The character isn't gone. He is just in a filing cabinet waiting for his next story. He might have to adventure with a new party, but you can always revive him later.
Heck, if your group is still together, still playing D&D, you can always ask if you can continue to play your character in the new campaign since you aren't quite done with him. Perhaps with the suggestion that you don't accrue XP until the rest of the party catches up to your level. The group or DM will probably not go for it, but it doesn't hurt to ask.
He's saying he's the new DM in the same setting, so he can even bring his character back as an NPC if he wants. Or make him the final boss who is pissed because he got abandoned
>Or make him the final boss who is pissed because he got abandoned
Close enough. The way I wrote it was that a magical anomaly ripped the "souls" out of all the PCs save my fighter, leaving them lifeless, undecaying bodies. He vowed to find answers and perhaps save them.
He was desperate enough to make a deal with the cleric's backstory villain (a dragon) for power and resources. If we go far enough into the campaign, I'll introduce him as recurring villain that hunts the new party trying to get back the "souls" of his companions.
Hey man that's cool, you can use the Blackguard statblock to run him(there is also the Champion and the Warlord) ormyou could go extra fancy and use Verminaard's stat block from Dragonlance as a cool campaing ending boss fight(it's free on DnD Beyond)
We have done PVP on the party's last session before the DM left and everyone seemed to had a lot of fun so I think I will be keeping him as a Battlemaster PC that levels with the party in the background albeit with extra features from the Warrior's codex which we are now using.
I do not guarantee introducing him until we are at least late into tier-2 for pacing, narrative and gameplay reasons. I want to at least gauge what the party is capable of and if it will be awkward using the old PC(s) lol
Since you're trying your hand at DMing, every player and party you've encountered could become a part of your story. You can write your own epilogue or leave hits about what happened to a particular band of adventurers for would-be heroes to find in their own epic Sagas.
I came into a group a few sessions into a homebrew The Sunless Citadel in Exandria. The group was semi established and they found me tied up being tortured by a bunch of gnolls. We completed the mission and returned to an inn where we met a recently divorced gnome. We ended up buying her cart off her which still had Just Married on a banner on the back. And that's how we became the Married Mauraders! They were the best player's I've ever played with and when I started school I had to drop the campaign and it soon dissolved after. I miss the group very much and wish they were still playing so I could check in on discord after school to catch the end of the games.
I know you all are on reddit in the off chance you read this I miss you all and you were the best group of roleplayers I'd ever had the pleasure of playing with!
Edit: I played a dwarf named Greaek from Kraghammer a battlemaster fighter who brutally fought with 2 shields and had a deep love for language and the underdark. He was exiled after a mining accident he was protecting fell killing the son of a powerful lord. He died in his last session and was resurrected as a fairy before heading back to Kraghammer to clear his family's name.
We had a pal/sorc who was very lawful. Like spreading law to the wild west. An entrepreneur artificer and a nature paladin/ nature warlock (anti civilization) we thwarted a Yuan-ti plot to eradicate the sentient races of the prime material with a magical disease.
I’m a dm for a group of 5 now but at the time it was 4, the party had was a human fighter, human rogue, half elf hexadin, and a centaur sorcerer. It was probably my favorite campaign to dm for recently because of how the campaign was run. The setup was that the party was killed in a homebrew setting called Ashenhold by a lich and sent 1000 years into the past by the goddess Arawn to figure out who will become the lich. The party had a countdown of 12 months to complete this mystery. One of the members, the half elf hexadin, was a member of one of the primary 8 noble families so they became wanted due to impersonating a nobleman which lead to numerous fun scenarios.
One of my favorite sessions takes place when the party arrives to a town inhabited by mostly orcs and a carnival arrives in town. The town in the time where the party comes from is known for something tragic happens where everyone disappears randomly. The party has fun with some of the carnivals activities.
When the party arrives into the main tent to watch the main event the people who arrive except for the party all fall asleep and after a couple of seconds, some clowns start looting the asleep citizens. They are forced to come up with a plan as the clowns slowly make their way towards the party. Shortly after some vines begin to spread towards the citizens and suck their life away. The party fights the clowns and make their way out of the tent to realize they have been transported to the feywild.
