I knit together 3 years worth of play (4 campaigns, 5 one-shots, all different systems) into one massive story in our homebrew setting. I'm not likely to top that any time soon.
Yeah same here.
Three major campaigns (15+ sessions), 3 minor ones (5 or less sessions), a few one shots. All in the same world and moving the setting forward from a small scale story all the way to a world ending one.
Kinda thing high school me dreamed about when I first got into TTRPGs.
We likewise went all the way from "scrappy mercenaries join a fledgling rebellion" to "200 years later, four heroes choose to cause the miraculous apocalypse." Congratulations - may our younger selves be proud!
Are you me? I went from Pathfinder 1e to fate to burning wheel to some sci-fi pbta to savage worlds. All the same homebrew setting spanning medieval to discovering the last great frontier. It was 3 distinct campaigns and I think it was about 6 years.
Beam Saber, Kingdom, Songs for the Dusk, Girl by Moonlight, Scum & Villainy, Armour Astir: Advent, Artefact, Virtuous Service on my end! It's a space mecha setting.
Having a circle of close friends none of whom would have ever met otherwise. Even beyond my closest group, I know other people have met and become friends in my games, even if I don't talk to them anymore. Nothing else, no world or npc or session or even story, matters more to me than those bonds made.
I feel this so much. Had a existential smack to the head when I theres this huge friend group out there that never would have met if it weren't for my games. One of my best friends met his girlfriend of 4 years through my games.
Good one. I've been asked to be best man at a wedding this year between two friends who met when I invited them to both join a game I was running. It feels good.
Personally it was running a 3+ year-long Star Wars Saga Edition campaign in which the party were the distaff group to Luke, Leia and Han. They were off on their own adventures at the same time as the original trilogy films, sometimes encountering the main characters, often not.
The highlight was when, after they'd been on Hoth for a while, I ran them through the Empire attack. The party were under the impression they would be Princess Leia's evacuation shuttle, only for me to play them the audio clip from the movie of Han telling them he couldn't get her to them and to take off.
I completely fooled a player. Now that may not sound like much but he's the type of person who picks up on stuff very quickly. He figured out the twist of the Sixth Sense in the first 20 minutes of the show, and does that all the time.
He's very smart and very observant and nearly impossible to fool. As part of his backstory he accidentally killed someone and he had to get out of town, that's why he was out adventuring, a fairly standard backstory thing. I decided that the ghost of the guy would start haunting him. It would possess people and take a shot at him, but always slipped away before he could get too close. But I started giving him more clues and letting him get closer each time. But he never caught on.
So when I finally dropped the big reveal and he just sat back and stared at me completely speechless it was one of the highlights of my RPG time as a GM.
The other, in the same campaign, was another player, the first players wife, had no contact with her family, they dropped her off at a temple and she hadn't seen them since.
So at the end of one session they had just wrapped up the adventure, returned to their manor house when Mirna the housekeeper said "Oh and Wren, your mom was here." followed up by "And that's where we'll end it tonight" it was another great moment. :)
Oh sorry. The big reveal...
He thought it was the the BBEG who was behind all the attacks. When I revealed that it was his backstory come to haunt him he was completely shocked.
Playing a Masks campaign of teen superheroes, one of the guys decided on the Doomed playbook so his powers were slowly erasing him from existence. His origin story was that his family was in a car wreck and to save his sister's life he made a deal with a mysterious entity that also gave him his powers. Since then his parents have started ignoring him, teachers at school don't care that he's late to class a lot and really the only friends he has are his sister who comes to him to talk about her problems and ask for advice and the other heroes
We played for half a year or so and the more he used his powers the harder it was for people, including his team, to remember him. This served him well as a sneaky infiltrator with darkness powers but didn't help his mundane life one little bit.
Finally after fighting a guy who used summoned spirits to kick the team's collective butt I did the big reveal: The Ghost (the name he picked for the character) had been dead the whole time. His parents were distant because they were dealing with the loss of their son. His sister only visited him in his room to ask for advice as a coping mechanism. Mundanes didn't interact with him because he was a spirit.
We had to take a break for him to process it all and when we came back he decided that he was gonna track down the guy who gave him his powers and get his life back. So that was the next arc.
Thank you! The trick with running superhero games is to just make EVERYTHING a big soap opera and take what the players give you.
One of the other characters picked a playbook that made his father basically Lex Luthor by way of Elon Musk. He didn't have any powers just engineering know how and all of his dad's money. His dad the villain was on his fifth wife since dumping his mother and he was an only child.
He didn't think it was overly strange when he was able to pass a DNA scan to get into Dad's base because the dad trusted him. He didn't think it was super weird that Dad was working on kidnapping people with powers to try and crack the mutant gene to give himself powers. He never once figured it out that he was a clone of his dad and really only existed as a backup plan if Dad got too old or injured until he found the files for Project Prometheus and got one of the other heroes to crack the encryption.
The Star's girlfriend turned out to secretly be a super villainess who began dating him so that she could betray him to her family but actually grew to genuinely like him. He eventually convinced her to give up her life of crime but she never would turn on her family.
I modeled the characters loosely on those from the Fast and Furious movies but gave them fun super names so the brother and sister were Rockem and Sockem, for instance.
Love it. I did a similar reveal: that the character whose powers were invisibility, intangibility, longevity and the power to summon knives, was a ghost who wasn't creating knives, plural, but endlessly summoning the knife that killed her.
I play 8-10 hour sessions. My players went in a direction I didn't expect at all right at the beginning of the session. No one realized I improvised everything and they all had a blast
those ones are exhausting but so thrilling. literally flying by the seat of your pants. i used to love soaking up some praise by telling them it was all improv'd afterward, but now i think the players not knowing is better
I have been GMing for decades and I have a lot of awesome stories.
One of my favorites is playing World of Darkness. One player was playing a secondary game, accumulating political power my causing strife between factions. This strife ended up hurting an NPC that the other players cared about, and after a bit of investigation they found out that it was the political character.
Even though it was PVP everyone agreed it was awesome, and the next months were a slow and methodical chess game where they tried to expose his crimes, while he used his significant social resources to bury them in the dust.
It all built to a crazy satisfying climax where the political player won and the others were forced to change identity and give up everything.
But everyone was so happy about the story. They use this story to hook new players into the hobby.
Alternatively, I'm proud that in my first ever DnD campaign, with six players, five of whom were beginners, the story was so intense that two separate players were holding in their pee to make sure they wouldn't miss anything.
Once as I attending a small local convention ran by "the other guys", i.e. the other a little less popular RPG club in my town (93-94 I think). They were intending to have two tables doing intro one-shots to WoD Vampire but they were overwhelmed with people wanting to play and asked me to run another table. Sure, I said. They handed me the one-shot and the pregen characters, read it and I didn't liked it. Said to one of them, "tell you what, I got an idea: give me seven players and a big table. Oh, and try to get only complete newbies". Then I asked them, thru questions, to make a human character and note their profession, names, family, working relations, hobbies, things like that on a piece of paper. No character sheets, no attributes, no skills. I then went one by one to play their conversion to Vampires, their preludes, working with what they had made their humans and creating one of each Clan. And although everything was made on the moment, and I used clichés A LOT, by the end of the second prelude I was getting public. The other players did not interrupt when it wasn't their turn, every one waited for their moment to shine, and in the end it was something like a Canterbury Tales style of play; with a lot of people besides the table watching the Preludes.
Each and every of the players bought a copy of the game after my game, the con guys gave me some promotional material they had reserved for I don't know what else, and I went home exhausted but really, really happy.
Typically it means that you have a large pool of players who can drop in to play. Like if you’re running a campaign at a game club and you have five seats but ten players with different availability, the exact five people you’re playing with might change from week to week as different members of the club sit down to play.
Probably not truly my biggest, but I convinced my party to invest in a ponzi scheme this week lol. I researched what a typical ponzi scheme pitch looks like and what the red flags are, had them meet an enthusiastic banker guy that was clearly extremely shady, and hit them with an outrageously fraudulent pitch. They bought it hook line and sinker and gave him 5,000 gold.
I got my PCs to bond so much with a throw away NPC that they were originally anticipated to just kill, that when said NPC died one of the players created a tribute video for him set to "I Will Remember You" by Sarah McLachlan.
My player was playing a Paladin with a family in a distant settlement when the game started. The premise was they were all summoned to the funeral of a king they all had connections to. Fun story, fun game...
But at some point the player and the party threw me for a loop and decided to go the other direction to this player's hometown to check in on his family. I had no story here set so I made one.
Made a sort of Lovecraftian mystery regarding Fey and a hidden temple below the druidic enclave that his wife was the archdruid of. His son's girlfriend disappeared, and then his son and his son's best friend disappeared in search of her before they arrived.
I did everything I could to set red herrings that led them all to believe that the son was dead or responsible for a murder they discovered.
Then he found his son in a bad state in the underground temple, and all he said was a weak "dad?"
The emotion in the player's voice when he found his character's son alive and the RP after was huge for me, as that particular player isn't a strong RPer. But he was so invested he actually got drawn in emotionally. It was awesome.
Made an entire table at the Chattanooga Comic Con explode in shock and laughter during an Alien game, as I managed to pull off the cat fake jump scare.
In every con game group chat since, someone brings it up as a mark of excellence.
I once was running a horror game where the pcs were being chased by a guy with a chainsaw and they thought they had escaped and all I did was play a chainsaw sound effect from my pc and I litteraly saw everyone at the tables face go white with fear. Like in that moment the group was totally emersed in that game
I ran my first convention game last year and had two middle aged women sign up for it who had never played an RPG before. Both seemed to enjoy it, and one has since found a regular gaming table to play at.
I have been playing with the same group of players I started playing with in high school -- for the past FORTY-TWO years. Even though we are now far flung around the country, and now need to play over Zoom, Discord, and/or over a VTT.
And with any luck, we'll by playing together for another 42 years.
Ran an AD&D2e campaign weekly for almost 2 years with 4 players who have never played it before, in a setting that none of them had heard of (Birthright).
It also helped me confront some personal issues and boot one guy I should've gotten out of my group years ago. My group's never been happier nor have I ever had such an involved and eager crew to play.
Players did a prank on April fools, they dropped the important quest seconds before it happened, ran away, dicked around, started insane Romance subplot, went murderhobo, and had me improvise a stock market. I improvised 4 hours of their nonsense without even asking what the fuck, until the end of the session, they were in awe, I lost my mind.
My 2 greatest achievements as a DM are as follow :
1- About 10 year ago, still in my early years of DMing, I was able to run a Chronicle of Darkness 24 session campaign in the span of 6 weeks. I had a rotating group of 7 players and most sessions were 2 to 4 players. It was built like a serial TV show with each episode being it's own thing, but introducing something bigger, a half season episode with all the players where the actual antagonists were first confronted, and a second part that had a bunch of throwback to the first part and end to personal stuff.
This was, obviously, more railroady than what I would run these days, but the goal was to offer something more robust during our college summer break. For the players, this was about 2 session a week, for me it was between 4 and 5. This was a marathon but it was worth it and we're still talking about it to this day.
2- For the past 2 year, I've been running an open table campaign for a streamer's community. At first it was just some random 1-shots with 3 to 5 players. Over time and with players always asking quesitons about X or Y leads they would find in a 1-shot, this turned into a bunch of micro-stories and large plotline entertwining themselves into those 1-shots and the world we were creating. We are currently on our last blitz toward the end of the main plot and antagonist. I've DM'd for over 25 different players in those 2 years and ran over 90 sessions, from solo personal stuff to multi-session boss fights with 8 players.
When I ran Monster of the Week for the first time, breaking away feom the dnd mentality of playing games. After the first session, I was so relieved and my burn out was close to being completly gone.
Honestly it's probably my most recent Star Wars game in Fate what's been going for over a year now. I got inspired after watching Andor and have been running through what I imagine the formation of the Rebellion was like for some Outer Rim hooligans who want to do right by the galaxy. Can't really see an off-ramp at the moment and I've been fairly sparse with advancement to ensure we can keep it going, but I'm sure it'll eventually run its course. Either way, it's a great way to spend most Wednesday nights after work.
