Finding My Path When the Campaign Ends

The end of a campaign doesn’t happen everyday. There is a particular euphoria one experiences when you and your players have negotiated the conclusion of an excellent story. Its even more rare when one gets to nail the landing on two campaigns in the same week. That wasn’t planned by any means. It just worked out that way. Both my Abomination Vaults game with one group on Tuesday evenings and my Palladium Rifts game with another group on Saturdays concluded this week.

I am in my happy place. I love running games and telling stories with my friends and family. It is one of my greatest passions in life. That said, running games can be stressful and I feel like a great weight has been lifted from my shoulders. I plan to enjoy this… But not for too long.

My Saturday group currently consists of my son and his friends. They’re all adults and they have been gaming together for a long time. Oddly enough, I only started GMing for them recently like this. No particular reason for that, it just worked out that way. Several of them also GM which is a pretty rare thing in a group. One of them is running Pathfinder 2E’s Sky King’s Tomb for us and will be running Lancer for us soon as well.

I asked my son what the group might want to play next and he told me they were already picking the games I was going to run next for them. They just hadn’t told me yet. I laughed. That is not a bad problem to have. One of them did ask me to run Cyberpunk Red for his birthday. That is coming up next. It will be a short run, maybe a session or two. And then they want to play Agents of Edgewatch (Pathfinder 2E) which I am more than happy to do.

On the other side, I am prepping for Exalted Essence. Exalted has been on my radar since the first edition came out in 2001. At one point, I owned every book for first and second edition, but the game never happened. Reasons. It was a bummer. I got hopeful when the third edition came out but it was too crunchy even for me. I eventually sold most of the books off. I just didn’t think it was going to happen and that was a lot of space on my shelves. Then Onyx Path published Exalted Essence, a rules-light/condensed version of the third edition. The flames of hope were lit again! Its time to make it happen.

One of my players offered to run a short game while I take a break. My knee jerk reaction was, “Who needs a break?” Don’t get me wrong. I appreciate the offer and I do love getting the chance to climb out from behind the screen. I’m absolutely going to take him up on the offer. I think he’s going to run Old Gods of Appalachia which will be pretty awesome. I’ve wanted to play that game since its release.

I also have to be mindful “GM Burnout” is a real thing. I have experienced that in the past and I had to make some serious changes to make sure I could avoid that condition. How did I do that? Well, that’s better saved for another day, another blog. Maybe I’ll write that one sometime.

In the meantime, my collection of campaign notes in Notion continue to grow. I have some prep to work on. Don’t worry, this is how I relax. There are thousands of stories to tell and they won’t tell themselves.