A Brief Postmortem of a 20-month Campaign

A small section of my world map. It's based on a published product, but took on a life of its own over the 11 months we played.

 

I know I massively fell behind on these session reports. Although COVID-19 ruined a lot of things, it didn't stop my group from meeting. It's hard to piece together the exact things that happened simply by my notes, but I'll share some of the more notable events.

Amazing things happened in this game, and it was 95% player driven. All of my world-building was focused on accommodating the desires of players. 

• Players explored almost half of a massive megadungeon (Dwimmermount). They discovered all kinds of strange things, like ancient elevators (non-functional), passkeys, a cloning room, and portals to other planets (instead of planes I have planets).

• Players purchased land in a major city, built a guild house and recruited followers.
• One player commissioned “founder's rings,” each with a different gemstone and inscription for the five founders of their adventuring guild. The recipients contacted me privately to enchant their founders ring with a different type of spell.
• Nearly two years have passed in the game: They started in November 2019, and when the campaign stopped, it was March 2021. 
  
• In that time, there has been only one TPK, but no other PC deaths. The difficulty curve levels out tremendously after the first few levels.
• The party have collected an estimated 2 million gold pieces in treasure.
• Players characters hover between levels 6 and 9.
• One player hired a mercenary army to rid an old military mountain base of orcs. He claimed the base and started a bunch of mineral mines in the mountains (mostly iron and salt). He has since renamed his fortress Crimson Keep, and has made it his home base.
• One of the players commissioned a basement with a secret library that only he knows about.
• The major city has experienced a royal kidnapping, a major plague, a fire that burned 80% of the city, and finally a major military invasion. All of these were random events I had rolled early in November while prepping. I laid them out on a calendar and rolled them into the main game as time passed. There were some uncomfortable parallels with real life that were totally unplanned (a plague broke out right around the time COVID-19 shutdowns started, so that felt bad).
  
• Another player was heavily invested in a local church, where he earned ranks within the organization and was now very near the top. He started a secret romance with a cleric from another faith, a forbidden love, and saved her life after the great fire.
• One player recovered the corpse of an ancient dragon and bartered with the necromancer council of a neighboring city. His requested payment? A single Wish spell, stored in a ring. It should be noted that he cast Wish last week to transport about 8,000 pounds of treasure and a slain dragon, to the wintry halls of Crimson Keep. This is the first time ever in my ten years of D&D that Wish has been cast.
• One player spent all of his weekly downtime researching information in the library, meaning I got to leak information to him from the campaign world. Sometimes he shared this with the party, and sometimes not. His questions led directly to world building, so my effort was never wasted.
  
• It should be noted that every single player without exception is keeping secrets from the others; one built a secret room in the dungeon to access a rare and mysterious machine and has told no one. Another kept the corpse of the slain dragon for himself. Another knows more about the lore of the world, and the abilities of certain monsters, than anyone.
• I don’t world-build until a players asks about a location or spell; they found a treasure map to a location that had only one paragraph of description. During the week, I developed the area and sent the info to the party, and they had a right good romp in a new location the following session. This requirement has kept me focused on the game, and quite entertained; I've never kept interest in a D&D game for this long.
  
• Most of the players have developed custom spells.
• All of the players have commissioned magic items.
• All of the players have made connections with NPCs and organizations with zero motivation or plot-hooking from me.
• Two of the players have romantic relationships with NPCs in the game.
• This is now my longest-running campaign of all time. It’s also my best. Although my desire was to have a prep-free game, it ended up taking a few hours each week; the difference is that I’m only prepping things the players will see the following week. The rest of the content is reusable and requires nearly zero maintenance. I don't prep for sessions, but I do try to resolve all player downtime during the week.
  
• There have been weeks I didn’t want to play (mostly due to the switch to online play), but I played anyway. I always had a great time. If this had been a 5e game, I simply wouldn’t have had content available for the players, and the sessions would have been cancelled. This probably would have led to the campaign fading out as cancellations stacked up.
  
• Oh, and the players (and their NPC buddies) all have named horses. 
   
   This curious game has been my best D&D experience yet, and I highly recommend any D&D enthusiast run a megadungeon-centric old school world at some point. It is my preferred way to play. 
   
  I also must stress that consistency is the key to a successful game; we played every week, for 11 months, rain or shine. I believe we missed no more than 3 or 4 weeks, and two of those were to take a diversion into Warhammer Fantasy RPG.The only reason we stopped was because my wife had a baby, and a few months later we were playing again, with me bouncing a baby on my knee.