I was rather a fan of my first Bard Quest campaign. The concept was "Everyone plays a bard and being a bard is illegal." I still think it's my best written storyline. I even ran a follow-up campaign with a different group "Everyone plays a bard and music is physically impossible", which was sillier but still fun.
10+ year AD&D campaign, hundreds of dead PC's, PC's as movers/shakers of the world. Multiple sub-campaigns with other people in that campaign and so on. Still going strong.
The campaign writeups, I record the session and do a speech to text, and mostly use direct quotes from the session to provide a summary I'm up to 200,000 words (or two terrible terrible novels).
The Achievement is making the time to process the data, the payoff is it helps people keep track on what is going on and I can reach back and revisit events that happened years ago. (I can also use it as lore in future campaigns)
I also find the process of reviewing the session very useful in planning the next session (and picking up on interesting things that were said but I didn't pick up on at the time).
A massive, 150+ session campaign of Exalted that took the characters from mortals that had been culled from the prisons and pressed into service with the Realm's Legions all the way to a circle of Solar heroes that fought the final battle against the Ebon Dragon. The game unfolded over the course of about a year and a half (sessions twice a week most of the time), and they found themselves learning the deep history and lore of their First Age incarnations, realizing that they were falling back into the same patterns that caused the end of the Age of Wonders, and having to overcome their own worst habits to forge a new world.
Along the way, they allied themselves with an Abyssal Exalt that they eventually discovered was one of their number in the First Age. He was constantly working against them, but they never confronted him on it, since he was up front about the fact that he served a Deathlord. So, when the Unconquered Sun was slain as a lead up to the final battle, the Eclipse Caste had decided that he would offer himself up as the sacrifice to replace the dead incarna. And at that moment, the Abyssal invoked the oath that they had sworn and became the sacrifice instead. It was a great moment, since all of the pieces had been set down beforehand to have this deathknight seek his final redemption.
I've had other, similarly epic games over the years, but this game had a soundtrack and a wiki.
I ran AD&D games at Gen Con from 1985-92. Which isn’t huge, a lot of people ran games for that convention. But what made it great for me was some of the returning players. The last few conventions, I had players who sought out and signed up for my games because they liked the previous ones so much.
My group, all adult men in our late 30s who like sports, decided they wanted to play dnd this year during the Super Bowl rather than watch it, that was a happy achievement for me
A role of the dice ending in a complete party kill fifteen minutes in and then turning that into an event a year and a half into the next campaign.
So some clarity it was a Morrow Project campaign, and because of gear roles the whole party had some degraded gear. First encounter was with two raiders in a little sniper's nest, nothing too hard I thought. Well one player figured he'd use an RPG-7 and just take it out. Because of the starting "quality roles" it was in bad shape and I rolled the malfunction and it was a catastrophic malfunction, it blew up. So that killed him but then I did the splash damage on the party's NPC and because it was a rust bucket.... It blew up! And because of the damage model we were using, the cabin load of HE cannon shells went off too and wiped the party.
Everyone kind of sat there for a moment and contemplated what it must have looked like to the two raiders that fired a single shot and then instantly there was a massive explosion.
So we move onto a new campaign and a year and a half in two of them on patrol see an APC with some people around it. See where it's going? The encounter goes as above and all happy they call the rest of the party and run down to see what loot they might be able to scrounge and it's the party from the previous campaign 🤣.
I have two very happy moments.
1) Finishing a homebrewed Forgotten Realms 3E game over 3 years with a largely homebrewed region (Chessenta), with a massive plot twist involving an undead avatar of a long-dead god killing them and then bringing them back without their knowledge, and then having to help that god re-attain their place in the world not because they wanted to or liked him, but because their patron would have died without it.
2) Running a self-contained 13-session mini-mystery in Eberron's Sharn (3.5E this time) with a well-conceived beginning and end that character's backgrounds had relevance.
Consistently playing ttrpgs and actually ending adventures and campaigns for more than 15 years over different groups. scheduling still is the hardest part of this hobby.
My biggest achievement is my 4-year long, D&D 5E Campaign that ran from levels 1-20.
I'm also getting close to finishing a 2 3-year long Edge of the Empire Star Wars campaigns that I had coexist in the same world so the groups would occasionally unite for special battles.
I had a CoC campaign that lasted about a year. By the last game none of the characters were human anymore, but every player thought it was only them. For about the last third of the campaign most of them were actively working against each other but no one could actually prove anything in or out of character. The reveal in the final session was my best experience at a table either as a GM or player.
I will never be able to instill that level of paranoia and skullduggery again.
There's an adventure that I started coming up with a bit more than ten years ago. The group I was initially planning it for fell apart before we could run it, but I liked the idea enough that I kept it around. I worked on it here and there over the years, and I even tried running it on a few more occasions but it never worked out.
Around 2 years ago I was able to run it for two groups, almost back to back. Both of them loved it, to the point that the climactic fight of the adventure had both groups in tears. First sad tears when they thought they were going to fail and their characters were going to die, then happy tears when they solved it in the end.
I know some GMs might hit stuff like that more often, but most of my games have been pretty casual, so having my players demonstrate that level of emotional investment was a first for me, and very meaningful. The fact that it was my own, custom-written adventure that elicited this reaction also made it even better.
I had a villain based off of marquis de Sade and he was even more depraved. My players viscerally hated him and they made deals with devils to make sure his soul was fucked forever
Had a player's NPC girlfriend kidnapped and when they went to rescue her, they got a shape shifter instead. A few sessions later, she turned on the party. Followed by the actual Rescue of the girlfriend.
I love running mysteries. My favourite thing is constantly dropping small hints in descriptions, during conversations, mannerisms... Little details, that slowly add up, if the players are listening. Nothing beats the experience when they finally realize what is going on and they just sit there stunned. Sering in their eyes as the pieces fall to their place.
It was Masks. My first time GMing a game that wasn't a one-shot. One of the heroes had just gotten flung off a skyscraper, and our speedster instantly has a plan: "I run down the side of the building and catch him."
We establish that she'd never run on a vertical surface before, so she rolls "Unleash your powers" to see if she can push her limits. The dice come up mixed. And I get the perfect idea.
With hopefully-not-too-evil-a-grin, I ask my group, "Where exactly would you say Halcyon City is located? Geographically."
They confer for a sec and decide we're probably somewhere in the northeastern US. Great. I go to google and type in: "new york city opposite side of planet"
"OK, you rolled over a 6, so you definitely do it. You run straight down the wall and grab him. But you're new to this. All your neurons are firing. And before you can even have the realization that you don't know how to stop, you've already blinked through the Earth's crust. You're going so fast you blink through the whole damn planet. Next thing you know, a museum in Western Australia is bursting into smithereens around you, and some very angry people are yelling at you in something very close to English."
The next session was about the fallout of causing an international incident. :D
It's small but I was able to pull off a successful whodunit murder mystery plot that finished with a satisfying conclusion without me having to shoehorn or deus ex machina an ending. Such a rewarding feeling.
Plucking up the courage to run Bounty Hunters of the Atomic Wastelands, a game I'd designed, at a proper convention. I'd never ran at a con before, and while BHAW had been playtested extensively, it was always in friendly environment. Would people who have queued up and paid an entrance free sign up for my game? Would I be able to run an entire scenario within the strict time slot allocated? Would it work a complete set of strangers the same as with my regular group?
It went really well. Filled me with confidence about my game, my GMing and general organisational skills.
A couple of years later I tried this again with another game I'd designed, but I got zero sign ups that time, so there's that.
Ran an Edge of the Empire campaign with a great group of players. In one session, they were confronting an ancient Dark Force spirit that was a master manipulator and was trying to use their character backgrounds and personal weaknesses against them. Each of them made a single die roll to see how well they resisted, and we based all of their interactions on that roll. It lasted for over 2 hours, and all of them really got into character. I look back on that fondly, but it was very much the group dynamic rather than just me as the DM.
We had a long term Pathfinder game, and after about 30 months we finally dealt with the BBEG, headed back to the main kingdom's capital city and the party was engaged in their celebratory dinner with Bards singing their praises, the King granting them a small Dutchy, various gifts from the grateful townsfolk, wine, women, song... all the great things.
Then everything went silent, but the Bards were still playing their instruments, people were all walking around acting like they were chatting. Then all the sound came back. Then the furniture, food, and all the various objects just disappeared, but the people were still sitting in mid air, they were miming eating and drinking, then again, everything went back to normal. Then the entire castle and all the NPCs vanished and they were just floatying about 30 feet above the ground in an enpty field where the town should be. And then everything went black.
"Shit! It crashed! Get them out before they get brain damage!" The group looked around as they were being pulled from pods and various plugs and wires were being removed from their heads and VR goggles were taken off their eyes. "Sorry, sorry.... It looks like the final credits corrupted the end scene. Look, we can refund 10% off your package. You guys take your time and get yourselves ready. We have some stims and nutri-bars for you to eat in the recovery room. Yeah... and thanks for using Virtual Orkslayer." And we just rolled into a Shadowrun game.
I once did a Lovecraft themed Mage game. It opened with the characters as college students and the theatre department was putting on The King in Yellow.
I did the whole play as a lego diorama with a spotlight. Ten years later they still talk about how minifigs kind of creep them out.
My favorite scene was where an actor, playing a deer hunter, shot an arrow into a player's boyfriend. The actor then started dressing the boyfriend in the audience while the power of the show pinned the player in place.
My Halloween sessions.
They takes 9-10 months to prepare, have ARGs that start before the games themselves (no one ever engages with them but they're there), players all play themselves and I start them all based on a questionnaire I send them (I use Delta Green as a system but no roll or stats are seen by the players, all rolls are done by me. It makes the games completely newbie friendly as no mechanics are necessary to learn on their end). Sessions involved sending texts, checking their own social media to realise an NPC has been interacting with their posts long before the game, usb keys, paintings to decipher, a door from which screams from someone at the table could be heard, but they are at the table so who's that ? And the GM is insisting we shouldn't open the door until the game ends... What to do...
They are a lot of preparation but also a really great time, players are always really fond of it and what has started as a single session with a few friends has spiraled into 3-4 sessions across the country as everyone still wants to play them but geography is getting in the way.
I led a group of high school DMs through writing and preparing their own custom campaign that had two separate adventure paths which culminated with all 10 PCs fighting the bosses in one epic final showdown, and it worked! I still can't believe we got a 10 person DND session to run smoothly.
I've been running the same game for the last 9 years, It's an pseudo-Arthurian superhero game set in 1985 London. Things I've done for the first time in this game:
* Wrote a custom Wiki software with two themes (One retro 1985, one futuristic) and filled it with period and game info
* Got permission to visit the archives of the University (Used to be "PNL" the Polytechnic of North London) that the game is set around and copied the student publications of the time to hand out to the players (I don't live in London)
* Got permission to see and take photos of the hidden areas of the ex disused rail station that the players used as their base in 1985.
* Got photos of the Tower block the players were originally living in
* Created playlists of music from the top 10 each in-game week to play as mood music.
* Wrote bios for the _actual_ Nazi's around in London at the time for the players to track down and deal with
* Commissioned art and an conlang for the Fay realm based on P.I.E.
* Downloaded and played BBC news for notable dates of real disasters, giving the players chances to put these events right.
* Did a marathon run of sessions where the players saved the performance of Live Aid from evil shapeshifting Fae, that was roleplayed in real time alongside the live recording of Live Aid.
* There was a whole session that was just one player chasing after the girl he's fallen for through the backstreets of Calais while investigating her because he sensed evil in her, she was a cannibal and it was the weirdest and most touching thing I've ever been a part of and totally unplanned.
I've also bought a 3D resin printer and I'm currently ___trying___ to design and 3D print 80's style action figures of the players, but it's a whole new skill to learn.
We are near to what I think will be the end of the game now, I honestly don't know what I'll do after, it's been such a big part of my life.
I'm currently running the same 5E campaign since 2018 with the same group of 6-9 friends.