A hooded figure with some sort of protective aura surrounding them is powered by a crystal where the party destroys it but are forced to escape through a portal that takes them to the same city but 2 months have passed.
The party began the session with 8/12 months passing and ended with 10/12 months passing
Campaigns collapse sometimes, it's an unfortunate fact of the game. Real life has to come first, and being a DM is a time consuming, mentally taxing job. (It's also incredibly rewarding, which is why I love it, but it does take a lot out of me.)
That said, your characters are not gone just because the game ended abruptly- you can bring back characters from a dead campaign with a little bit of imagination, and you may end up with an even better story! I did this once with a teenage bumpkin fighter that I brought back as a middle-aged, moustached wizard with amnesia. He doesn't know what happened in the last 30 years, has no idea where he learned magic, and still acts like a well-meaning but completely naive kid from the absolute middle of nowhere. I don't think I would have enjoyed this character nearly as much if I had not had to put him on hold, then come up with a way to bring him back years later.
My first DnD game, I played with 2 of my high school friend and 3 other people (1 of which bowed out early on). I still play DnD with those 2 high school friends and we still fondly remember the trio of our characters. A famous short satyr bard, a meathead half-orc, and a warforged who was won by the half-orc in a contest and is tasked with helping him train.
If they were The Three Stooges, the satyr was Moe, the half-orc was Curly, and the warforged was Larry. The satyr was the "face" of the group being the more charismatic one, though the half orc was a force that was hard to wrangle in. It was a fun trio of characters with overlapping goals, but *not really being friends* and all had their own selfish interests.
The other 2 players who were there to the end, one did not talk all that much and the other was a *bit of a difficult player* who was always picking fight with NPCs. Some fun scenarios came out of that and they never dragged the game to a halt, but they did just *sit out* a fight or two.
The DM pulled some weird moves clearly deliberately trying to get my character killed (Bard was a ranged magic user, we were fighting an owlbear that was surrounded by the brutes, and another player trapped it's young in a net. The owlbear moved from being surrounded not triggering any opportunity attacks, ignored the player who had it's young trapped, moved all the way over to the bard and punched it's lights out, then *walked back to where the 2 brutes were so it could continue getting pumbled*). We tried to talk to the DM about it as it was a big ol immersion break, but the DM was not all receptive and had a "who cares if a character dies, make another one" attitude. We thought we worked it out tho but the next day they abruptly nuked the Discord server we played in.
I still draw my character, and all of our characters were "canon" in the future games we played together. My bard specifically, since they were a well traveled famous performer, sometimes an NPC might mention a song as being written by them or that they performed in a spot.
I was planning a small one off for my 2 friends using the characters, a plot about my satyr bard gets kidnapped for ransom (so I did not have to juggle DMing and playing the character fully) and let the other 2 try and figure out how to rescue him. We have yet to have the time to play it out though.
I rather like this idea about how to 'wrap up' a party without feeling like you abandon them.
[https://www.reddit.com/r/UnearthedArcana/comments/1aljv5h/the\_plot\_hole\_dnd\_campaign\_style\_concept/](https://www.reddit.com/r/UnearthedArcana/comments/1aljv5h/the_plot_hole_dnd_campaign_style_concept/)
They just take the Plothole Inn's(I rather like the Knowhere Inn for a name though) invitation and are forever bound to that place. Possibly thwarting some other villainous scheme somewhere else in the realms.
My lizardfolk barbarian bounty hunter had a southern accent. He was grouped with a gnome wizard who had a tiefling son who he adopted. He was a sorcerer who hated his helicopter gnome father. Our last companion was a halfling bard who was a stand up comedian that would always drop sweet jokes at the yawning portal (dragon heist).
My barbarian died saving them and it was a first character death for the whole table. He was the glue to that campaign, once he died we tried 2 more sessions before stopping (DM also burned out and didn’t like killing my guy)
So this isn't D&D, but Edge of the Empire. 3 players, 1 DM, 1 Player controlled NPC
Edge of the Empire uses an "Obligation" system. Everyone has a personal obligation at character creation and the group can take on obligations to earn xp. These obligations are shown on a scale from 1-100 (1-10, 11-20, 21-30 being the player obligations, we had a group obligation that was 31-45 and 46-55) Every session you roll a d100, and if it lands in the range something from that obligation pops up and starts impacting your focus as a character until you deal with it. It was such a cool system and revolutionized working backstory into the games imo, and made it really easy to be invested in other players backstories.
