So I just finished an epic campaign with my group, which culminated in the loss of two PCs, the total annihilation of a massive astral construct building, the destruction of a hive of killer-bee spirits, the destruction of a major cell of Winternight, and the possible death of a major horror (although you can never really tell, can you?). The characters lost just about everything in the process (including all of their magical items, most of their weapons, and their vehicles), but got a lot of karma, and most will probably retire to a simpler life of bartending, gunsmithing, and trying not to piss off Ares and Aztechnology so much in the future.

Have you ever finished an epic-length campaign? How did it end? Did everyone die, or did it go off smoothly? Whar did the characters 'do' after it was all over?

Well, in the final episode of the last SR campaign I played, my merc managed to detonate nearly every piece of explodable equipment he had collected over the past several years of play.

Considering he was a demolitions specialist with a hoarding habit, you can imagine the results.



At the end? He dropped the smoking used-up Dragon launcher and walked off into the sunset. Nobody knows where he ended up.


-karma

It varies. Most of the campaigns of any game that I've seen end were due to total PC death.

~J

*cough* Or abandonment.

*glares* You know that of which I speak.

The last campaign I ran (Survival of the Fittest), we only had one fatality and another saved by the Act of God rule (bye bye karma). The decker, Jackula (cool name), bit off way more than he could chew. He managed to run some pivotal programs, that aided the party in their infiltration, but he bit the big one at the hands of another security decker.

The Act of God usage went to our Shammie who accidentally got cornered by Volk (the werewolf), after being blinded by the nagas. Ouch! Said goodbye to the karma and we changed the death to a serious wound with Volk believing he had slain the caster.

For a group of six people, that wasn't bad. Considering that I upped all of the stats and numbers of enemies for the group by roughly 2-3 times what the book had listed, I'd say they did considerably well.

The runners in my last campaign had successfully snuck into a really, really nasty Wintermute base, with intent to shut down their nuclear weapons, steal their plans, extract 6 scientists, and grab some magical R&D on the way out the back door.

All went well until sometime in the middle of the complex, when the team was about to cross a bridge over a large pit, a kind of 'control' area before the main control room.

Me: OK, you get the door open, and (rolling some dice) no alarms go off. However, the door across the way, on the otehr side of the bridge, is also open, and a pair of what you assume are mages walk through the door. Everyone roll reaction. (lots of rolling, the team's mage somehow gets the jump on everyone).

Kuro (the mage): I cast Powerball.

Rest of group: stunned silence.

Me: You know that you could also cast Stunball? Or Slaughter? Or shoot them with your shotgun, since you're under a silence spell?

Kuro: Powerball, maximum force... um... force 8.

The bridge didn't survive the blast.

The pit was the entrace to a killer bee hive. They were not amused.

Needless to say, it was amazing that they made it off the island with only two cassualties. However, the Hand of God was invoked 3 times.

Well, my groups last run could almost count as a campaign in itself, it lasted approximately 2 months game time, however we took around 8 months real time to complete it, meeting up once every 2-3 weeks and playing for about 12-15 hours at a time.

What started off as a low level datasteal turned into a grade FUBAR situation that got is in deep with the Yaks, a subsiduary of Shiawase and a Vampire that was manipulating the CEO of the aforementioned subsiduary. All this while being hunted by a (presumed hostile) Sioux bounty hunter adept, who also trains wild cats survival skills, a gang of genetically modified super orcs that can't be seen by cameras or through any kind of astral perception, a sociopathic killer who was out to reclaim one of our group for another company (as he was an escaped pet project) and he turned out to be the doppelganger of an entirely different sociopathic killer that just enjoyed turning up and messing with our heads.

Throw on top of that the fact that our Johnsons been geeked, we're flat broke and have nowhere to go (we couldn't even trust some of our contacts) and you can just imagine the sh!t we had to pull.

We were lucky to make it out alive, after facing off against a gang of ghouls that had jumped us as the lights went out (total darkness, thank god for thermo) sneaking past some ultrasound-motion detection triggered sentry guns whilst under fire from the aforementioned gang of orcs packing LMGs and heavy armour (who had now captured our mage during the fight with the ghouls) and eventually facing off against the vamp, her minion and the remains of the orc supergroup in a room full of trip wires tied to grenades and our mage smack in the middle of it (did i mention the room full of gaseous acid we had to find a way through to get that far?). The vamp got away (after a good kicking from our mage, a huge earth elemental, and the other sammy (i had the other sammy character)) The last of the orc supergroup and the minion got cleared up after a damn prolonged gun fight that ended up a sword fight between the minion and my own character. Then after all that, we got our names cleared with yaks for the murder we had been framed for (that and a payment of 100,000, that is, that's what we had to pay the yaks to get them off our back).

By the end of it, our mage had used nearly all her services with the small army of elementals that she had, plus a fair few expendable foci, though she had gained a follower of sorts (something about an elf that has started following her around, they're supposed to be family or something, but i don't know about that yet) who's hell bent on keeping her alive, our other sammy pretty much expended all her ammo, the decker with a bad addiction to shiawase products (isotropic black ic = BAD) our Security specialist having nightmares for months and more relationship problems than any given series of oprah and my character lost, without direction (he's just now been officially kicked out of the Yakuza, who was on probation with) and with a tatoo that will get most Yaks trying to kill his ass if they ever see it, that and he's made a long term enemy out of the Oyabuns second in command. Not to mention that we've pissed off a vampire that now has some personal beef with us for messing up plans she had been laying for the past forty years or so. All that last bit was done during the last 15 hours or so of game time, there was a damn sight more where that came from, i can tell you (our GM is a sadist, which is fine, 'cause we all seem to be masochists in our player group!).

We had come out of that run with a sort of "Where's my Medal?" feeling and then reality hit the characters. We need another job soon, as we're still broke.

So, essentially, we're young, gifted and skint. We got nada, nothing. But hell, we're still alive!

Now is that a cry of pity or jealousy you got going there?

Heh, i realised i missed one thing from my last post, the fact that my character, the other sammy and the security specialist nearly all came down with the Kreiger strain of HMHVV. Me and the security specialist got treated and sorted without a problem, however, the other sammy's a few shades paler than she used to be...