How to Write a Campaign Epilogue

After two plus years spent campaigning with friends around the table, the story has come to an end. The dust from the final battle settles, and a moment of relief descends upon the table. For the game master, all of those months of prepping and planning have come to a hopefully satisfying conclusion. And for the players, a moment of triumph or resolution in the stories of their characters.

But other than hugs, some drinks, or celebratory pizzas, how does a GM and the party wrap up a two and a half year campaign? How can I, as the GM bring the players back to the fold of their recently created world — a world which now wanes in its dying embers or distant light as we move away from it — for one final ‘episode’ that might tie things up in a neat and memorable package for all time and posterity?

I think this is mainly a GM problem. It’s unlikely that any of the players around the table, or any involved in the extended campaign, would have this urge to ‘wrap things up’ so neatly. The idea accompanies, as a logical extension, the storehouse of notes and collected lore that has amassed in the GM’s possession since the whole thing began. It’s an urge to persevere the thing you made, but unselfishly perhaps. The same way you enjoyed the game every week (sometimes every month or every other), that same feeling might be possible if you and the party were once again all present to recreate the world together one last time around the table. Of course this comes with the notion that the epilogue session too will be documented and added to the neatly bound vault that will forever live on your shelf as the campaign with so and so name and other data. But it will feel so good to finally stamp those two words in the final pages of your journals or other docs, when you know for certain that it’s the end.

But who is this for? Surely not the players. Although I do think they will get a real kick out of the party we’ll throw. A large part of me knows — as a writer and world builder — that it’s selfishly for my own pleasure. But I also have a slinking intuition that the players in this long campaign and story would also revel in this ‘closure’, given the weight of the story itself, the terrifying and ruthless BBEG, and the general theme of diverting another apocalypse. Perhaps we don’t necessarily need ‘closure’ for a game like this. But the idea is compelling, and I’d like to live in a world where this was the case rather than the opposite.

So what are the elements of the proposed epilogue? I will try to make this as short and as brief as possible (please note I have never done this in the past, this is my first real attempt at an epilogue session). I think once all elements are considered together, it might seem evident that the game itself demands the epilogue if the whole party (GM included) is on board.

Element one: get everybody together in the same room again and order pizza or other food and snacks. Provide an array of beverages too. Create a sense of a ‘party’ but one that is loosely tied to the game, most likely gathered around the same table you played your campaign sessions, with dice and other elements of the game out on table or exposed in some way, but perhaps a little sparingly. Add a map of the world or region that you spent the most time in during the campaign to the wall to give the players a sense of location again. Provide or display any other tangible props (miniatures, set pieces, or other homebrewed artifacts) that might make sense or recall the players’ time spent in this world.

Element two: the GM should decide the duration between the last session and when the epilogue takes place. They should spend some time thinking about how the world has changed in say the year since the party defeated the evil that threatened to tear it apart, or how the people have gone into hiding since party’s failure to stop the encroaching darkness completely. They need to show how the world has changed for better or for worse. They should probably write all of this down and add it to their campaign books (this is what I will do). They should create any new props or other display items (maps or other handouts) that might help create a better sense of the changed world in concrete form for the players to encounter when they return to the table to reconnect with their recently departed world.

Element three: ask the players — any who took part in the campaign, even if it was only a single session — to think about what their characters have been doing since the game ended, then return to the table with an extended ‘chapter’ of their story, which could be either written or simply thought about beforehand. Brainstorming and role-play should be welcomed at the table for when the characters reveal their stories. If a certain party member died during the last fight, it might be a family member or friend, or another important NPC in the campaign that reveals the character’s final story, perhaps by revealing a secret about that character to the rest of the party. Given the bounds of your world and campaign setting, the options are endless here.

At first glance, an epilogue might seem only the GM’s problem, a splinter in their mind, an itch to wrap things up in their story and complete their notes on their shelf or digital library. But when the players are involved and come back to the table with their own stories, to a world post-final-session loosely defined by the GM, things get interesting. I think it’s here in this space — where the open ended creativity of the GM meets the individual ideas of each player — that the real party happens. In this way it’s just another session where everybody is doing what they did during the actual play sessions of the recently ended campaign. It keeps the game going, only everybody knows it’s the end. It’s a kind of chaos/apocalypse party, or just a really good time thinking about what might’ve become of all those characters we created.

In my game, I think it will involve a music festival on some formerly abandoned grounds the party purchased with a stash of rare gems. There’s a singing sea monster (a plesiosaurus) in the nearby lake that might join for a song. The sun is finally out and the ice is melting, so there’s a chance a crowd will show. This kind of scenario might also spark some ideas for the next campaign. In this way, once we’ve all agreed upon the ending, knowing we made it there together, getting the closure akin to what we find in a book or a finished manuscript, we can move on to the next one. The game is infinite in so many ways — like our imaginations — but needs these stopping points, a way to make sense of the endless possibilities, the potentiality, that the game presents, perhaps in the same way the dice are used to limit our choices during gameplay. Dice are something like guideposts in this infinite space. The epilogue is akin to this, another post in the collective sand of our thoughts and fantasies. ★