My traditional approach is to just let a campaign follow its nose, let the players run down whatever alleys they want, but I recently found my home campaign had a clock put on it - so what to do? Experience with previous campaigns of this sort is that it can be pretty unsatisfying to just stop as if there is going to be another game next week and never come back to it.
So how to bring things to some sort of satisfying conclusion? This tweet provided a map - "Payoff. Payoff of narrative, of personal story arcs, of loose threads, etc."
First off is to sort the signal from the noise - what are things that the players are just up to - things that we can box under 'sharpening the saw'. Things in this category are nice in and of themselves but without a chance to use them for great glory they fall a bit flat. Things like finally getting that magic carpet to work - nice, but if there is no session where the party gets to use the flying carpet to save the day then that is not as good as it could have been.
Second is to look at the parts that are remaining 'gunpowder' things that could potentially lead to a nice bang if heaped in a sufficiently large pile. Is this all one heap or there a couple of heaps? If you have a bunch of good hooks in play but each one is building slowly towards completion then the risk is that none will ever payoff.
So now I have all my 'gunpowder' pieces tagged the third thing is to sort them into their buckets. Some are tied together, some are independent. Then I flagged which ones had caught player interest more than others. Then I also flagged what the stakes were for each one - varying from 'someone will be upset' through to 'loss of the kingdom to fire and darkness'.
Fourth: for each of these threads I ran the 'do nothing' scenario - this is a straight up event clock outline. The opposition will execute their segments and achieve X eventually.
Fifth: I looked at that list of events that each thread will contain and kicked out signs and clues for each of them to let the players be informed of what was happening. Note when I say clue, I include opportunities for direct intervention such as 'the party intercepts a courier from the bad guys' - lets them both stop the message and capture it - and even interrogate the messenger if they are really on their game.
Sixth: I wrote what the 'fix' for each of these could be and what clues or leads there could be to inform the players of what that. This was the first 'new' set up I did, figuring out at least one way the players could resolve each of the major threads and what clues might lead them there.
Now I have a big list of clues for each of the threads - all of which tie to elements the players are already aware of.
So the options at time of doing all this were:
a) just feed clues down towards the players and hope they focus on dealing with one of the issues and do so in such a way that ties off the campaign in a neat fashion.
b) prioritise delivery of one set of clues so throw one of the threads into the foreground and try and run that to a big finish
c) pick two and let the party choose what they stop and what they let slip; one becoming the 'finale' and the other the 'cliff-hanger' for a theoretical future continuation.
What has happened since, as we have run out half of our remaining time, has been a prioritisation of one thread, and a second thread getting wrapped up or delegated in a hurry under a 'once we set off to do thread 1, we won't be able to do anything else on thread 2' which was interesting. The choice to 'prioritise' one set of crises led to the hammer coming down on all the open issues on a different crises. As ever, when DM'ing, expect the unexpected.
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