schneefink

My D&D campaign is over! I can barely believe it. 29 sessions! We started in early September and back then I thought it'd be no more than 5-10. But now it's over! (Apart from the post-campaign Q&A/afterparty this weekend.) And I think it was a satisfying ending :)

The last thing I wrote about here was the first part of the bank heist. The next session consisted half of the party convincing Valkyrie to help them break out of the bank after all, and half of combat encounters, which were mostly Valkyrie barely destroying an iron golem and the druid (with some help) killing the reinforcements. Only half the players were there and they figured out who these weird people from a different world were, it was beautiful :)

And then the next week was the reveal for the rest of the group – they figured it out when they met Tony. (Except U., because she knows nothing about the MCU ^^ ) Instead of searching the cave the party just waited until the portal was built (why are they always so curious when I have nothing prepared and not when I have?, of course), and then the bad guys mind-controlled Tony, then Tony attacked Bruce and the Hulk appeared, all of that in a very tiny cave, I had more than ten NPCs to keep track of… Fun but stressful. At first I was worried the party would win without even taking significant damage, but then they made 1.5 big tactical errors and one character died. …so that happened! Really quickly too, in one round. But there are consequences of talking about your plans loudly in front of the bad guys, and I did tell them that… And they did manage to kill all the bad guys.

The last session was the clean-up, fixing the portal activation array, and then the Avengers left. And two of the party decided to accompany them! I had not expected that, but I loved it. The artificer and the druid, of all people. They're gonna have fun in the MCU! …maybe not immediately though. I rolled badly for how well done the activation array was, but I didn't want it to fail that would have been boring, so I just had them miss their target – and arrive on Hala, the capital of the Kree empire. Fun! And that's where I left them :)
The rest of the party helped the head of the Thieves' guild dissemble the portal and then organized the resurrection ritual for the dead party member. I use a variant of Matt Mercer's resurrection rules: there's a DC for the ritual to succeed, people can make contributions to the ritual to lower it, but in my version there's no low maximum number of contributions and the odds of it succeeding are very high. The ritual succeeded, and there were actually some nice character moments.
Then they had to get through the interrogation by the city watch but we shortened that. Of the three characters remaining in their original world, one applied to join the Thieves' guild, one will finally open his magic shop, and one was reunited with her boyfriend and will first help him on his quest and then plans to found an organization of magical paramedics.

For my first time DMing I think it was a big success! I wouldn't have had the energy to do it for so long if my players hadn't often told me how much they enjoyed it, that made it worth it. I'd definitely do it again one day – but not soon, right now I really look forward to being a player again.