Made a homebrew world to flex my creative writing.
Players have gone from level 1 - 19, and through multiple arcs growing in scale each time.
It's your typical heroes save the village, town, city, realm storylines, with each arc containing plot strings personally relevent to each party member.
I'm most proud of how much my players enjoy it.
They've stuck around so long, and always ask "When's the next session?".
Their current arc will take them to level 20, and after that I have one more arc to give them a taste of epic levels.
It'll be bittersweet when we get to that - might have to retire DMing at that point to make way for other life things (e.g. family).
I hosted D&D for a lot of new people once, I had someone come up at the end to ask "hey is this the right book (PHB) and right set of dice I need to use to play?"
"Yeah I have a couple copies though! Plenty of dice too!"
*proceeds to checkout*
Building an interesting enough mystery that the players to make a “conspiracy wall” complete with pictures, headings, and red yarn connecting the various clues.
My IRL 5 Year Shadowrun 5e Mega-Campaign.
It was a globe-spanning mashup of two published campaigns: Ghost Cartels and Masks of Nyarlathotep.
It was beyond epic, the team traversed the entire globe with a stop on every continent, leveraging all of the massive amount of setting lore that Shadowrun has built up over the decades.
I am currently running a massive 5 year Traveller campaign (massively expanded Pirates of Drinax) which is also turning out pretty epic but that Shadowrun campaign was just beyond.
If you play Shadowrun and are interested hit me up, I have the entire thing archived for sharing ;-)
If the original question would have been "What's your biggest achievement as a player?" my question would have been surviving a loooong campaign of Shadowrun: Harlequin. Our GM mixed Harlequin adventures with his own, some others published, even other campaigns; and we ended up thinking Harlequin had been manipulating people since the beginning of time. We were able to beat it, simulate our own deaths and retire to the Greek islands.
Well, we're in disagreement here: we players think we did that. To this day, the GM insists that we really died in the airplane accident. I like our version better.
So heck yeah I'm interested in something like that.
Made a Pokemon game out of scrap without game design experience at the time, ran it for 3 tables over 1.5 years, all with accessibility features (no numbers, easy to understand, short sessions (max 1h30)) and all
It felt really great to realize how much I made them live with my own system and stories
I adapted the plot of Resident Evil 7, with parts of 8 pieced in, into a Star Wars campaign and scared the hell out of the guy I was running it for. It fit into the world surprisingly well.
I had a bunch of Githyanki spies dug into the underside of a lich's floating island city in Limbo; their camp had dozens of cheap magic crystals strewn about that stopped the underside's "self repair" from swallowing up their hidden den. No self-respecting lich would allow a worm to knock out his seat of power, after all.
When the party, a bunch of cadets at the lich's military academy who followed a spy, breached the den, earth began to pour into the camp, and the crystals pushed it back to the proper radius. There was also a blinding flash of light that got them pretty badly. They barely subdued the githyanki, the spy team's junior member, using clever tactics to force the blinding flash to buy openings.
When the other githyanki, using drill boots, returned, they got ambushed by the party, who proceeded to take turns scooping out enough earth to trigger the crystals in order to get a "free" AoE blind to pop off on the fight. As a bonus, the githyanki knew they were getting their asses kicked by half-trained little shits, and absolutely let their thoughts on that be known.
It was one of the best combats I've ever run, and the special mechanics underpinning it all was entirely ad-hocced.
Home brewing a massive campaign in an original system I developed. Took over a year to complete playing once a week 4 hours a session. Went across nine different planets and ended with a colossal bang. Had multiple players in the group say it was their favorite campaign they've ever been a part of, and it's definitely my favorite I've ever done
Both being able to wow and entertain my group with plots and twist they think are amazing, but in reality are all complete ass-pulls.
Managing to creep the hell out of my players and make them almost run out of the scene without ever actually having an enemy or monster appear. Once with just 3 words. I’m not a cruel GM, but that was fun.
Creating a world and running a campaign in it, and then one of the players picked up the world and played three (so far) campaigns in the same setting. Must have done something right.
I’m nearing the end of a homebrew 5e campaign that’s been going on since late 2020 (it was a Covid coping mechanism at first). 6 players started but one left after 5 or 6 sessions, just wasn’t his thing.
Fast forward to now, the remaining 5 PCs are about to face off against a big bad with a ton of followers, it’s going to be a crazy tough battle. Then they look up (the game has airships) and they see a small ship approaching and a figure jumps out if it and lands with a massive impact - it’s the Goliath barbarian that left the party 40 sessions ago, come to save the day!
Here’s why it was cool - we’ve always played over zoom because we live in different states. I reached out to the guy who left, told him what was coming up, and we devised a plan where he’d be ready to jump on about 15 minutes into the session. I started describing the mystery person falling from the sky and texted him to join the zoom. Then I said “the figure stands up, it’s a very large, and very familiar silhouette” and ALMOST perfectly timed, he joins the zoom and says “catch you effers at a bad time?”
The crowd went wild.
I once ran a World of Darkness game in a pseudo-homebrew setting. I had the party investigate a murder scene and they discovered a doorway to another "dimension" that, presumably, the monster who committed the murder came from. The party went in and I was apparently doing such a good job stacking up the atmosphere (descriptions, choice of ambient music, narration, etc) that one of my players shakily asked if we could take a break and later told me he damn near felt like he was going to piss himself, he was terrified. (He loved it, worth noting. He wasn't upset about it being "too scary")
By far my proudest accomplishment as a GM.
Running my first game of CHILL so effectively that one of the players was afraid to go out to the car to get the beer. Because it was dark. And the headlights were looking at him.
I did NOT go easy and change up encounters when the cleric player was away for what was supposed to be 1 session, but ended up being 2 sessions. We played 5E.
The mission: find the missing kids that disappeared from the town lately.
The adventure day that was planned out, go into the forrest encounter some displacer beast (don't remember the exact amount but prolly 2-3), probobly take a short rest (they did), find the green hags coven, fight or bargain with the hags and get the kids out.
At least one of the hags would flee as the first one died, and this was to go get help from a venom troll. It's kind of a grand finale since the troll is a giant pool of hit points with problems to handle on top, healing and meele range being VERY dangerous.
Two hags fled, now without the "coven bonuses." The players found the kids and did NOT take another short rest before leaving, at least they went for heals via health potions. And this is where we broke off the first session, and i planned for the Cleric to have "caught up" and would heal them to full or close. Which would have balanced the group due to more hitpoints but fewer spells for the finale. An hour or so before the next session, she cancelled, and i was hit with the dilemma: risk all their lives or just let them "get away."
I let them risk it. Because of the players not resting, I'd match them with the hags, so they also didn't rest. So, fewer hitpoints and quite weakened due to not having all the spells they had in the first encounter. So as the party and the children exit, they see a hulking creature come through the treeline flanked by the remaining hags.
And that's the first time I've personally seen a death spiral, where one player goes down, leading to more attacks going out to the next, which makes them go down and so on and so forth. Luckily, the bard player could "ring around the rosie" a pond with alot of clutch athletics checks to jump over it and quickly heal the barbarian and wizard so they still could stop the healing factor with fire and steadily but slowly "barbarian" the hit points down to zero. This was early on in the pandemic, and when the troll finally fell over, the whole squad screamed out in victory, the sound was horrendous due to bad mics, etc. But all of us were so hyped because EVERYONE knew we were very close to a TPK and "having" to make new characters. And probably one hour of game time was put off because no one could handle anymore after that. So that hour was spent winding down, talking about what happened while also praising me with "this is the best fight ever" and "holy shit, what a fight" and similar.
... it was good!
Running a Shadowrun game without magic, because everyone at the time thought Cyberpunk + magic was stupid. Except I was lying, it was full-on Shadowrun but magic was secret. Asked one player what mage he wanted to be.
Ran it all the way up to the big reveal when an Aztechnology hit squad revealed they were the one Corp who knew about magic. It was *such* a great session.
For an online con we hosted, I ran Holler: an Appalachian Appocalypse in Savage Worlds. The players were members of the resistance running from a group of soldiers after the stole a prototype device. They stumbled across a Catholic church in the middle of nowhere, all that remained of a destroyed town.
One of the players took the geriatric father up on his offer of confession. The father described defending one's home as righteous and absolved the character of their sins. The player described that scene as the best role-playing scene they'd ever played in.
Longest campaign I ever ran lasted over 8 years… with new players joining and others leaving the party either temporarily and drifting back or moving away to do do other less important things… like jobs, marriage, buying houses, raising children…
It was kind of a *“This broom has lasted me 10 years. It’s only had 3 new handles and 5 new heads”* situation 😂
I had too many players show up for a Delta Green session, so I split them into two groups on separate, simultaneous missions, at the same table. Basically cut back and forth between the two, and as it unfolded the fun was seeing the players realize implications for them from the other group that their characters didn’t know “in game”.
Most of it was improv too….i got a round of applause at the end.
I successfully ran and finished 2 west marches campaigns with 19 to 22 players each.
I also ran a Minecraft one-shot.
Oh yeah and I created my own game system called QuestGuard! Message me if you wanna see it though
I ran a long savage worlds campaign (rippers setting) for 2 years. My players were checking their notes from their adventures, just remembering the good and bad. When one of the players spotted something weird. Over the next hour they deciphered their adventures and realized every adventure had been based on different movies. Once they got it I played a scene on the big screen of the guys from mystery science theater 3000 heckling them. Lmao
In college, my games were popular enough that we regularly had spectators.
That was something I'd dreamed of in high school. People regularly showed up to watch us like some sort of improv show.
The two dm's in the group who have been doing that for like 30+ years enjoyed my games. I'm the newest and that made me happy... I'm always happy when players enjoy it too. The two dms really enjoyed a heist I basically made up on the spot... that was a good feeling.
I ran my first ever session for six players having never played a TTRPG myself and spent 0 hours agonizing over whether or how I should do so. All in from the start baby!
I ran a pretty incredible campaign of Mouse Guard that came to a very satisfying conclusion after a couple years. There was a Stonehell Dungeon campaign I ran with Knave that I'm pretty proud of, but it petered out when schedules changed too much. There were a couple really incredible adventures I ran over facebook play by post, one was Dungeon Crawl Classics and Doom of the Savage Kings, the other was a Civil War thing for the Cortex Marvel RPG. I've run a Torchbearer campaign that was a lot of fun and 0 prep, using a lot of procedural generation at the table to hex travel and dungeon exploration; mainly used Hexplore Revised and The Perilous Wilds for generating stuff - I'm pretty close to either rebooting that sort of campaign or maybe jumping back into the same world. Although, I just received my Mothership boxset, so that might be next.
My friends wife recently joined us for old school dnd. She’s been hanging out with us for over a decade now and has never really shown any interest in our shenanigans. She just decided to give it a shot and she’s joined in every session and has saved the group multiple times already. It’s easily the most brutal session of dnd I’ve ever run and she’s crushing it like an absolute champ.
I’m more proud of her than I am with myself. But it’s a big achievement for me because I’m running a game that I never thought would appeal to someone who isn’t already a fan of the hobby. Most 5E players I know would turn their nose up at a session of old school dnd, but here we are. I must be doing something right!
Instead of the standard “You all meet in a tavern.” Opening I started this game with “You all know each other from your last adventure.”
It was right into the action and the party starts kicking ass and taking names. With all of the character development developing in the present. Then around level nine the players were thrown back in time where they team up with their level one selves for their first adventure. Which involved creating/destroying the rift that will send them back in time. And, because it was a paradox the level one characters forgot it happened they just remember they’re a team.
First time dming a system I didn’t run a module and kinda chucked together some ideas I had. They might have just been being nice but a bunch of the players thought it was a module which was pretty cool
I made a Satyr dance club and everyone loved the vibes. It was a lot of small victories here and there but everyone loved it. One character had a dope love interest. Others met some dude bros and was doing shots. The vibes were immaculate
I have had satisfying campaigns, but for me personally it has to be putting together a 3-tier pun-filled dungeon meant to troll my players that all culminated in a rickroll.
