Mike Shea

I loved it.

I'm really happy to have this tool in my toolbox and I wanted to offer it up to you once again.

Every week here on the talk show, we take some questions that have come in from the Sly Flourish Patreon Q&A.

I answer all of the questions that come into the Patreon Q&A every Friday, but some of those questions I bring here to the show so that we can dive into them.

Today, Michael N. says, I have a question about your Scourge of the Dragon Empire campaign.

I just did my prep for Scourge of the Dragon Empire and open-ended campaigns in general.

All of my previous campaigns have been somewhat linear with clear narrative arcs and a final goal slash final enemy at the end.

I am preparing my second Midgard campaign set in the recently conquered region of the Muradi Dragon Empire.

Hey, me too.

And I plan to use your 3-2-1 quest model to enable the players to drive the story.

I know that it will be a while from now, but I'm concerned about how to bring the campaign to a satisfying conclusion.

How do you see your Dragon Empire campaign coming to a close?

Is it best to just allow the final enemy or goal developed organically over the campaign and then just end things when it feels right?

Does a campaign always need to have an end with a bang to be satisfying?

That's more than one question, but we're gonna forgive you, because it's a really, really good question.

So in Return of the Lazy Dungeon Master, my book on how to prep your RPGs, I offer kind of a model for thinking about this.

And that model is, we have an idea of what the campaign's main goal is, something like kill Strahd, or dismantle the Dragon Empire, right?

Like disable the Dragon Empire.

or whatever we have sort of a primary goal for the adventure which may include like a villain again like stragg could be a villain or vecna right you want to destroy vecna or stop vecna from destroying the multiverse or whatever spoilers so you you have that sort of shining star of what your campaign is about you kind of take that shining star and you turn it into essentially a main bond for the characters that the characters are working together to disrupt the dragon empire

That's something that I kind of built into your session zero so that you know that that's the drive and ambition of the characters.