NPC player was a tank named Amos, he was just a generic mercenary type
Player 3 had a Droid hacker that owed money to a cartell. Every obligation roll for them ended up as some kind of heist.
Player 2 was our charismatic leader Han Solo type who had a super sick family member, and led into missions surrounding our need to acquire the newly developed bacta, which lead to us joining up with the rebellion somewhat
Player 1 (me) a John Marston esque Bounty Hunter left for dead by my former group, presumed dead but actually in imperial custody but escaped with the help of my new crew, in a desperate search for my old group which includes my wife (who didn't know what happened to me). This character was my most fun RPG character I've ever had. I was a duel wielding gun slinger who modified the crews gear. We had to split up to do joint objectives at one point, and I stealthed to the second spot solo to deal with it. Was discovered by a squad of stormtroopers on my way back but managed to win a 1v5 firefight and rejoin the team.
Unfortunately DM is in Japan now so unlikely to get back to this game anytime soon, if ever. Edge of the Empire is a fantastic experience if you're ever inclined to try it.
I played a campaign once (five players, one DM), where the characters all leveled up in "real time," meaning that they leveled up over the course of in-game years. We all started at level 1 as 11 year olds and slowly worked out way up to level 11.
We watched our characters grow from foolish children and impertinent teens into mature adults and then into old men. Some formed relationships and had children, others fought to overcome their insecurities and anxieties and become the best possible version of themselves. We traveled across space and time in a grand campaign that saw us fighting for the freedom of not just our world, but planets all across the galaxy.
In the final session, one of the characters succumbed to an old wound that had festered for years (he got crit by Blade of Disaster in a boss fight), leaving behind a wife, two children, and several grandchildren. Two more characters were old and gray. One of those two traveled 2000 years into the past to reunite with the man he loved but never got the chance to share a life with. As a consequence, though, he never saw anyone else in the party ever again.
Another character, long since a lich and lost to the darkness of that fate, departed to spin his webs and worship the god of death. The final character, an elf, had withstood the years better than his more short-lived companions and would go on to become an archfey. He rebuilt the faerie kingdoms destroyed in the War of the Opened Eyes with his partner at his side. He outlived every other character, expect perhaps the lich, and he outlived their children and their children's children, but such is the fate of an elf in a world of men.
I hopped into a server i didnt know for a game after offhandedly mentioning DnD to someone on League.
The campaign lasted a year before the DM burned out, but Terminal Velocity is etched in my mind as the most fun group and campaign i've been in. I played a centaur bladesinger wizard, and was accompanied by two rogues, inquisitive and swashbuckler (Aarakocra and Wood Elf), a half-orc fighter battlemaster, and a kobold artillerist artificer.
We were a squad of highly specialized soldiers part of an expedition sent on behalf of a world-spanning goblinoid empire sent to colonize and conquer a new world. We explored the land hex by hex, gathering allies and working with our respective military divisions between sorties. Hikko and Aldrin (Centaur and Kobold) were working as part of the R&D division, on artillery and logistics respectively, Dorner (Half Orc) was part of the main chain of command and our squad leader, Colikos (Elf) was an assassin of the empire with orders of his own, and Gintaxias (Aarakocra) was part of the scouting division, often on exploratory missions even in downtime.
The nickname of Terminal Velocity came from our tendency towards high movement speeds, and complete disregard for our own survival. As an example, we once faced a troll in a cave that we knew had explosively flammable pollen in it, with the troll also covered.
Our artificer crit failed a roll to throw a homemade grenade at the troll and almost KO'd both himself and our inquisitive, then i rode forward with the fighter on my back, torch in hand and lit us and the troll up both, only ending in a victory because we had a pretty damage oriented group and beat it before it could finish us.
Terminal Velocity made it into my personal worldbuilding, and i hope i can DM a sequel one day.