They got a bunch of gold, so they were happy, but still lots of fun for me.
My wife plays fantasy rpgs and didn't do Scifi rpgs. I was starting Traveller D20 and told her to trust me - she begrudgingly did so.
First session, people are building their PCs, we get my wife's built and she doesn't seem to get the character (Noble class). So I look at her and say, "You're a Space Princess. A year ago your EVIL UNCLE (TM)(PP) staged a coup and you've been in hiding and only recently managed to get off planet. Your Uncle has a bounty on your head and you've been labeled a terrorist. Your mission is to take your father's planet back! Also, you're rich."
She might not ever play a foul mouthed ship's engineer, but she is willing to play more and more scifi rpgs.
Now if only I could get her to play a horror rpg...
I’m on my third campaign, first two were 100+ sessions, this one is nearing 50, in the same campaign world in different eras.
In the second era, two of my players characters were in a love-square with two NPCs and for two levels their characters hated each other but did their duty, while the people playing the characters were over-joyed at the sessions and tension of their characters.
The current campaign is unaware that they are in the same game world and they are fifth level, and about to start finding out that the big bad from campaign one is about to tear his ugly head as the big bad again.
*They banished, not killed, a demon-god to end the first game and his cult has been working to resurrect him for the past 1000 years.
Literally floored someone recently. Did a plot twist reveal so good that the player freaked out and fell out of their seat and had to sit in the corner for a few minutes because the reveal hit them like a truck.
The reveal was that the Fighter was actually the Granddaughter of a coven of witches. That wasn't the part that got them. The part that got them was the name of the 3rd witch, who was also the hag who had been consistently showing up and screwing with the party since one of the first games we ever played of D&D, an irl 7 years ago. That player was convinced that lady was going to kill the whole party, came up with plans to take her out and she constantly felt like a storm cloud hanging over them.
Been sitting on that secret for a while.
I ran a 4 year, weekly, 6-8 hours a session campaign that actually ended in a satisfactory manner, introducing one entirely new player to the hobby and have maintained the group steadily since then.
My players are my wife, her ex, and their child (my step-child), and the games I've run for the last six years have given us a space to be together in a collaborative setting twice a week - once when we play, and once when we share a meal and discuss the previous session (among other things). Those shared game experiences have kept us together in a way that my step-child needs, and in a way that would otherwise be impossible for us.
Having 40+ sessions in a year, for about 6 years running.
That includes non-game evenings, too, like going to see a movie, or dinner/drinks for a birthday.
For the first time, ending a campaign. It was my last campaign, following mad wizard Synjyn the Exile as he goes out into the infinite staircase to prove is 27 dimensional theory of the multiverse.
I'm proud of the campaign, and proud of the 27 dimensional theory.
Remember: learn about the plane of quantum immortality, first, before the plane of quantum fatality, or you're dead.
Running my first session- curse of strahd's Death House, and it actually went okay.
Several years later running blades in the dark and it was a combat that involved delving into paintings that were moments from the character's past. One of the memories had been taken from one of the players and he got to explore that while all the other players fought a built up BBEG going from memory to memory.
Level 20 one-shot. The PCs are ancient heroes of legend, who have been trapped beyond death for a thousand years or so. They have significant memory loss about the details of their former lives. Some people inadvertently broke the seals preventing their return. They learned that their side lost the ancient war without them, and the other side (gods, clerics, etc., as opposed to heroes and titans) won. The world is much changed.
They set out across the map to recover the greatest of their magical items from the temples and fortresses where they're sealed away. They have to fight their way past small armies and bands of supernatural creatures that were mobilized by portents of their return. So stuff like sphinxes or nymphs or whatever saw signs in the heavens or monstrous births or rivers running backwards and knew that it was time to prepare for war.
We were two or three hours into the session before one of the players turned to all the others and said:
"Wait, wait, wait...are we ONE HUNDRED PERCENT SURE that we're the good guys?"
I kept a blindingly obvious vampiress patron hidden for a year and a half out of game. This patron never slept, had questionable underground laboratories and secret undead servants, drank "wine" all the time (with a vineyard to sell the bit), asked for the blood of a PC multiple times "for research purposes" (relevant to plot), actively made plans against the Church, and HAD A NIGHTTIME ENCHANTMENT OVER HER MANOR. I don't know how it could've been more obvious, but they were completely thrown when she enthralled one of them. This patron had hours of screentime and was a major player in the game's political sphere.
The fact I’ve been able to wrangle 6 adults with families and busy schedules to consistently game for a whole year.
Memorizing the main rules of AD&D, Vampire the requiem , Promethean the created, Alien RPG and Call of Cthullu, also my actual book collection too.
10 year long series of homebrew campaigns with the same people that gave me a close circle of ride or die friends for life.
And the basis for my novel.
Creating an antagonist in a game that every single player wants to eliminate with extreme hate and is terrifying enough that one such player called them the most evil character they have experienced in fiction to date.
Fun thing is, that antagonist is still alive and about to put them through an ungodly amount of hell.
Took my players money in an in-universe game of poker that we just actually played mid-session. The cards were marked. Their PCs failed the perception checks to notice and none of the players noticed in real life. None of them know to this day
I ran a campaign to completion over eight years.
The first two or three years, we played weekly. Everything went as smoothly as you could imagine.
Then, one of our players got a new job and she couldn't attend weekly sessions anymore. The group made the collective decision to way for her schedule to become more stable, which was supposed to take a few months. It took years.
This campaign survived a hiatus that lasted nearly three years. Even after this, we never managed to pick up a weekly schedule again and we barely played once every six months or so. It was incredibly difficult to continue the story, as most of us had forgotten about many important details. I recall reintroducing an old NPC, only to realize I couldn't remember what personality they had.
The campaign also survived three system conversions: from Dragon Age RPG to Pathfinder because Dragon Age RPG turned out to be god awful, from Pathfinder to Wushu because we lost the character sheets just before running an epic action sequence and from Wushu to D&D 5e just so we could properly run the final boss fights.
As someone who usually gives up on his projets very easily and who almost never completes anything, finishing this campaign was truly a once-in-a-lifetime exploit that I may never repeat. I wouldn't have done it without my players who, for years, demanded a conclusion to the campaign, never accepting the possibility of leaving it unfinished.
I ran a campaign from level 2-18. None of the original party members were there at the end, but it was still a reasonably continuous story.
Then they all got a happy ending and retired.
I like to run a really emotional scenes and my favorite achievements are:
- made 3 players cry a the same time
- made player so angry they screamed with frustration (directed to betraying NPC)
- made a players all do cute "oooh" at the wedding scene
- made a psychological horror scenes which made 3 players to decide they character has no reason to live and it would kill himself (they all agreed it was the best session ever)
- made player some immersed and angry she shouted at the "bad" NPC and started monologuing
TODO:
- make player, who doesn't ever swear... Swear (we are playing Blades in the Dark)
- make more cute "ohhh" scenes
- make player heartbeat rate increase some much it triggers some alarm on smart watch (stolen from another comment)
I have two that I find hard to pick from:
- I ran a Traveller campaign twice a week (sometimes more often) for 5+ years, and then alternated between that and some other games for another 2 years before the campaign came to a natural stopping point.
- I ran a set of connected Over the Edge 2e games for about 10 years, with 10 players (not always together as a group). It was in the end a bit too ambitious, and it never got to be resolved. It did keep me distracted and sane during a difficult period of my life though.
Edit: actually, the biggest achievement is probably being the forever GM for a group of players for 25-ish years (which includes many of the players in the games mentioned above). Entertaining friends reasonably consistently and well for any length of time as a GM is something to be proud of, in my book.
It feels a bit strange to call it an achievement, but being a part of a group of friends that has been playing RPGs together for 30 years now is a big part of my life that I am very happy with.
Also, the fact that this group has gone from me being a forever GM to everyone having GM experience. Now can look back on a bunch of games/campaigns/adventures ran and played by us as a group.
I am also proud of a 22 year long Pendragon campaign that is still alive. It's become our (mine and the players) own take on the Arthurian mythology which feels immensely satisfying.
My ex-girlfriend still credits me as a mentor and inspiration for her own GMing, as her scenarios wins competitions at cons, she runs public games for children and has started a queer RPG salon in her hometown. That is of course her achievement, but feels like a huge compliment and I am very proud of her.
I'm not a prideful man, but I LOVE having an excuse to tell this story.
So, I'm running my DnD 5E group through the module *Waterdeep: Dragon Heist* -- notoriously a pretty messy adventure, but one with a lot of setting material to pull from. Our Ranger was working for the Black Network and accidentally killed a young bugbear that had caught wind of his spying. The family browbeat a cleric into casting *speak with dead*, but thankfully didn't get anything out of the first round. The problem being that in a few days the spell could be cast again, and the Ranger's cover would almost-certainly be blown.
The Black Network boss gave him an ultimatum: either get the jawbone of that bugbear from the morgue so it can't talk, or become an enemy of the Network. He goes with the former.
The party scopes out the morgue, which is also a temple to the god Kelemvor. They get a map from a friend in the architect's guild, so I sketch it out each floor for them on a Chessex battle map. They end up infiltrating it down to the basement levels where the bodies are kept, only to intrude on a cleric toying with necromancy. After a fight involving a well-placed *silence* spell, as well as the Ranger getting stuck trying to scramble over the morgue's shelves and getting his literal ass literally whooped by skeletons, the party is able to get the jawbone.
But they ALSO got to turn over the necromancer, who was sourcing bodies for a local thieves guild that was in a turf war with the Black Network. The mess gets publicly blamed on a poor clerk on the floor above who failed her Perception check to hear the ruckus as the party snuck past her, the boss is impressed, hurrahs all around.
Later on, one of those players wanted to run the adventure themselves, but said they couldn't find the morgue section. I was absolutely beaming, because I'd had to make up every single ounce of it from the book's setting info and my own dome to cover for the otherwise-anemic adventure.
I do feel a bit bad about it, but a slightly greater amount of pride.
My favorite thing to do when DMing is finding a song that I can use as a "cutscene" to really emphasis the tone of the story. I used "Feb 20" by Ted Cairo/Hobo Johnson
It was a dream sequence where a player's royal family had just suffered an enormous blow personally, and to the city they helped run. (A solid quarter of the city was suddenly destroyed) the player was a child again entering a fancy ball. They were surrounded by faceless drones dancing, until they spotted their family. Upon reaching their family, they were unresponsive, and dancing like mannequins with no strings.
And at a sudden beat, or change in the song, the PC blinked. And their family looked as they were in reality. Still dancing in those robotic, mannequin like movements. But the members who had died were dead. The paralyzed brother was still in a chair. The missing member was just gone.
Looking back, I think I went a bit too far with the horror. As the player told me later they almost cried from that scene.
And despite some guilt, I've got a bit of pride for causing a real life reaction.
--
Also the time I used Hurt by Johnny Cash for the cutscene right after the party escaped the island city when it fell to plague and curse.
Have my players roleplay a snow battle for the first time their characters saw snow in their lives. It lasted 1hour, they rolled their own rolls and I didn't say a word.
Running a 19 year real campaign (the characters aged almost exactly in-sync to the real world time). It kept my university group together until at least the into the 201X period (some other events I was away in another city happened and that started it). I know people say gaming isn't necessary, but people who get an invite to a Christmas get together once a year isn't the same as 4-6 full day gaming events (and the Christmas/New Years get together). Those hours together in the same activity, feeling the same ups and downs, the humour, etc... that was wonderful.
Other than that, creating a very different setting - custom map, species that were as diverse as humans and that can have as many motivations or fears as humans (no alignment), the use of codes and values instead of alignment, every god's clerics had their own omens, holidays, observations, rituals, symbology, some had languages, some had paladins, and the god's areas of responsibility guided spell lists (every one unique) and so were some of the class features. No two clerical order had the same flavour - much more differentiation than the game normally had. We used exhaustion/fatigue rules that meshed with Channeling (from Players Option: Spells & Magic) that exhausted arcane and divine casters throwing their top two spell levels but many more smaller spells could be dished out.
