Wrapping a campaign on time

With an upcoming campaign end in sight, I am looking at how to wrap things up for my Hexcrawl25 campaign. The fact that it is still going into 2026 is a nice fillip but with a small householder on the way, better to tie things off than have it hanging over me.

I had a rummage around for wisdom on the web and DungeonFruit has some good ideas - but in a 'you should have started way back there' too-late-now sense. Dungeonfruit talks about "setting up your end condition" in Beginning Of The End (How To Finish A Campaign). Alas I am going almost perfectly against their advice and going with a real-world time limit - there is not an ticking clock hanging over the campaign, it was always about the party chasing after their own goals; a pure sandbox.

Beginning the wrap up

This means we are looking to align the end of campaign with players accomplishing their goals, not any particular big plot of mine. I told them the time they had left two sessions back and to think what they wanted to get achieved in that time. This is throwing the responsibility to manage their time on the players, which is fully in line with how the campaign has been running so far - they set the tempo, they go where they like, I run the world they are poking about in.

Throughout the campaign we have periodically been using the Ultimate RPG Campfire Card Deck and that has revealed or crystallised quite a few player chosen goals. I have catalogued them as they had come up - some have resolved, others are beyond the scope of the campaign but still some remain that could be achieved. Thus in the absence of an over-arching plot I will aim to let the PC's threads come to a resolution.

Personal quests folk had picked (and succeeded)
- found the Kingdom of Ashley, rescue and install the 'king' (collective)
- get a giant spider mount (the dwarf warrior)
- become reknowned (the 'wizard')
- create their own herbarium (the 'herbalist')

Open plots at time of trying to set up the finale
- meet their destined true love, as foreseen by a seer they met in a deep mine (the tundra barbarian)
- finish clearing out the local cult lair (collective)

Plan to the end

At this point this means that I am going to budget my time as getting one big quest done per session - maybe we will achieve more but going by prior rate of questing, probably not. So with a session filled by them finishing out the dungeon delve/cult clearance they are currently embarked upon that leaves three for resolving the 'destined true love' hook - which should be fine. The in-house testing team helped me figure out how to time it all, I know what elements I need to have to hand, the rest just runs off the hexmap.

Note, in between writing the first draft of this and now completing it, the party continued to clear out the cult lair they had been camped at - and are now easily a half session remaining before they are done and have taken some fairly heavy blows along the way. I am going to have to adjust my timeline from here - there may be a rest period, or reluctance to get stuck into further heroics? We shall see.

I think what I need to do is to set up multiple smaller elements - resolvable within a half session or so - and then keep/drop some as the time runs down, so the final session can be a reasonable declaration of victory, wherever they get to. Assuming they do not TPK along the way, which remains a possibility.

The one big thing I am taking from Dungeonfruit is to leave time for 'wrap up' and/or epilogue - I will give each of the players some running room to say how things turn out in the aftermath of all their deed - but I need to remember to leave that time and bring things to a close a little early on that last night.