The character isn't gone. He is just in a filing cabinet waiting for his next story. He might have to adventure with a new party, but you can always revive him later. Heck, if your group is still together, still playing D&D, you can always ask if you can continue to play your character in the new campaign since you aren't quite done with him. Perhaps with the suggestion that you don't accrue XP until the rest of the party catches up to your level. The group or DM will probably not go for it, but it doesn't hurt to ask.
He's saying he's the new DM in the same setting, so he can even bring his character back as an NPC if he wants. Or make him the final boss who is pissed because he got abandoned
>Or make him the final boss who is pissed because he got abandoned Close enough. The way I wrote it was that a magical anomaly ripped the "souls" out of all the PCs save my fighter, leaving them lifeless, undecaying bodies. He vowed to find answers and perhaps save them. He was desperate enough to make a deal with the cleric's backstory villain (a dragon) for power and resources. If we go far enough into the campaign, I'll introduce him as recurring villain that hunts the new party trying to get back the "souls" of his companions.
Hey man that's cool, you can use the Blackguard statblock to run him(there is also the Champion and the Warlord) ormyou could go extra fancy and use Verminaard's stat block from Dragonlance as a cool campaing ending boss fight(it's free on DnD Beyond)
We have done PVP on the party's last session before the DM left and everyone seemed to had a lot of fun so I think I will be keeping him as a Battlemaster PC that levels with the party in the background albeit with extra features from the Warrior's codex which we are now using. I do not guarantee introducing him until we are at least late into tier-2 for pacing, narrative and gameplay reasons. I want to at least gauge what the party is capable of and if it will be awkward using the old PC(s) lol
I still think up story beats for games that were abandoned years ago.
Since you're trying your hand at DMing, every player and party you've encountered could become a part of your story. You can write your own epilogue or leave hits about what happened to a particular band of adventurers for would-be heroes to find in their own epic Sagas.
I came into a group a few sessions into a homebrew The Sunless Citadel in Exandria. The group was semi established and they found me tied up being tortured by a bunch of gnolls. We completed the mission and returned to an inn where we met a recently divorced gnome. We ended up buying her cart off her which still had Just Married on a banner on the back. And that's how we became the Married Mauraders! They were the best player's I've ever played with and when I started school I had to drop the campaign and it soon dissolved after. I miss the group very much and wish they were still playing so I could check in on discord after school to catch the end of the games. I know you all are on reddit in the off chance you read this I miss you all and you were the best group of roleplayers I'd ever had the pleasure of playing with! Edit: I played a dwarf named Greaek from Kraghammer a battlemaster fighter who brutally fought with 2 shields and had a deep love for language and the underdark. He was exiled after a mining accident he was protecting fell killing the son of a powerful lord. He died in his last session and was resurrected as a fairy before heading back to Kraghammer to clear his family's name.
We had a pal/sorc who was very lawful. Like spreading law to the wild west. An entrepreneur artificer and a nature paladin/ nature warlock (anti civilization) we thwarted a Yuan-ti plot to eradicate the sentient races of the prime material with a magical disease.
I’m a dm for a group of 5 now but at the time it was 4, the party had was a human fighter, human rogue, half elf hexadin, and a centaur sorcerer. It was probably my favorite campaign to dm for recently because of how the campaign was run. The setup was that the party was killed in a homebrew setting called Ashenhold by a lich and sent 1000 years into the past by the goddess Arawn to figure out who will become the lich. The party had a countdown of 12 months to complete this mystery. One of the members, the half elf hexadin, was a member of one of the primary 8 noble families so they became wanted due to impersonating a nobleman which lead to numerous fun scenarios. One of my favorite sessions takes place when the party arrives to a town inhabited by mostly orcs and a carnival arrives in town. The town in the time where the party comes from is known for something tragic happens where everyone disappears randomly. The party has fun with some of the carnivals activities. When the party arrives into the main tent to watch the main event the people who arrive except for the party all fall asleep and after a couple of seconds, some clowns start looting the asleep citizens. They are forced to come up with a plan as the clowns slowly make their way towards the party. Shortly after some vines begin to spread towards the citizens and suck their life away. The party fights the clowns and make their way out of the tent to realize they have been transported to the feywild. A hooded figure with some sort of protective aura surrounding them is powered by a crystal where the party destroys it but are forced to escape through a portal that takes them to the same city but 2 months have passed. The party began the session with 8/12 months passing and ended with 10/12 months passing
I have more stories from this party and the next one if you would like to hear more
Campaigns collapse sometimes, it's an unfortunate fact of the game. Real life has to come first, and being a DM is a time consuming, mentally taxing job. (It's also incredibly rewarding, which is why I love it, but it does take a lot out of me.) That said, your characters are not gone just because the game ended abruptly- you can bring back characters from a dead campaign with a little bit of imagination, and you may end up with an even better story! I did this once with a teenage bumpkin fighter that I brought back as a middle-aged, moustached wizard with amnesia. He doesn't know what happened in the last 30 years, has no idea where he learned magic, and still acts like a well-meaning but completely naive kid from the absolute middle of nowhere. I don't think I would have enjoyed this character nearly as much if I had not had to put him on hold, then come up with a way to bring him back years later.
