great boss battles in 5e games:

Run waves of monsters. Monster waves bring a lot of presssure on the characters without completely overwhelming them with too many opponents at once.

You can set up waves of combatants like this:

A bunch of normal monsters, roughly one per character.
A bunch of low-challenge monsters, two to four per character.
A couple of big monsters, roughly one per two characters.
The final boss.

That's probably as many waves as you could want and you can certainly reduce that by, for example, combining the big brutes with the boss in the same wave.

Build your waves around Lighting Rods – showcase the characters' awesome abilities by including monsters particularly susceptible to those abilities. Often big brutes to crowd control and lots of minions to blow away with areas of effect work well. Add mages so your wizard has someone to counterspell. Think about the monsters that showcase your players' favorite moves.

Bring in your boss later so they don't get completely creamed in the first round of combat.

You can change the pacing and challenge of your final battle by changing how quickly or slowly one wave enters after another. Add waves sooner to increase the challenge or delay a wave to decrease it.

Add interesting environments and effects. Split the battle across two sides of a portal to hell. Center it around a massive arcane gate about to explode. Stage your battle on a huge crashing airship or in a room with a huge soul-eating machine hanging above a massive pool of lava. Make the environment of your final battle awesome. Give it interesting mechanical effects that affect both characters and monsters alike.

Keep your hands on the dials. Balancing boss battles so you get perfect edge-of-the-seat excitement out of your players is hard to do. Luckily we GMs have dials we can turn during combat to change things up. These dials include:

Changing the number of monsters
Changing monster hit points
Changing the number of attacks a monster has
Changing the amount of damage they inflict

Keep your hands on those dials to keep the pacing fun.

Use Dreadful Blessings. I've found Dreadful Blessings to be a huge game-changer in my high-level 5e games. Players prefer them to flat legendary resistance and they give us the ability to tune bosses on the fly to ensure they meet their intention in the story of the game. Replace legendary resistance with dreadful blessings and give yourself a fantastic tool to help bosses meet their intention in the story.

Give Players What They Want

Stories sometimes surprise us with twists and turns but those twists and turns rarely serve well at the end of an RPG campaign. You might be inclined to add crazy twists and turns at the end of your campaign. Instead, ask yourself if that's what your players really want. You can even ask them what they want and then give it to them.

A few sessions before the end of your campaign, ask players what story threads they would like to see come to a conclusion. Ask them what they want as they reach the end of the campaign. Write down their responses and figure out how to conclude these threads as you prepare for your final sessions.

Avoid adding big twists to the story at the end. Instead, give players the memorable and satisfying conclusion they've been aiming for.

One Year Later

When the big story is over in your campaign and you're drawing to a close, ask players where they see their characters one year after the event of the story. These "one year later" montages have several wonderful advantages:

They hand the story over to the players so they can conclude their own arcs.
They let the GM sit back and watch as the story evolve in ways you might never have expected.
You don't have to worry about the players' montages breaking the game, because the game is already over.
Other players get to listen and admire the stories of the other players. We all truly share the story together.

I've asked for "one year later" stories from my players in a almost a dozen campaigns now and I've never been disappointed. One-year-later stories provide a wonderful final coda to campaigns.

A Bookend to a Fantastic Tale

We want campaign conclusions to be fun, memorable, and satisfying. Over-thinking campaign conclusions is a big risk. Instead of trying to do too much, ask players what they want from the campaign's conclusion, build in a fun climactic encounter, and ask players to describe what happens to their characters one year later. Enjoy together the epic conclusion of your epic campaign.

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