What it is: noble house campaign, running with 3.5e, the players as a cleric, sorcerer and bard as cousins, grand-children of the duke at campaign start. This has been a variant of the 'fortress focussed' model where the party have access to a lot of resources beyond just their character sheets but have also taken on personal responsibility for the realm. Campaign play has been the PCs solving the big problems facing the house. Setting is homebrewed; pitched on the back of scrap paper in session zero then anchored with an Azgaars fantasy map, populated with OSR animal-lings. What we have below is mostly a 'mechanistic' DM's perspective on running it.
What worked:
* Amazing craftiness from the players - artwork from the bard, a DMs screen, and delicious treats.
* Now my longest campaign by hours played, even considering my 'nothing else to do' teenage campaign Katharsis. This year we played more Ducal House than I got in gaming altogether back in 2019. We are off our pandemic-era, pre-small person peak performance but still respectable.
* Session zero to get everyone aligned, bring two relatively new players on board
* Anchored the tables sanity through the pandemic and the hard times around that
* Implied world building from Azgaars - rolling with the 'and therefores' from the randomly generated map to build out from the initial concept. Feedback was "It feels like very fleshed out and playing is like getting to mess around in a well built fantasy novel which is super fun" so it seems to be working.
* Player-led plots - I throw events at them, they figure it out - sometimes I have no idea how. I have also kept to a 'XP from threats defeated' regime which has lead to progression tracking heroics which I think works well. I was tracking hours per session since the start - session length has dropped overall since the pandemic high-days but I was surprised that the progression up levels was broadly even. Recent events on the Plateau of Jor (sessions 62-81) were a lot more hazardous and combat intensive but while they punched through level seven relatively quickly it did not grossly disturb the trend. This fits overall as they set off at level 6 and came back level 9 - hitting the 'name rank' and coming back legends.
* Running long enough that consequences have had time to come back around again, despite medieval travel times. Players like this too saying they "enjoy hearing rumours filter back or learning that something we neglected in the beginning has not died as a story threat but has been brewing in the background. it feels immensely rewarding and daunting at the same time to know that what you do matters...for the better and for the worse."
What was challenging:
* ATW/ATJ - our competing campaign session counts - for some reason the bard, our chronicler, has slipped in counting sessions and is now ~ 6 sessions behind my count and we cannot figure out why.
* Scheduling got ropy for a bit - people moved countries, started careers, small folk joined households - but we've clung on despite lean times. Sessions / month tempo spiked to weekly back in the first year and a half, then after we came back in year three post small person, we have stabilised more or less at the planned frequency of twice a month, third session as bonus.
* Remaining consistent. I used my 'single sheet session prep' consistently and while good for any given session, it has become tricky over time as finding something can involve going to the excel XP tracker, looking up the event (or trying to figure out what session the thing happened) then going to that session, spotting the reference there to where I actually wrote it down (could be many sessions previous) then going there. It works but it is a bit clunky. Better than not having notes and I currently cannot think what a better system would be (for me). I have not so far read another DM's method and gone 'a-ha!' Players also noted it was "slightly challenging to keep track of the lore/some of the storylines we aren't actively pursuing" requiring "doing bi-yearly re-reads of what are about 5 notebooks worth of stuff at this point."
* I built traps for myself with the significant cast of NPCs, now trying to have them all react reasonably to major campaign events. Player feedback is that they really like all the NPCs and look forward to getting back to certain places to meet 'the usual suspects' so it is effort well spent I guess.
Lessons learned:
* Not intentional but session 100 brought a big cycle closure - finally arrived back into home city after a long jaunt out into the hinterlands; short-cutting home through the astral, across a dead god. I wrote on these gear-shifts before - urban mystery solving and social, high-speed hexcrawling, then dungeon-diving and now returning to urban/political play. This variety was also flagged as something the players liked.
* Time played vs intended - I had guesstimated 10 hours a month back in the day - biweekly 5 hour sessions - and though the recent rate has been a touch lower, we are still way above where I anticipated we would be by now. By 18 months in we had played what I thought would be 3 years worth of stuff - and generated tons of in world lore and consequences that needs tracking. Overall keeping such a big world in order has been helped significantly by 'front' type faction and group tracking. I do not need to figure out what any given person is thinking, I just have a thought on what is going on in the background and then have them react to that.
* Players flagged inventory review as a key lesson learned; digging out all the forgotten trinkets, magical items and obscure spells to solve some of the harder problems.
To wrap up - I am very happy we're rapidly approaching our four year anniversary still with momentum. We've had some conversations about how we could finally wrap this up - retire the characters and start anew in the world, just put it on permanent hiaitus and return for special events, continue to level up until god-like immortality achieved - but for now there are still adventure hooks to be run down, messes to be cleared up and the other members of the dynasty to be cat-herded.
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