I ended a campaign yesterday, one that I had been running in one form or another for about 14 months. It’s perhaps not at the standard of epic long-runners that people will write about specifically due to endurance, but it is the longest single campaign I’ve ever run. And, as I’ve alluded to here before, it’s a doozy. I ran 26 sessions across two different systems, including one arc of pre-play. The game started in Apocalypse World: Burned Over, where we ran five sessions using the Forerunners rules before everyone picked their playbooks and the game continued in earnest for 13 more sessions.

I suppose I should add one small detail here: I began character creation for Forerunners with an adapted version of the character questionnaire from The Last Game Before Graduation, a teenager-specific scenario for the DIE RPG that’s contained within the main book. While I wasn’t initially planning it this way, after 18 sessions of Apocalypse World the party made it to DIE, leading me to call the first two arcs of the campaign ‘the longest Persona generation sequence thus attempted’.

DIE campaign mode lasted for 8 more sessions, and it’s an interesting beast. I’m not sure I could have handled any DIE campaign lasting more than 8-10 sessions, but this one especially accelerated towards profound emotional instability very quickly. By the time we reached the conclusion, at least the way I saw it, there was nowhere left to go. That said, everyone seemed fairly pleased with the way things ended, and I’m glad I chose to end it where I did instead of trying to push it any further.

I suppose that at this point I need to be clear that I made things much harder on myself than I needed to with the campaign setup for this game. I’ve already discussed before that this was a ‘Nexus’ game, where settings and characters from previous campaigns came back for a series of extended cameos. That did not, though, necessitate that I structure DIE the way I did. First off, I wrote an entire mirror party of paragons (all characters from previous campaigns, of course), with the premise that only one of each paragon would get to vote to go home. As the rules described, every time the PCs leveled up, all the NPC paragons leveled up as well. What made this funnier was that the players grokked the dynamic around level 4 or so, realizing with a sinking feeling that their main opponents were levelling up too.

In addition to that, I added a PC Master into the fray, inspired in part by one of my players ascending to nearly co-GM heights with one of the character abilities from Apocalypse World. In Burned Over, the Restless playbook can bring new monsters to the table on a regular basis, and this player brought so many insidious and expertly designed encounters that, well, I wanted him to keep doing it. I handed him the d20, and made everything that much more chaotic as a result.

Having both the protagonists and the antagonists continually grow in power made for a more and more dangerous stalemate. What ended up happening though was that the Master cheated so hard that it broke the balance of the game completely. By using a Narrativist cheat to summon a third Master into DIE (there was already an antagonist NPC Master because of course there was), the Master ended up coordinating with the other two Masters and hatching a plan so far outside the rules that the Grandmaster got involved and, in the end, said they could do it, but only if they were permanently forked to a homebrew world that took the shape of a d12. A full circle of paragons who wanted to stay went to the fork, a full circle of paragons who wanted to go said ‘The Game is Over’, and the PCs found themselves back at the back table of a Florida Waffle House, but with their one friend who was Master gone.

In a way, I think this game may be the apex of a number of high-concept games I ran between college and now, ranging from free-wheeling GURPS settings to identity-questioning narratives in both Eclipse Phase and The Veil and finally running a Magical University in Burning Wheel just to say how many mechanics it truly takes to give yourself an aneurysm. Though the DIE RPG is hardly the most mechanically intensive game I’ve ever run (far from it), the high concept and writing of the campaign mode just invite opportunities for joyous meta nonsense. The characters met their players at one point in this campaign, which may sound insane but the DIE RPG is the only game I’ve read reminding you that you should judge the actions of your PC Master’s player across whatever past campaigns they’ve been in. The DIE RPG and a metatextual Nexus campaign are a match made in heaven.

They’re also exhausting! I’m taking a break from GMing, not only because multiple people in my group have been waiting their turn (I am very blessed to have a GMful gaming group), but also because I need to sit and think about what I’ve done. There was a certain lack of patience in this game, an element shared across a number of games I’ve run where I’m not very good at letting something sit, allowing something to take a good long time and develop. I think one of the reasons I’m so interested in hypothetical simulationist play and the OSR and all this prepping is because there’s a belief in my head that if I write more, if I take longer to prep an area or an encounter, or a character, my players will take more time with it. That’s not really how it works, of course; the space you create in a gaming session is defined by how you fill it, not how many words you used. If I want to slow things down and create a world that my players sit with, I need to work more at not pulling them through it.

Now, the DIE RPG is meant to have a finite number of emotional conflicts, and ultimately there’s a reason that the baseline form of the game lasts about 12-15 hours of play. As much as I created more and there was more to do, it felt unstable the longer I kept running. Emotions ran higher and higher, and eventually there was nowhere to go other than exile or death. That is part and parcel of this game. Similarly, I absolutely set up the Apocalypse World segment of the campaign so that the Gamechanger (a mechanic in Burned Over) was going to be the characters getting sucked into DIE. The game absolutely could have gone longer, and I had a plan that would have been executed if no one had ever pushed the big red button. That said, I know my players, and the entire session that went by between the big red button being revealed and it being pushed was slightly more than I expected.

All this is to say that while yes, I want my next game to slow down a bit, not to run off the treadmill so quickly, this one ran at a pace that matched the system, the plot, and the players. I regret nothing. But in regretting nothing, and in seeing how long I was able to keep this up, I do want a change. One of the things that’s really powerful about a more rules-intensive system is that you have rules for many more things, and you can make many more things matter. I want to see if I can take some lessons I’ve learned from other gaming experiences, whether that’s character motivations from Burning Wheel, resource management from Twilight:2000, or emotional characterization from the DIE RPG. I want my next game to see characters who are built into interesting, complicated beings that I didn’t expect; I want to see a map drawn before me that feels lived in, feels like it could be real. I’m still figuring out which tools to use to make this happen, but I’m feeling good about it. If there’s one thing that playing a campaign over two completely different rulesets has taught me, it’s that there’s a lot of gems out in the TTRPG world. They just aren’t going to be bound into a single ruleset.