My first DnD game, I played with 2 of my high school friend and 3 other people (1 of which bowed out early on). I still play DnD with those 2 high school friends and we still fondly remember the trio of our characters. A famous short satyr bard, a meathead half-orc, and a warforged who was won by the half-orc in a contest and is tasked with helping him train. If they were The Three Stooges, the satyr was Moe, the half-orc was Curly, and the warforged was Larry. The satyr was the "face" of the group being the more charismatic one, though the half orc was a force that was hard to wrangle in. It was a fun trio of characters with overlapping goals, but *not really being friends* and all had their own selfish interests. The other 2 players who were there to the end, one did not talk all that much and the other was a *bit of a difficult player* who was always picking fight with NPCs. Some fun scenarios came out of that and they never dragged the game to a halt, but they did just *sit out* a fight or two. The DM pulled some weird moves clearly deliberately trying to get my character killed (Bard was a ranged magic user, we were fighting an owlbear that was surrounded by the brutes, and another player trapped it's young in a net. The owlbear moved from being surrounded not triggering any opportunity attacks, ignored the player who had it's young trapped, moved all the way over to the bard and punched it's lights out, then *walked back to where the 2 brutes were so it could continue getting pumbled*). We tried to talk to the DM about it as it was a big ol immersion break, but the DM was not all receptive and had a "who cares if a character dies, make another one" attitude. We thought we worked it out tho but the next day they abruptly nuked the Discord server we played in. I still draw my character, and all of our characters were "canon" in the future games we played together. My bard specifically, since they were a well traveled famous performer, sometimes an NPC might mention a song as being written by them or that they performed in a spot. I was planning a small one off for my 2 friends using the characters, a plot about my satyr bard gets kidnapped for ransom (so I did not have to juggle DMing and playing the character fully) and let the other 2 try and figure out how to rescue him. We have yet to have the time to play it out though.
I rather like this idea about how to 'wrap up' a party without feeling like you abandon them. [https://www.reddit.com/r/UnearthedArcana/comments/1aljv5h/the\_plot\_hole\_dnd\_campaign\_style\_concept/](https://www.reddit.com/r/UnearthedArcana/comments/1aljv5h/the_plot_hole_dnd_campaign_style_concept/) They just take the Plothole Inn's(I rather like the Knowhere Inn for a name though) invitation and are forever bound to that place. Possibly thwarting some other villainous scheme somewhere else in the realms.