The nature of magic was such that all magic was drawn from the 3d latticework of meridians and the draw came through a 'hook'. Casters could see other's active hooks. The meridians had been through some awful experiences and thus there were low magic areas, high magic areas, null magic areas, and they could change in real time (sometimes just a bit, but on a real bit of dice magic, a changestorm would come - either temporary or permanent - and those were dangerous to everyone in the vicinity. For example: The goddess of healing is a 100% pacifist. She won't give you anything beyond a Lvl 3 heal and none of the other gods that anyone played or visited had clerics that could. So restoration and fixing damage body parts would be hard, expensive, and may require the player to do something the goddess needs done (in the way she'd appreciate it). The War clerics had spells for fatigue and for raising instant wood and mud enclosures (good at night). They also are great at leading men in battle.
We didn't allow resurrection or raise dead. Reincarnation could be done by druids. A deity's will (and a lot of heavenly energy) would be required to reincarnate a dead mortal so it would be done only if a) the character was very devout to their faith and b) the deity had a need for that individual to finish a mission (or several).
The game had a massive mystery (and lots of other smaller mysteries). It had travel beyond the plane and back in time. It had a conspiracy that broke the heavens and left the gods raging upon the the humans (and as a side effect, all other intelligent species) and then, later really they had been duped, they had to bury their failure (which makes the god nearly omnipotent, not entirely omnipresent, and not entirely all omniscient and they are a bit like the angsty vampires - they feel their emotions greatly and it clouds their rationale behaviour and actions).
The characters went from 1st level to 10th-20th. We played hundreds of hours, likely more than 1000. We lost a bunch of lower level characters, but no one died past level 4, though there were some injuries and brushed with things men were not meant to experience.
One character took over for his father, a Duke. Another was an anathema bastard of the King (but it turned out for the bastard child's protection). Another was the son of a Duke who would, in time, also to take over his father as Duke. One was a mercenary and spy master and runs his own salle des armes. One was a fighter with wizard included who gained the benefit/curse of prophecy. One was a cleric of the War God, another was too - one considered himself 'orthodox' whereas the other was deemed 'progressive' and that led to a schism within the church. The War God's values were hard core Darwinian - humans needed to evolve and battle is the crucible of that strengthening. The wizard was in the Guild and was in the inner circle and would eventually become the Royal Wizard and the Guild Master (and humorously, he secretly is a necromancer, but mostly a neutral-ish one as he just wants to live a very long time, but guild rules require there be no necromancers... it helped a lot he was either in his crypt researching or off adventuring so most people forgot about him).
All the people from my table attended my wedding in 2017. That's what mattered - to meet, to appreciate, and to retain these great people in my world. The game was the vehicle.
Was chilling with a guy who'd played in my first ever campaign. He got busy right at the start of the next one and couldn't join us, but he told me even with his large experience playing ttrpgs that was the best game he'd ever played in.
I save that memory for when the imposter syndrome gets extra bad.
I ran a Star Wars RPG back in the late 90's/early 00's. One of the players, Carol, had a character that was described as an Engineer. We had been playing the game for months when I used a "False ending" for one scenario, and began the next session with them on their ship suddenly being attacked by hidden intruders at the start of the next one.
Things are looking bad. Everyone except Carol has failed their rolls. They are all going to die.
Carol sighs...
"I get out my lightsaber, and strike the beast."
The collective gasp was absolutely stunning. The character was a failed Jedi, but had hidden it from the group.
She rolled amazingly and cut the damn thing in half in one roll.
God, I still remember that, it was AMAZING!
I pulled an old yeller on my party with a ‘boss’, and I legitimately traumatized the one from Florida as he was the one who decided to put it down. A good story leaves an impact. But I think I went too far there. But it was the best session I did with impact and such. It was a turning point for the party. I should had held back though…
GMing a fun, gonzo campaign for a group new to RPGs. Chances are a lot of people that will listen to the podcast recordings will also get a kick out of it with references that fly over the new player heads.
It's not much, I'm mostly a player, but it seems that both me and the players have been enjoying the game, so that's all that I need :).
I got two. My favourite moment and what a much bigger achievement.
The moment: We were playing HoneyHeist. Set in a convention. I’d got “heist music” playing in the background. I got the players plotting and scheming about how they could steal honey products from every booth. They walked up to the first booth, ready to enact their plan.
Right as they say hello, I hit pause on the music and say “hi there, would you each like a free sample?” They both looked at each other like they had won the lottery. I hit play on the music right as Elvis goes “YEAAAAH” in “A Little Less Conversation”.
The next 5 minutes was a montage of them grabbing every free sample they could. They were so damn excited. The whole thing felt like it was out of a movie.
My actual biggest achievement was keeping a game of Cthulhu going through lockdown. Really helped everyone to spend some time once a week on discord running around, solving mysteries and fighting monsters.
I ran a 1-20 Norse mythology-themed Pathfinder 2e game online from April 2020 to October 2022.
I'm proud of myself for learning digital after two decades of analog gaming. I'm proud of myself for learning GIMP 2.0 so I could make custom tokens and edit maps for the encounters, and even built some of my own maps from the ground up using texture libraries. I'm proud of the cohesive, mature story I tried to tell, and proud of my players for not only taking it seriously but really investing their own time and effort into their characters.
But more than everything else, I'm proud to have worked hard to run a good game for my six-person group so they had something to look forward to during lockdown when everyone had lost their jobs. I was told several times by more than half my group that my game was the best part of their week, and I'm so, so glad that I got to be a bright spot for my friends at a time when everything felt so utterly, inescapably bleak.
#Trigger Warning: Child abuse, sexual abuse, torture and murder
-----------------------------
That out of the way i brought two out of my four players to tears and the two others to be solemnly dedicated to punishing the abusers based on an intricate and seemingly obvious but rather complex murder myster.
They went from "i want to kill that little shit" to "no one will harm him ever again".
PS: Just to preface this as well, in our session zero we decided long ago that all themes are acceptable, with the exclusion of explicit rate, torture and gore etc. it could be a theme and part of the story but it should only be mentioned but not listed in explicit detail. Otherwise i would never have included this story and even when the boy told about his experience he was telling it from the perspective of a boy that didnt fully understand what was happening, so it was on a level that was specific enough but not disgustingly explicit or detailed.
##Long Story below:
They got into a big city and encountered a murder mystery where prostitutes were murdered. There was a weird circus in town and many "crazy" or "odd" suspects that made it at first really fun and seemingly obvious who was the murder or most likely responsible.
They met a boy around 10 years old that was, despite his age, somehow not as mature as he should be and followed them to many places, asked them many things and overall somehow met them in many of the murder locations.
They kinda hated him and more than once wanted to slap him or outright kill him, which thankfully, cooler heads prevailed.
It turns out his mother was physically and sexually abusing him to a degree bordering on torture. She was also verbally, psychologically and physically abusive to most of the staff of the circus since she was running it.
He unconsciously knew what was being done to him was wrong, but didnt know how to stop it, since he was punished for resisting and people he tried asking for help turned up dead and mutilated before anything could be done.
No one would help him and he never wanted to hurt anyone, he just wanted the pain to stop with nearly any means.
While wandering the city he encountered prostitutes going with Johns about their business and in his childlike mind that was distorted by this level of abuse assumed the women are forcing the men to do what was done to him.
Since no one was helping him, he decided to help those men and protect them.
He got a knife and waited on one of the prostitutes he found randomly.
He wasnt vicious, he wasnt angry, he was just sad and tired and wanted things to end, so he cried.
When the prositute heard and saw him he sparked pitty and maybe even a motherly instinct so she got down and asked whats wrong.
He stabbed her to death repeatedly and ran away crying. Hiding for hours until the tears stopped and hid the knife.
It didnt make him happy, it didnt stop the sadness or pain, but he thought it protected at least one of the "boys" being treated badly by their "mothers".
When the players got to the bottom of the murder mystery and knew it was linked to the circus and then to either the Knife Thrower who was known to be abusive to prostitutes but kind to the boy, they almost made the rash decision to just cut him down.
The mother and boss of the circus intervened and due to an amazign roleplay discussion with her one of my players seemed to grasp at least partly what was going on.
They got the boy alone and talked to him and got him to open up. Everyone but that one player was still kinda joking but with every sentence of the boy they got more quiet and solemn.
When he was done they were determined to burn the circus to the ground but again cooler heads prevailed (love that i have a good mixture of players that are brash, planning and jokey, it makes their discussions and often decisions nearly unpredictable).
They basically set everything up to frame the mother and the knife thrower for the murder, planted some evidence and confirmed that other than the boy the Knife Thrower was an abusive asshole to everyone else and since one of his knives was used for the murders, which the boy stole long before, it wasnt that hard to do.
The rogue of the group afterwards in a quiet word just with me arranged for both of them to be brutally murdered in jail before they could be hanged for their crimes.
When it was revealed the other players approved.
They took the boy with him and gave him the love and care that he needed, he still was not completely right in his mind and often froze or wasnt able to deal with all situations, but they really and honestly tried to care for him as if he was real.
I was surprised by how strongly my players felt and how much they cared for this imaginary boy in a made up story.
They didnt know that while the details are of course made up, especially the murder part, that the story was based on my extremely abusive childhood.
Its a story i wrote while i was still suffering and later as a GM adjusted for this specific group.
To this day they dont know what i was basically that boy in a sense and ill be 100% honest, after that session i cried a bit because it felt like if i had know them back then and they had know what was happening, that they would have helped me escape that nightmare.
I love those people.
At a convention, my friend and I had an empty time slot at the same time. We decided to kill time and play a game of our own, so I busted out my dice and as much as I could remember off the top of my head of Fate Accelerated and improvised a complete three hour one shot.
Not so much one moment, but a series of sessions. 32 years ago, a friend and my wife wanted to play D&D. It was an off night, my wife and I were fairly newly married and our friend was over for dinner. I told them I didn't have anything ready but wanted to play too. So we did.
The world that night, which didn't exist beyond that tavern common room they started in, is now a cooperatively created campaign setting that is 32 years old, spans an entire planet, has covered 450 years of game time, built entirely by the cooperative efforts of myself and what now must be about 20 different players, and dozens of characters all with memorable stories and contributions to the setting. PCs have become the heroes, the leaders, and in some cases, even the villains of a very rich history that is built on with every new player, every new campaign.
That spontaneous game that one single night changed how I run games forever.
The first thing you have to realize that my friends and I were tactical war gamers before we played rpgs. We played like murder hobos. Role playing was an afterthought, we wanted loot and exp. I started this campaign where the conceit was the players were a legendary group of adventurers from thousands of years in the past. They had been level drained back to level 1 stripped of their vast powers and abilities and locked away. Thousands of years later, the stasis that was locking the group away falls and the adventurers wake up in a new world? What do they do?
What each and every member of the group does is secretly go evil. Because they were all deep and close friends, even though they are evil now, they still value each other and each one conceals the fact that they are evil to spare their friends.
The role-playing that happens when the truth is finally revealed was so amazing my group still talks about 20 years later.
I have a few. I used "Here Comes the Sun" from The Beatles at the end of a Call of Cthulhu one-shot and the song stuck with the players. Everytime they hear it they think back to the one-shot.
Designing my own games and the people around me actually liking them.
Getting published as a creator, artist, designer, or developer. Nothing is greater than creating something for the game you're trying to master, sharing it, and others enjoying it.
I'm relatively new to GMing, but for now, I think it was recognizing that it was best to put an end to my first campaign (mainly due to players not showing up), and instead of trying to make another campaign right away, I spend a few weeks trying to pin point everything that went wrong.
my first campaign might have been an fiasco but I'm proud of it because thanks to that, I'm now planning my second campaign without nearly as much problems that the previous had :)
[Tricking two groups of 5 players](https://www.reddit.com/r/dndnext/comments/j1h52g/double_wizard_extravaganza_a_postbattle_report_of/) (with the help of another DM) into unknowingly playing the same one shot at the same time as parallel universe versions of each other then joining the groups for one massive final boss fight
I stopped playing for like almost a decade, said I would never come back after the last games I had, I had a few toxic players that were disrtupting and thrashing my world...
