After 4 years, 16 days, and 14 levels, the party finally defeated my final villain. They successfully prevented the return of the exiled gods and earned the highest honor in the land.
I am an extremely tired GM. Time to take a few weeks off, then start planning the next campaign.
Uncountable.
A single intense session can they’re take an entire weekend of planning as your primary task, depending on how you run your table. It can take longer.
I remember the big fight from my longest campaign ever.
Arranging tokens, having charts set up for pre-rolled checks for the most common bad guy actions, drawing up maps, planning out the “big” minions’ actions, the actual bbeg’s actions he intended, the kinda of minions and their sections of books marked and ready, organizing miniatures for the sections that would make use of them, checking character sheets to make sure I could keep the important parts in my head, and more.
I think I worked for two weeks getting it all set up, an hour or two a day mostly, with the two days before set aside for getting everything finalised and physically set up, and those two days were pretty much an all day thing.
And that’s with me already having had a good chunk of that info in my head. Back then, I could quote off most of the recurring monsters’ stats, and the main bad guys too.
And then the players look in the big dark cave, and John turns around and says, I’m getting really bad vibes here, let’s skip this one, and the party agrees and continues to the pub looking for another adventure.
Don’t even ask me about the side trip into a dragon cult’s lair when my kid and the group I was running decided to completely ignore a dozen preplanned hooks and go haring off through the woods instead.
Unless they plan to stay out of caves forever, then eventually they’re going to stumble into the one that you have planned…
After a weary day of traveling, the group finds a nice tiny cave to sleep in for the night. While asleep, a wolf attacked and shocked John. John rolled a 1 on his constitution check and then rolled a further 1 on his emotional check. John now has a permanent fear of caves preventing any further cave exploration.
The caves are alive and have developed a taste for poor John. They yearn to feed, and their howls sound through the night like gusts of wind through the trees.
John knows the hopelessness of inevitability. Some day, they will find him. Some day, he will wake up deep in the bowels of the caves, and his cries will add to the howls of the caves on the wind.