RPGaDay: Close

Coming up with the close of an adventure is the part I find hardest.  Sometimes I can do a climactic final fight, but sometimes that's not how things are meant to go.  To add to the difficulty, I'm currently running campaigns at MK-RPG, which have a set 8-week length, so I have to aim to have the big finale happen on week 8.  Sometimes not helped by the players taking more or less time than I expected to complete a given scenario.

One thing I have picked up though, particularly for convention one-shots, is epilogues.  Even if the ending of the scenario wasn't particularly dramatic, wrapping it up and asking players for a few words on what their character did next sometimes seems to round things off nicely.

When I run Firefly games I really try to have a good ending scene (and some have succeeded better than others) but either way I finish off by asking the players to come up with a name for the episode.  Maybe I should expand this to other games?  It certainly works for anything inspired by episodic TV.

One time I am happy with a close is my Delta Green campaign.  The game wasn't a great fit for the group, and one player wanted to drop out, so I decided I'd wrap things up the game after he quit.  Since by this point in the campaign he was on the verge of turning into a deep one, I decided the final mission would be that he'd been kidnapped by a former member of [Redacted] who was going to use him to expose the Delta Green conspiracy.  By the end of the session, the character turning into a deep one had been killed, one character escaped, one was killed in the resulting explosion when they thwarted the plan and one ended up in a Mi-Go brain canister, which was everything he could have wanted.  While the group in general didn't jibe with Delta Green the way I'd hoped, that last player got really into his character and I felt I owed him a good finale.  I'm glad I managed to deliver.