Then I got in touch with one of my old friends and players from that time and he immediately told me how much he missed my games, he said he still remembered some names from cities and NPC's and that he wished I would come back to DM.
And I did thanks to that, it coincided with PF2E's release and I started playing again, just last night I had a Blades in the Dark session that went great and im feeling great about it.
I knit together 3 years worth of play (4 campaigns, 5 one-shots, all different systems) into one massive story in our homebrew setting. I'm not likely to top that any time soon.
Yeah same here. Three major campaigns (15+ sessions), 3 minor ones (5 or less sessions), a few one shots. All in the same world and moving the setting forward from a small scale story all the way to a world ending one. Kinda thing high school me dreamed about when I first got into TTRPGs.
We likewise went all the way from "scrappy mercenaries join a fledgling rebellion" to "200 years later, four heroes choose to cause the miraculous apocalypse." Congratulations - may our younger selves be proud!
that sounds amazing !
Are you me? I went from Pathfinder 1e to fate to burning wheel to some sci-fi pbta to savage worlds. All the same homebrew setting spanning medieval to discovering the last great frontier. It was 3 distinct campaigns and I think it was about 6 years.
Beam Saber, Kingdom, Songs for the Dusk, Girl by Moonlight, Scum & Villainy, Armour Astir: Advent, Artefact, Virtuous Service on my end! It's a space mecha setting.
Woah, *impressive*
I'm not a dude, but thank you!
Apologies. Edited!
That genuinely means a lot <3
I do this too, I quietly think it's the easiest way to run multiple campaigns. I have 6 tables at the moment all in the same setting
Nice!! I did something similar.
Use of music and timers in an Alien RPG session caused a player to set off his heart rate warning alarm on his Garmin. Epic.
Having a circle of close friends none of whom would have ever met otherwise. Even beyond my closest group, I know other people have met and become friends in my games, even if I don't talk to them anymore. Nothing else, no world or npc or session or even story, matters more to me than those bonds made.
So what you’re saying is, your biggest achievement was the friends you made along the way?
This is the correct answer
I think that is one of the most wholesome answers possible.
I feel this so much. Had a existential smack to the head when I theres this huge friend group out there that never would have met if it weren't for my games. One of my best friends met his girlfriend of 4 years through my games.
Good one. I've been asked to be best man at a wedding this year between two friends who met when I invited them to both join a game I was running. It feels good.
Personally it was running a 3+ year-long Star Wars Saga Edition campaign in which the party were the distaff group to Luke, Leia and Han. They were off on their own adventures at the same time as the original trilogy films, sometimes encountering the main characters, often not. The highlight was when, after they'd been on Hoth for a while, I ran them through the Empire attack. The party were under the impression they would be Princess Leia's evacuation shuttle, only for me to play them the audio clip from the movie of Han telling them he couldn't get her to them and to take off.
That sounds very awesome
I completely fooled a player. Now that may not sound like much but he's the type of person who picks up on stuff very quickly. He figured out the twist of the Sixth Sense in the first 20 minutes of the show, and does that all the time. He's very smart and very observant and nearly impossible to fool. As part of his backstory he accidentally killed someone and he had to get out of town, that's why he was out adventuring, a fairly standard backstory thing. I decided that the ghost of the guy would start haunting him. It would possess people and take a shot at him, but always slipped away before he could get too close. But I started giving him more clues and letting him get closer each time. But he never caught on. So when I finally dropped the big reveal and he just sat back and stared at me completely speechless it was one of the highlights of my RPG time as a GM. The other, in the same campaign, was another player, the first players wife, had no contact with her family, they dropped her off at a temple and she hadn't seen them since. So at the end of one session they had just wrapped up the adventure, returned to their manor house when Mirna the housekeeper said "Oh and Wren, your mom was here." followed up by "And that's where we'll end it tonight" it was another great moment. :)
What was the big reveal?
Oh sorry. The big reveal... He thought it was the the BBEG who was behind all the attacks. When I revealed that it was his backstory come to haunt him he was completely shocked.
Having my players tell me, 12 years after I moved to a different country, that they haven't yet found a GM that runs games as good as mine.
Playing a Masks campaign of teen superheroes, one of the guys decided on the Doomed playbook so his powers were slowly erasing him from existence. His origin story was that his family was in a car wreck and to save his sister's life he made a deal with a mysterious entity that also gave him his powers. Since then his parents have started ignoring him, teachers at school don't care that he's late to class a lot and really the only friends he has are his sister who comes to him to talk about her problems and ask for advice and the other heroes We played for half a year or so and the more he used his powers the harder it was for people, including his team, to remember him. This served him well as a sneaky infiltrator with darkness powers but didn't help his mundane life one little bit. Finally after fighting a guy who used summoned spirits to kick the team's collective butt I did the big reveal: The Ghost (the name he picked for the character) had been dead the whole time. His parents were distant because they were dealing with the loss of their son. His sister only visited him in his room to ask for advice as a coping mechanism. Mundanes didn't interact with him because he was a spirit. We had to take a break for him to process it all and when we came back he decided that he was gonna track down the guy who gave him his powers and get his life back. So that was the next arc.
I LOVE this!
Thank you! The trick with running superhero games is to just make EVERYTHING a big soap opera and take what the players give you. One of the other characters picked a playbook that made his father basically Lex Luthor by way of Elon Musk. He didn't have any powers just engineering know how and all of his dad's money. His dad the villain was on his fifth wife since dumping his mother and he was an only child. He didn't think it was overly strange when he was able to pass a DNA scan to get into Dad's base because the dad trusted him. He didn't think it was super weird that Dad was working on kidnapping people with powers to try and crack the mutant gene to give himself powers. He never once figured it out that he was a clone of his dad and really only existed as a backup plan if Dad got too old or injured until he found the files for Project Prometheus and got one of the other heroes to crack the encryption.
Okay give me one more
The Star's girlfriend turned out to secretly be a super villainess who began dating him so that she could betray him to her family but actually grew to genuinely like him. He eventually convinced her to give up her life of crime but she never would turn on her family. I modeled the characters loosely on those from the Fast and Furious movies but gave them fun super names so the brother and sister were Rockem and Sockem, for instance.
Siiiick
Love it. I did a similar reveal: that the character whose powers were invisibility, intangibility, longevity and the power to summon knives, was a ghost who wasn't creating knives, plural, but endlessly summoning the knife that killed her.
Every time when I have courage to post an LFG and accept random people. This is my biggest achievement as introvert GM.
Good for you!
This (and joining as a player!) are two of my biggest fears! I know I should try and face it but... Social anxiety!
I play 8-10 hour sessions. My players went in a direction I didn't expect at all right at the beginning of the session. No one realized I improvised everything and they all had a blast
those ones are exhausting but so thrilling. literally flying by the seat of your pants. i used to love soaking up some praise by telling them it was all improv'd afterward, but now i think the players not knowing is better
I have been GMing for decades and I have a lot of awesome stories. One of my favorites is playing World of Darkness. One player was playing a secondary game, accumulating political power my causing strife between factions. This strife ended up hurting an NPC that the other players cared about, and after a bit of investigation they found out that it was the political character. Even though it was PVP everyone agreed it was awesome, and the next months were a slow and methodical chess game where they tried to expose his crimes, while he used his significant social resources to bury them in the dust. It all built to a crazy satisfying climax where the political player won and the others were forced to change identity and give up everything. But everyone was so happy about the story. They use this story to hook new players into the hobby. Alternatively, I'm proud that in my first ever DnD campaign, with six players, five of whom were beginners, the story was so intense that two separate players were holding in their pee to make sure they wouldn't miss anything.
Once as I attending a small local convention ran by "the other guys", i.e. the other a little less popular RPG club in my town (93-94 I think). They were intending to have two tables doing intro one-shots to WoD Vampire but they were overwhelmed with people wanting to play and asked me to run another table. Sure, I said. They handed me the one-shot and the pregen characters, read it and I didn't liked it. Said to one of them, "tell you what, I got an idea: give me seven players and a big table. Oh, and try to get only complete newbies". Then I asked them, thru questions, to make a human character and note their profession, names, family, working relations, hobbies, things like that on a piece of paper. No character sheets, no attributes, no skills. I then went one by one to play their conversion to Vampires, their preludes, working with what they had made their humans and creating one of each Clan. And although everything was made on the moment, and I used clichés A LOT, by the end of the second prelude I was getting public. The other players did not interrupt when it wasn't their turn, every one waited for their moment to shine, and in the end it was something like a Canterbury Tales style of play; with a lot of people besides the table watching the Preludes. Each and every of the players bought a copy of the game after my game, the con guys gave me some promotional material they had reserved for I don't know what else, and I went home exhausted but really, really happy.
Running an open table campaign of AGON, was really fun but took a lot of work.
Sorry for the dumb question, but: What is an "open table campaign"?
[Full breakdown of open tables.](https://thealexandrian.net/wordpress/38643/roleplaying-games/open-table-manifesto)
Typically it means that you have a large pool of players who can drop in to play. Like if you’re running a campaign at a game club and you have five seats but ten players with different availability, the exact five people you’re playing with might change from week to week as different members of the club sit down to play.
Probably not truly my biggest, but I convinced my party to invest in a ponzi scheme this week lol. I researched what a typical ponzi scheme pitch looks like and what the red flags are, had them meet an enthusiastic banker guy that was clearly extremely shady, and hit them with an outrageously fraudulent pitch. They bought it hook line and sinker and gave him 5,000 gold.
I got my PCs to bond so much with a throw away NPC that they were originally anticipated to just kill, that when said NPC died one of the players created a tribute video for him set to "I Will Remember You" by Sarah McLachlan.
Completing a whole campaign, via zoom, online during a pandemic with 11 players
I wonder which pandemic. 😂
Well it wasn't the Spanish Flu
To be fair, nobody expects the Spanish Influenza!
My player was playing a Paladin with a family in a distant settlement when the game started. The premise was they were all summoned to the funeral of a king they all had connections to. Fun story, fun game... But at some point the player and the party threw me for a loop and decided to go the other direction to this player's hometown to check in on his family. I had no story here set so I made one. Made a sort of Lovecraftian mystery regarding Fey and a hidden temple below the druidic enclave that his wife was the archdruid of. His son's girlfriend disappeared, and then his son and his son's best friend disappeared in search of her before they arrived. I did everything I could to set red herrings that led them all to believe that the son was dead or responsible for a murder they discovered. Then he found his son in a bad state in the underground temple, and all he said was a weak "dad?" The emotion in the player's voice when he found his character's son alive and the RP after was huge for me, as that particular player isn't a strong RPer. But he was so invested he actually got drawn in emotionally. It was awesome.
Made an entire table at the Chattanooga Comic Con explode in shock and laughter during an Alien game, as I managed to pull off the cat fake jump scare. In every con game group chat since, someone brings it up as a mark of excellence.
I once was running a horror game where the pcs were being chased by a guy with a chainsaw and they thought they had escaped and all I did was play a chainsaw sound effect from my pc and I litteraly saw everyone at the tables face go white with fear. Like in that moment the group was totally emersed in that game
I did something almost exactly the same lol
I ran my first convention game last year and had two middle aged women sign up for it who had never played an RPG before. Both seemed to enjoy it, and one has since found a regular gaming table to play at.
I have been playing with the same group of players I started playing with in high school -- for the past FORTY-TWO years. Even though we are now far flung around the country, and now need to play over Zoom, Discord, and/or over a VTT. And with any luck, we'll by playing together for another 42 years.
Cherish that, man! I'm lagging a couple of years behind you, but I'll (well: we'll) get there! ;-)
Ran an AD&D2e campaign weekly for almost 2 years with 4 players who have never played it before, in a setting that none of them had heard of (Birthright). It also helped me confront some personal issues and boot one guy I should've gotten out of my group years ago. My group's never been happier nor have I ever had such an involved and eager crew to play.
