Almost Done: Some Thoughts After the Penultimate Session of a Very Long RPG Campaign

The most read posts on this website, year after year, are Thirteen Things I’ve Learned About Superhero Games After Running 30 Sessions Of Mutants And Masterminds and its follow-up Fifteen Things I’ve Learned About Superhero RPGs After Running 150 Sessions of My Campaign. They’re both RPG-centric posts about an ongoing superhero game I’ve been running since early 2011.

Last night I ran session 199, and when we convene for session 200 last week it will be the last game of the campaign as it exists in its current format. One of the original players is moving interstate, and we’re hitting the end-point of plot elements originally set up somewhere in issue 20. The heroes just beat-up the Herald of a world-devouring galactic horror, and next week they’ll fight the ancient robot from the dawn of time trying to bring that galactic horror to earth.

Which is not bad for a group of heroes that got their start chasing down escaped velociraptors and re-skinned knock-offs of the Vulture, all while fretting about whether they’ll fail English.

I’ve run long RPG campaigns before—D&D campaigns that spanned three or four years and took the heroes from 1st level to the top of the XP chart—but it surprises me that the longest in both years and the number of sessions has proven to be a superhero-based game because, frankly, I’ve tried to get one running several times over the last few decades and they usually falter very early on.

Fortunately, we’ve had a good lead-in to the end of the campaign. Lots of forewarning that the player in question was going, and I’ve spent a good chunk of time thinking about what made this campaign work and what I’d do differently if I started a new supers campaign tomorrow.

It’s largely refinements of the notes I wrote in last year’s Fifteen Things, with some influence from reading games like Blades in the Dark, which have really interesting systems for achieving long-term goals and keeping all the power-players in the setting active and coming up against one another.

It was also largely theoretical—I’d been intending to set superhero games aside when the campaign is done and try something else. For someone who ran a lot of D&D and other games, sticking to a single campaign world for nine years is a weird feeling. I was looking forward to running something else, and enjoying a change of pace.

Then, about three weeks back, I sat down and jotted notes for two different ways of continuing in the setting. Not the same campaign, necessarily, but doing a kind of reset that would take the end-point we’re heading towards and fly off in a new direction. Something that would work rather well with two player characters instead of the larger group, and give me a chance to try and lock down the lessons of the last nine years and formulate them into a broader theory. Maybe even a chance to try and replicate the kinds of things comics do that don’t come naturally to games.

And it’s tempting. Extraordinarily tempting. If only because running a superhero game is so much less prep work than anything else I’ve ever run, especially if I try and stick to my plan of only using twenty or so villains for the first year or two of gaming.