I come back here today to report something very momentous: we have finished a campaign! We have been playing Princes of the Apocalypse, starting at a game store, moving online when the Plague hit, playing on roll 20 since. This started in May of 2018. It ended this week.
It's been a long ride. We started by showing up at a game store, finding 6 or 7 people already there, all ready to roll initiative. The two of us had ideas for characters, but found that there were a couple of each of the things we were going to play already in the group, and no one had bothered to make either a cleric or a wizard, so we took up the burden. I made a cleric; Jim made a wizard. We were used to the classes, we made the characters in the time it took to fill out a sheet, and off we went.
I got extremely lucky - I had wanted a nimble fighter, and decided to make a nimble cleric instead. I made him a pirate, and wanted a class that let him use rapiers - tempest did that. That made sense for a sailor, I thought, so there you go. Then - a couple sessions into the game - I discovered what tempest clerics could do. I read Wrath of the Storm. I could do 2d8 lightning damage whenever I got hit? Ah - I get it! We've mentioned backstories here a couple times - this is one of the things that sometimes gets overlooked. It makes as much sense to find your backstory in your abilities as to make it up before you pick class and feats and all that. I had an idea who Josef was - he was an NPC I'd pulled in from a campaign idea I had (that I later wrote up as a Nanomo project) - a priest who was captured by pirates and either imprisoned or went over the the pirates. But when I discovered the features of tempest clerics - it hit me: he was a priest who went over to the pirates, then was struck by lightning, like Sam Shakusky - and survived, but gave off sparks, like Sam. Character. Great power, that came from a random bit of trauma, and he has no real clue how it is supposed to work. Being a priest already, he assumes some god chose him for something.... I remember in the early days the DM nagged me for a deity - I waffled for weeks. Partly because Forgotten Realms deities don't interest me - but also because the point of the character was that he got some of these powers from something completely outside his normal experience (even as a cleric.) The tempest stuff I tended to think of as almost a sorcerous power, something mysterious and uncontrollable. He eventually settled on a god, Valkur, mostly because his symbol featured neat lightning bolts.
Anyway. That's Josef. At the beginning this game had 7-8 players, with some fluctuation, as people came and went. It was fun, but that's a big table - and a couple of them were jackasses, and it took a while to weed out the twits. And even people who weren't so bad, took some time to fit in, and some soured and grew nasty over time, and so we shed a few members, added a few, and so on, until COVID hit. Playing online brought it down again - a couple people didn't make the switch, or dropped out; and then others - well, self-immolated. A bit of inter-party strife may have occurred, something that is a bit rare in modern D&D. But in the end - it kept going, and we worked our way from cult to cult and murdered cultists and priests and prophets and in the end, a couple gods, and won, and got to sail away into the sunset. Something like that.
Anyway: now it's over. That means we can finally start a long promised Rime of the Frost Maiden Campaign.
It's something to note though. This is the first campaign I have ever finished. Which might be a bit less impressive than it sounds, since for most of my D&D playing life, we have thought in terms of dungeons and adventures, not campaigns. Even things that had some arc to them (an early campaign that started fighting orcs, then giants) were really conceived as their own things - a story within the overall game. Not a full campaign. Before this - we did try Storm Kings Thunder and Tomb of Annihilation, and made good progress on both - but neither is anywhere near the ending. And as my year end round ups might indicate - we have a lot of things started and underway but in limbo. It's not as bad a thing as it sounds - we've always assumed open endedness in this game - but still.
Finishing? Very nice. On to the frozen wastes (with that group)! That should be fun too. And back in person, as an added bonus. Good times indeed.
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