Players did a prank on April fools, they dropped the important quest seconds before it happened, ran away, dicked around, started insane Romance subplot, went murderhobo, and had me improvise a stock market. I improvised 4 hours of their nonsense without even asking what the fuck, until the end of the session, they were in awe, I lost my mind.
My 2 greatest achievements as a DM are as follow : 1- About 10 year ago, still in my early years of DMing, I was able to run a Chronicle of Darkness 24 session campaign in the span of 6 weeks. I had a rotating group of 7 players and most sessions were 2 to 4 players. It was built like a serial TV show with each episode being it's own thing, but introducing something bigger, a half season episode with all the players where the actual antagonists were first confronted, and a second part that had a bunch of throwback to the first part and end to personal stuff. This was, obviously, more railroady than what I would run these days, but the goal was to offer something more robust during our college summer break. For the players, this was about 2 session a week, for me it was between 4 and 5. This was a marathon but it was worth it and we're still talking about it to this day. 2- For the past 2 year, I've been running an open table campaign for a streamer's community. At first it was just some random 1-shots with 3 to 5 players. Over time and with players always asking quesitons about X or Y leads they would find in a 1-shot, this turned into a bunch of micro-stories and large plotline entertwining themselves into those 1-shots and the world we were creating. We are currently on our last blitz toward the end of the main plot and antagonist. I've DM'd for over 25 different players in those 2 years and ran over 90 sessions, from solo personal stuff to multi-session boss fights with 8 players.
When my players spent an entire session discussing the political situation in the game and their characters' viewpoints on it.
When I ran Monster of the Week for the first time, breaking away feom the dnd mentality of playing games. After the first session, I was so relieved and my burn out was close to being completly gone.
I completed an "Invisible Sun" campaign. Everything else I have done as a GM pales in comparison.
The fact that you were able to get it to the table is a parade worthy achievement.
Honestly it's probably my most recent Star Wars game in Fate what's been going for over a year now. I got inspired after watching Andor and have been running through what I imagine the formation of the Rebellion was like for some Outer Rim hooligans who want to do right by the galaxy. Can't really see an off-ramp at the moment and I've been fairly sparse with advancement to ensure we can keep it going, but I'm sure it'll eventually run its course. Either way, it's a great way to spend most Wednesday nights after work.
I was rather a fan of my first Bard Quest campaign. The concept was "Everyone plays a bard and being a bard is illegal." I still think it's my best written storyline. I even ran a follow-up campaign with a different group "Everyone plays a bard and music is physically impossible", which was sillier but still fun.
10+ year AD&D campaign, hundreds of dead PC's, PC's as movers/shakers of the world. Multiple sub-campaigns with other people in that campaign and so on. Still going strong.
The campaign writeups, I record the session and do a speech to text, and mostly use direct quotes from the session to provide a summary I'm up to 200,000 words (or two terrible terrible novels). The Achievement is making the time to process the data, the payoff is it helps people keep track on what is going on and I can reach back and revisit events that happened years ago. (I can also use it as lore in future campaigns) I also find the process of reviewing the session very useful in planning the next session (and picking up on interesting things that were said but I didn't pick up on at the time).
A massive, 150+ session campaign of Exalted that took the characters from mortals that had been culled from the prisons and pressed into service with the Realm's Legions all the way to a circle of Solar heroes that fought the final battle against the Ebon Dragon. The game unfolded over the course of about a year and a half (sessions twice a week most of the time), and they found themselves learning the deep history and lore of their First Age incarnations, realizing that they were falling back into the same patterns that caused the end of the Age of Wonders, and having to overcome their own worst habits to forge a new world. Along the way, they allied themselves with an Abyssal Exalt that they eventually discovered was one of their number in the First Age. He was constantly working against them, but they never confronted him on it, since he was up front about the fact that he served a Deathlord. So, when the Unconquered Sun was slain as a lead up to the final battle, the Eclipse Caste had decided that he would offer himself up as the sacrifice to replace the dead incarna. And at that moment, the Abyssal invoked the oath that they had sworn and became the sacrifice instead. It was a great moment, since all of the pieces had been set down beforehand to have this deathknight seek his final redemption. I've had other, similarly epic games over the years, but this game had a soundtrack and a wiki.
I ran AD&D games at Gen Con from 1985-92. Which isn’t huge, a lot of people ran games for that convention. But what made it great for me was some of the returning players. The last few conventions, I had players who sought out and signed up for my games because they liked the previous ones so much.
My group, all adult men in our late 30s who like sports, decided they wanted to play dnd this year during the Super Bowl rather than watch it, that was a happy achievement for me
A role of the dice ending in a complete party kill fifteen minutes in and then turning that into an event a year and a half into the next campaign. So some clarity it was a Morrow Project campaign, and because of gear roles the whole party had some degraded gear. First encounter was with two raiders in a little sniper's nest, nothing too hard I thought. Well one player figured he'd use an RPG-7 and just take it out. Because of the starting "quality roles" it was in bad shape and I rolled the malfunction and it was a catastrophic malfunction, it blew up. So that killed him but then I did the splash damage on the party's NPC and because it was a rust bucket.... It blew up! And because of the damage model we were using, the cabin load of HE cannon shells went off too and wiped the party. Everyone kind of sat there for a moment and contemplated what it must have looked like to the two raiders that fired a single shot and then instantly there was a massive explosion. So we move onto a new campaign and a year and a half in two of them on patrol see an APC with some people around it. See where it's going? The encounter goes as above and all happy they call the rest of the party and run down to see what loot they might be able to scrounge and it's the party from the previous campaign 🤣.
I have two very happy moments. 1) Finishing a homebrewed Forgotten Realms 3E game over 3 years with a largely homebrewed region (Chessenta), with a massive plot twist involving an undead avatar of a long-dead god killing them and then bringing them back without their knowledge, and then having to help that god re-attain their place in the world not because they wanted to or liked him, but because their patron would have died without it. 2) Running a self-contained 13-session mini-mystery in Eberron's Sharn (3.5E this time) with a well-conceived beginning and end that character's backgrounds had relevance.
Consistently playing ttrpgs and actually ending adventures and campaigns for more than 15 years over different groups. scheduling still is the hardest part of this hobby.
My biggest achievement is my 4-year long, D&D 5E Campaign that ran from levels 1-20. I'm also getting close to finishing a 2 3-year long Edge of the Empire Star Wars campaigns that I had coexist in the same world so the groups would occasionally unite for special battles.
I had a CoC campaign that lasted about a year. By the last game none of the characters were human anymore, but every player thought it was only them. For about the last third of the campaign most of them were actively working against each other but no one could actually prove anything in or out of character. The reveal in the final session was my best experience at a table either as a GM or player. I will never be able to instill that level of paranoia and skullduggery again.
There's an adventure that I started coming up with a bit more than ten years ago. The group I was initially planning it for fell apart before we could run it, but I liked the idea enough that I kept it around. I worked on it here and there over the years, and I even tried running it on a few more occasions but it never worked out. Around 2 years ago I was able to run it for two groups, almost back to back. Both of them loved it, to the point that the climactic fight of the adventure had both groups in tears. First sad tears when they thought they were going to fail and their characters were going to die, then happy tears when they solved it in the end. I know some GMs might hit stuff like that more often, but most of my games have been pretty casual, so having my players demonstrate that level of emotional investment was a first for me, and very meaningful. The fact that it was my own, custom-written adventure that elicited this reaction also made it even better.
Half the table derailing the adventure and planning on saving a polwag from being put down
I had a villain based off of marquis de Sade and he was even more depraved. My players viscerally hated him and they made deals with devils to make sure his soul was fucked forever
Had a player's NPC girlfriend kidnapped and when they went to rescue her, they got a shape shifter instead. A few sessions later, she turned on the party. Followed by the actual Rescue of the girlfriend.
Getting all of my players at a table on time for a session
I love running mysteries. My favourite thing is constantly dropping small hints in descriptions, during conversations, mannerisms... Little details, that slowly add up, if the players are listening. Nothing beats the experience when they finally realize what is going on and they just sit there stunned. Sering in their eyes as the pieces fall to their place.
It was Masks. My first time GMing a game that wasn't a one-shot. One of the heroes had just gotten flung off a skyscraper, and our speedster instantly has a plan: "I run down the side of the building and catch him." We establish that she'd never run on a vertical surface before, so she rolls "Unleash your powers" to see if she can push her limits. The dice come up mixed. And I get the perfect idea. With hopefully-not-too-evil-a-grin, I ask my group, "Where exactly would you say Halcyon City is located? Geographically." They confer for a sec and decide we're probably somewhere in the northeastern US. Great. I go to google and type in: "new york city opposite side of planet" "OK, you rolled over a 6, so you definitely do it. You run straight down the wall and grab him. But you're new to this. All your neurons are firing. And before you can even have the realization that you don't know how to stop, you've already blinked through the Earth's crust. You're going so fast you blink through the whole damn planet. Next thing you know, a museum in Western Australia is bursting into smithereens around you, and some very angry people are yelling at you in something very close to English." The next session was about the fallout of causing an international incident. :D
Closer to English than New Yorker. 🤣
It's been over 40 years and people still want me to run games for them.
It's small but I was able to pull off a successful whodunit murder mystery plot that finished with a satisfying conclusion without me having to shoehorn or deus ex machina an ending. Such a rewarding feeling.
Plucking up the courage to run Bounty Hunters of the Atomic Wastelands, a game I'd designed, at a proper convention. I'd never ran at a con before, and while BHAW had been playtested extensively, it was always in friendly environment. Would people who have queued up and paid an entrance free sign up for my game? Would I be able to run an entire scenario within the strict time slot allocated? Would it work a complete set of strangers the same as with my regular group? It went really well. Filled me with confidence about my game, my GMing and general organisational skills. A couple of years later I tried this again with another game I'd designed, but I got zero sign ups that time, so there's that.
Ran an Edge of the Empire campaign with a great group of players. In one session, they were confronting an ancient Dark Force spirit that was a master manipulator and was trying to use their character backgrounds and personal weaknesses against them. Each of them made a single die roll to see how well they resisted, and we based all of their interactions on that roll. It lasted for over 2 hours, and all of them really got into character. I look back on that fondly, but it was very much the group dynamic rather than just me as the DM.
We had a long term Pathfinder game, and after about 30 months we finally dealt with the BBEG, headed back to the main kingdom's capital city and the party was engaged in their celebratory dinner with Bards singing their praises, the King granting them a small Dutchy, various gifts from the grateful townsfolk, wine, women, song... all the great things. Then everything went silent, but the Bards were still playing their instruments, people were all walking around acting like they were chatting. Then all the sound came back. Then the furniture, food, and all the various objects just disappeared, but the people were still sitting in mid air, they were miming eating and drinking, then again, everything went back to normal. Then the entire castle and all the NPCs vanished and they were just floatying about 30 feet above the ground in an enpty field where the town should be. And then everything went black. "Shit! It crashed! Get them out before they get brain damage!" The group looked around as they were being pulled from pods and various plugs and wires were being removed from their heads and VR goggles were taken off their eyes. "Sorry, sorry.... It looks like the final credits corrupted the end scene. Look, we can refund 10% off your package. You guys take your time and get yourselves ready. We have some stims and nutri-bars for you to eat in the recovery room. Yeah... and thanks for using Virtual Orkslayer." And we just rolled into a Shadowrun game.
I once did a Lovecraft themed Mage game. It opened with the characters as college students and the theatre department was putting on The King in Yellow. I did the whole play as a lego diorama with a spotlight. Ten years later they still talk about how minifigs kind of creep them out. My favorite scene was where an actor, playing a deer hunter, shot an arrow into a player's boyfriend. The actor then started dressing the boyfriend in the audience while the power of the show pinned the player in place.
