I'm still kind of in shock that we managed it, but after 6.5 years, ~275 sessions, and approximately 1,100 hours of playing our group has finished a 1-20 (okay technically 2-20 but it doesn't have the same ring, does it) campaign. There were times where I was so sure the end was right around the corner and times where I thought it would never come, but it's the creative work I'm definitely most proud of.

The Campaign

The campaign was my first time ever DMing, so it took a lot of growing pains. It started out as mishmash of modules and adventures I found online until they were level 5 and I had an idea for an overarching campaign, and from there on out it was basically entirely homebrewed.

The campaign centered around a cult who had broken a sword that held a god a millennium ago using that power to rip a hole in The Weave, draining high level magic to their god's domain. 1,000 years later the party's warlock found a piece of a strange, talking sword, became a Hexblade, and started putting it back together, slowly fixing The Weave but also jumpstarting the cult's plan to fully bring their god into the Material Realm. Much plot ensued.

The Party

Halfling Assassin (and later Phantom) Rogue

Tiefling Arcane Archer Fighter

Half-Elf Hexblade Warlock

Goliath Forge Cleric

XGTE had just come out when we started in January of 2018 so most of the players were grabbing things from that to try out. Everyone was experienced to begin with, and I was actually the only one of us who had never DMed before! I told everyone they were graduating from Adventuring Academy but they had flubbed their final and were on a makeup mission. They needed to come up with how the flubbed it and why they wanted to adventure. Everyone wrote up maybe a sentence or two of backstory and we were off.

General Thoughts

The key to getting this campaign across the finish line was investment. During this campaign we went from being in college together playing in person to spreading around the world (at this point there's a 15 hour time difference between two of our players) and playing on first Skype then Discord. Scheduling, as always, is the true BBEG, but if everyone is dedicated to making time for the game, it can be defeated. Originally we would play with one person missing, but as we got later in the campaign and it was clear that this was something special and the arcs became grander in scope and character impact, we only played when everyone could make it. I would say overall we had about an 80% hit rate on playing every week.

That this campaign took 6.5 years is a testament to my players' love of planning, RPing as much as possible, and me figuring out "pacing" as I grew as a DM. We tightened up, especially once we had a firm plan in place for the end stages of the campaign, but there were multiple sessions in a row where they would hang out in their base of operations, talk to different NPCs, advance goals, develop their storylines, and choose what they wanted to handle next. We loved it, but it eats a lot of time.

I wouldn't quite call it a sandbox, but there were multiple plot hooks available at any time and it would vary whether they would chase down something of their interest or if, in the machinations of the various forces at work in the world, I would force some action on them.

I used Milestone leveling throughout. I like that you only ever level after you accomplish something of importance, and some arcs of the campaign would have multiple level ups involved in them. The party averaged ~4 level ups a year, with them reaching Level 20 in June of 2023. Once they were Level 20 the only plots left to handle were preparing for the Final Battle where they would try to kill a god or wrapping up character backstory arcs. Instead of levels, they earned aid for the final battle in allies and favors, magic items, gold, narrative closure, etc. It worked pretty well.

I ran mostly Theater of the Mind combat. I hate finding maps and my prep time is a precious resource. I also find that when running combat, if there's a map I don't describe the action as well, letting the map and token do the talking. I like making combat feel cinematic, so unless I felt the fight needed it (a lot of moving parts, a boss fight) I just ran it using a spreadsheet to track information.

There were many character deaths throughout the campaign (Probably like 15?). For the most part they were able to be resurrected by the Cleric in the party or a Cleric in the main city they based out of, but there were multiple that happened in situations that made that impossible. I would then give the players a choice about whether they wanted to come back but with narrative consequences or roll a new character. Some example consequences:

• The Teifling became indebted to her "Devil Daddy" and had to do him a favor. This spiraled quite out of control.
• The Rogue had picked up some extra souls in the Nine Hells and died with those souls taking control. The party had to do a bunch of work to bring her back but in the meantime the souls worked against the party and brought essentially Magic Nukes into the world.
• The party TPKed while fighting The Baba Yaga in the Feywild. The Warlock's sword saved them, but there were massive narrative consequences for this, which made it feel like an actual cost and not just a "we've been playing for too long for this to end like this" cop out.

I know not every party feels the same way, but when everyone is super invested in the story narrative turns on the party can feel just as bad as rolling up a new character, and some of the best arcs of the campaign came out of these consequences.

Advice

Build what you need. We started this game with basically nothing but a starter town and a mission to find some cows, and now it's a huge world with lore docs out the wazoo and poweful NPCs and factions around the world. I see so many DMs (especially new DMs) feel like they need to build a living, breathing world when what your players need is a reason to get engaged. Focus on them and what they're doing and why, and as the players grow more comfortable and invested in the world and start to want to change the things they see, you can expand from there.

I also use this approach for running adventures. I write out the broadstrokes of why something is happening, figure out where the party is starting from, what they might need to progress to the next stage, and then if I had time and was feeling excited about the arc, maybe another half session's worth of notes in case they got farther than I thought (they never did). I'm very comfortable improvising, so leaving a lot of blank space for the party worked for my style. I had a saying that nothing in my notes is canon until it's said on table, which really gave me the freedom to tell what I thought was the best story, no matter what I'd written down the night before. A lot of awesome moments came out of that and it really helped build a collaborative story and not a story I wrote that they were playing in.

For a bit of high level advice, in broad strokes the Forgotten Realms wiki is your best friend. So many words have been written about so many creatures and places and realms and as the DM you have the power to steal everything that's not nailed down. I would say nothing came through without my spin on it, but it was a great resource for ideas.

For monsters, big shout out to Kobold Press and Mordekainen's Tome of Foes. They have weird abilities and are actually challenging for the CR which is written, something I found largely untrue of creatures in the MM. Be warned if you're used to just using the MM, though, since your internal calibration of what CR creatures are the right challenge will be off. I've never run the actual CR calculation on my encounters and I probably never will. It's way too fiddly.

For the actual fights, I added at least 75 HP to basically any monster the party fought. They could pump out huge amounts of damage, I love making weird and powerful magic items, especially with the Forge Cleric's player, and because of that I had to fiddle with basically everything. 0 regrets but a lot of work if you want to go away from RAW items.

My biggest advice with high level D&D is get weird and provide challenges, not solutions. Have enemies that can't be harmed by magic or magic items and see who still has a shortsword they took off a goblin at level 3. Create massive environmental challenges that should be impossible for them to survive. Create bosses who can't simply be killed, but need to have a certain item/aspect of them pushed out first. Don't design a solution, allow players to make checks and listen to their ideas. It's a lot of "yes, and" and "no, but" that allows players' creativity to shine and for ideas you could never dream of to exist.

I'm going to wrap up my part here, clearly I could talk about this all day. AMA!

EDIT: u/Acceptable-Ad1482 is the fighter from the campaign, feel free to ask them anything too! I'll list other party members if they have the bravery to show themselves.

I also see that u/FrancoisedeSales, the cleric player, has joined the fray!