My lizardfolk barbarian bounty hunter had a southern accent. He was grouped with a gnome wizard who had a tiefling son who he adopted. He was a sorcerer who hated his helicopter gnome father. Our last companion was a halfling bard who was a stand up comedian that would always drop sweet jokes at the yawning portal (dragon heist). My barbarian died saving them and it was a first character death for the whole table. He was the glue to that campaign, once he died we tried 2 more sessions before stopping (DM also burned out and didn’t like killing my guy)
So this isn't D&D, but Edge of the Empire. 3 players, 1 DM, 1 Player controlled NPC Edge of the Empire uses an "Obligation" system. Everyone has a personal obligation at character creation and the group can take on obligations to earn xp. These obligations are shown on a scale from 1-100 (1-10, 11-20, 21-30 being the player obligations, we had a group obligation that was 31-45 and 46-55) Every session you roll a d100, and if it lands in the range something from that obligation pops up and starts impacting your focus as a character until you deal with it. It was such a cool system and revolutionized working backstory into the games imo, and made it really easy to be invested in other players backstories. NPC player was a tank named Amos, he was just a generic mercenary type Player 3 had a Droid hacker that owed money to a cartell. Every obligation roll for them ended up as some kind of heist. Player 2 was our charismatic leader Han Solo type who had a super sick family member, and led into missions surrounding our need to acquire the newly developed bacta, which lead to us joining up with the rebellion somewhat Player 1 (me) a John Marston esque Bounty Hunter left for dead by my former group, presumed dead but actually in imperial custody but escaped with the help of my new crew, in a desperate search for my old group which includes my wife (who didn't know what happened to me). This character was my most fun RPG character I've ever had. I was a duel wielding gun slinger who modified the crews gear. We had to split up to do joint objectives at one point, and I stealthed to the second spot solo to deal with it. Was discovered by a squad of stormtroopers on my way back but managed to win a 1v5 firefight and rejoin the team. Unfortunately DM is in Japan now so unlikely to get back to this game anytime soon, if ever. Edge of the Empire is a fantastic experience if you're ever inclined to try it.
I played a campaign once (five players, one DM), where the characters all leveled up in "real time," meaning that they leveled up over the course of in-game years. We all started at level 1 as 11 year olds and slowly worked out way up to level 11. We watched our characters grow from foolish children and impertinent teens into mature adults and then into old men. Some formed relationships and had children, others fought to overcome their insecurities and anxieties and become the best possible version of themselves. We traveled across space and time in a grand campaign that saw us fighting for the freedom of not just our world, but planets all across the galaxy. In the final session, one of the characters succumbed to an old wound that had festered for years (he got crit by Blade of Disaster in a boss fight), leaving behind a wife, two children, and several grandchildren. Two more characters were old and gray. One of those two traveled 2000 years into the past to reunite with the man he loved but never got the chance to share a life with. As a consequence, though, he never saw anyone else in the party ever again. Another character, long since a lich and lost to the darkness of that fate, departed to spin his webs and worship the god of death. The final character, an elf, had withstood the years better than his more short-lived companions and would go on to become an archfey. He rebuilt the faerie kingdoms destroyed in the War of the Opened Eyes with his partner at his side. He outlived every other character, expect perhaps the lich, and he outlived their children and their children's children, but such is the fate of an elf in a world of men.
I hopped into a server i didnt know for a game after offhandedly mentioning DnD to someone on League. The campaign lasted a year before the DM burned out, but Terminal Velocity is etched in my mind as the most fun group and campaign i've been in. I played a centaur bladesinger wizard, and was accompanied by two rogues, inquisitive and swashbuckler (Aarakocra and Wood Elf), a half-orc fighter battlemaster, and a kobold artillerist artificer. We were a squad of highly specialized soldiers part of an expedition sent on behalf of a world-spanning goblinoid empire sent to colonize and conquer a new world. We explored the land hex by hex, gathering allies and working with our respective military divisions between sorties. Hikko and Aldrin (Centaur and Kobold) were working as part of the R&D division, on artillery and logistics respectively, Dorner (Half Orc) was part of the main chain of command and our squad leader, Colikos (Elf) was an assassin of the empire with orders of his own, and Gintaxias (Aarakocra) was part of the scouting division, often on exploratory missions even in downtime. The nickname of Terminal Velocity came from our tendency towards high movement speeds, and complete disregard for our own survival. As an example, we once faced a troll in a cave that we knew had explosively flammable pollen in it, with the troll also covered. Our artificer crit failed a roll to throw a homemade grenade at the troll and almost KO'd both himself and our inquisitive, then i rode forward with the fighter on my back, torch in hand and lit us and the troll up both, only ending in a victory because we had a pretty damage oriented group and beat it before it could finish us. Terminal Velocity made it into my personal worldbuilding, and i hope i can DM a sequel one day.
Saying the DM couldn't be arsed to do a closing epilogue is a dick move. They were running a campaign for you, and that's how you speak about them?