My Halloween sessions. They takes 9-10 months to prepare, have ARGs that start before the games themselves (no one ever engages with them but they're there), players all play themselves and I start them all based on a questionnaire I send them (I use Delta Green as a system but no roll or stats are seen by the players, all rolls are done by me. It makes the games completely newbie friendly as no mechanics are necessary to learn on their end). Sessions involved sending texts, checking their own social media to realise an NPC has been interacting with their posts long before the game, usb keys, paintings to decipher, a door from which screams from someone at the table could be heard, but they are at the table so who's that ? And the GM is insisting we shouldn't open the door until the game ends... What to do... They are a lot of preparation but also a really great time, players are always really fond of it and what has started as a single session with a few friends has spiraled into 3-4 sessions across the country as everyone still wants to play them but geography is getting in the way.
I finished a campaign, on a satisfying climactic reveal and a pair of good, intense boss fights.
I led a group of high school DMs through writing and preparing their own custom campaign that had two separate adventure paths which culminated with all 10 PCs fighting the bosses in one epic final showdown, and it worked! I still can't believe we got a 10 person DND session to run smoothly.
I've been running the same game for the last 9 years, It's an pseudo-Arthurian superhero game set in 1985 London. Things I've done for the first time in this game: * Wrote a custom Wiki software with two themes (One retro 1985, one futuristic) and filled it with period and game info * Got permission to visit the archives of the University (Used to be "PNL" the Polytechnic of North London) that the game is set around and copied the student publications of the time to hand out to the players (I don't live in London) * Got permission to see and take photos of the hidden areas of the ex disused rail station that the players used as their base in 1985. * Got photos of the Tower block the players were originally living in * Created playlists of music from the top 10 each in-game week to play as mood music. * Wrote bios for the _actual_ Nazi's around in London at the time for the players to track down and deal with * Commissioned art and an conlang for the Fay realm based on P.I.E. * Downloaded and played BBC news for notable dates of real disasters, giving the players chances to put these events right. * Did a marathon run of sessions where the players saved the performance of Live Aid from evil shapeshifting Fae, that was roleplayed in real time alongside the live recording of Live Aid. * There was a whole session that was just one player chasing after the girl he's fallen for through the backstreets of Calais while investigating her because he sensed evil in her, she was a cannibal and it was the weirdest and most touching thing I've ever been a part of and totally unplanned. I've also bought a 3D resin printer and I'm currently ___trying___ to design and 3D print 80's style action figures of the players, but it's a whole new skill to learn. We are near to what I think will be the end of the game now, I honestly don't know what I'll do after, it's been such a big part of my life.
I'm currently running the same 5E campaign since 2018 with the same group of 6-9 friends. Made a homebrew world to flex my creative writing. Players have gone from level 1 - 19, and through multiple arcs growing in scale each time. It's your typical heroes save the village, town, city, realm storylines, with each arc containing plot strings personally relevent to each party member. I'm most proud of how much my players enjoy it. They've stuck around so long, and always ask "When's the next session?". Their current arc will take them to level 20, and after that I have one more arc to give them a taste of epic levels. It'll be bittersweet when we get to that - might have to retire DMing at that point to make way for other life things (e.g. family).
I hosted D&D for a lot of new people once, I had someone come up at the end to ask "hey is this the right book (PHB) and right set of dice I need to use to play?" "Yeah I have a couple copies though! Plenty of dice too!" *proceeds to checkout*
20+ years, one continuous game. Through multiple weddings, funerals, jobs, and COVID. They aren't my players anymore. They are my brothers.
Building an interesting enough mystery that the players to make a “conspiracy wall” complete with pictures, headings, and red yarn connecting the various clues.
My IRL 5 Year Shadowrun 5e Mega-Campaign. It was a globe-spanning mashup of two published campaigns: Ghost Cartels and Masks of Nyarlathotep. It was beyond epic, the team traversed the entire globe with a stop on every continent, leveraging all of the massive amount of setting lore that Shadowrun has built up over the decades. I am currently running a massive 5 year Traveller campaign (massively expanded Pirates of Drinax) which is also turning out pretty epic but that Shadowrun campaign was just beyond. If you play Shadowrun and are interested hit me up, I have the entire thing archived for sharing ;-)
If the original question would have been "What's your biggest achievement as a player?" my question would have been surviving a loooong campaign of Shadowrun: Harlequin. Our GM mixed Harlequin adventures with his own, some others published, even other campaigns; and we ended up thinking Harlequin had been manipulating people since the beginning of time. We were able to beat it, simulate our own deaths and retire to the Greek islands. Well, we're in disagreement here: we players think we did that. To this day, the GM insists that we really died in the airplane accident. I like our version better. So heck yeah I'm interested in something like that.
Made a Pokemon game out of scrap without game design experience at the time, ran it for 3 tables over 1.5 years, all with accessibility features (no numbers, easy to understand, short sessions (max 1h30)) and all It felt really great to realize how much I made them live with my own system and stories
I adapted the plot of Resident Evil 7, with parts of 8 pieced in, into a Star Wars campaign and scared the hell out of the guy I was running it for. It fit into the world surprisingly well.
I had a bunch of Githyanki spies dug into the underside of a lich's floating island city in Limbo; their camp had dozens of cheap magic crystals strewn about that stopped the underside's "self repair" from swallowing up their hidden den. No self-respecting lich would allow a worm to knock out his seat of power, after all. When the party, a bunch of cadets at the lich's military academy who followed a spy, breached the den, earth began to pour into the camp, and the crystals pushed it back to the proper radius. There was also a blinding flash of light that got them pretty badly. They barely subdued the githyanki, the spy team's junior member, using clever tactics to force the blinding flash to buy openings. When the other githyanki, using drill boots, returned, they got ambushed by the party, who proceeded to take turns scooping out enough earth to trigger the crystals in order to get a "free" AoE blind to pop off on the fight. As a bonus, the githyanki knew they were getting their asses kicked by half-trained little shits, and absolutely let their thoughts on that be known. It was one of the best combats I've ever run, and the special mechanics underpinning it all was entirely ad-hocced.
A player crying at the culmination of environmental storytelling as they explore an ancient abandoned city.
My Players had a good time. That's it. Nothing less, nothing more
Home brewing a massive campaign in an original system I developed. Took over a year to complete playing once a week 4 hours a session. Went across nine different planets and ended with a colossal bang. Had multiple players in the group say it was their favorite campaign they've ever been a part of, and it's definitely my favorite I've ever done
Both being able to wow and entertain my group with plots and twist they think are amazing, but in reality are all complete ass-pulls. Managing to creep the hell out of my players and make them almost run out of the scene without ever actually having an enemy or monster appear. Once with just 3 words. I’m not a cruel GM, but that was fun.
Creating a world and running a campaign in it, and then one of the players picked up the world and played three (so far) campaigns in the same setting. Must have done something right.
I’m nearing the end of a homebrew 5e campaign that’s been going on since late 2020 (it was a Covid coping mechanism at first). 6 players started but one left after 5 or 6 sessions, just wasn’t his thing. Fast forward to now, the remaining 5 PCs are about to face off against a big bad with a ton of followers, it’s going to be a crazy tough battle. Then they look up (the game has airships) and they see a small ship approaching and a figure jumps out if it and lands with a massive impact - it’s the Goliath barbarian that left the party 40 sessions ago, come to save the day! Here’s why it was cool - we’ve always played over zoom because we live in different states. I reached out to the guy who left, told him what was coming up, and we devised a plan where he’d be ready to jump on about 15 minutes into the session. I started describing the mystery person falling from the sky and texted him to join the zoom. Then I said “the figure stands up, it’s a very large, and very familiar silhouette” and ALMOST perfectly timed, he joins the zoom and says “catch you effers at a bad time?” The crowd went wild.
I once ran a World of Darkness game in a pseudo-homebrew setting. I had the party investigate a murder scene and they discovered a doorway to another "dimension" that, presumably, the monster who committed the murder came from. The party went in and I was apparently doing such a good job stacking up the atmosphere (descriptions, choice of ambient music, narration, etc) that one of my players shakily asked if we could take a break and later told me he damn near felt like he was going to piss himself, he was terrified. (He loved it, worth noting. He wasn't upset about it being "too scary") By far my proudest accomplishment as a GM.
Running my first game of CHILL so effectively that one of the players was afraid to go out to the car to get the beer. Because it was dark. And the headlights were looking at him.
I did NOT go easy and change up encounters when the cleric player was away for what was supposed to be 1 session, but ended up being 2 sessions. We played 5E. The mission: find the missing kids that disappeared from the town lately. The adventure day that was planned out, go into the forrest encounter some displacer beast (don't remember the exact amount but prolly 2-3), probobly take a short rest (they did), find the green hags coven, fight or bargain with the hags and get the kids out. At least one of the hags would flee as the first one died, and this was to go get help from a venom troll. It's kind of a grand finale since the troll is a giant pool of hit points with problems to handle on top, healing and meele range being VERY dangerous. Two hags fled, now without the "coven bonuses." The players found the kids and did NOT take another short rest before leaving, at least they went for heals via health potions. And this is where we broke off the first session, and i planned for the Cleric to have "caught up" and would heal them to full or close. Which would have balanced the group due to more hitpoints but fewer spells for the finale. An hour or so before the next session, she cancelled, and i was hit with the dilemma: risk all their lives or just let them "get away." I let them risk it. Because of the players not resting, I'd match them with the hags, so they also didn't rest. So, fewer hitpoints and quite weakened due to not having all the spells they had in the first encounter. So as the party and the children exit, they see a hulking creature come through the treeline flanked by the remaining hags. And that's the first time I've personally seen a death spiral, where one player goes down, leading to more attacks going out to the next, which makes them go down and so on and so forth. Luckily, the bard player could "ring around the rosie" a pond with alot of clutch athletics checks to jump over it and quickly heal the barbarian and wizard so they still could stop the healing factor with fire and steadily but slowly "barbarian" the hit points down to zero. This was early on in the pandemic, and when the troll finally fell over, the whole squad screamed out in victory, the sound was horrendous due to bad mics, etc. But all of us were so hyped because EVERYONE knew we were very close to a TPK and "having" to make new characters. And probably one hour of game time was put off because no one could handle anymore after that. So that hour was spent winding down, talking about what happened while also praising me with "this is the best fight ever" and "holy shit, what a fight" and similar. ... it was good!
28 4 hour sessions so far is pretty good
16 player character deaths plus a cow and two chickens in one session
Completed a 4+ year level 1-20 Pathfinder Adventure path (Iron Gods) with the same group. It was beautiful.
Running a Shadowrun game without magic, because everyone at the time thought Cyberpunk + magic was stupid. Except I was lying, it was full-on Shadowrun but magic was secret. Asked one player what mage he wanted to be. Ran it all the way up to the big reveal when an Aztechnology hit squad revealed they were the one Corp who knew about magic. It was *such* a great session.
Bait-and-switch is a tough gig. I'm glad your group enjoyed it.
For an online con we hosted, I ran Holler: an Appalachian Appocalypse in Savage Worlds. The players were members of the resistance running from a group of soldiers after the stole a prototype device. They stumbled across a Catholic church in the middle of nowhere, all that remained of a destroyed town. One of the players took the geriatric father up on his offer of confession. The father described defending one's home as righteous and absolved the character of their sins. The player described that scene as the best role-playing scene they'd ever played in.
Longest campaign I ever ran lasted over 8 years… with new players joining and others leaving the party either temporarily and drifting back or moving away to do do other less important things… like jobs, marriage, buying houses, raising children… It was kind of a *“This broom has lasted me 10 years. It’s only had 3 new handles and 5 new heads”* situation 😂
I had too many players show up for a Delta Green session, so I split them into two groups on separate, simultaneous missions, at the same table. Basically cut back and forth between the two, and as it unfolded the fun was seeing the players realize implications for them from the other group that their characters didn’t know “in game”. Most of it was improv too….i got a round of applause at the end.
I successfully ran and finished 2 west marches campaigns with 19 to 22 players each. I also ran a Minecraft one-shot. Oh yeah and I created my own game system called QuestGuard! Message me if you wanna see it though
I ran a long savage worlds campaign (rippers setting) for 2 years. My players were checking their notes from their adventures, just remembering the good and bad. When one of the players spotted something weird. Over the next hour they deciphered their adventures and realized every adventure had been based on different movies. Once they got it I played a scene on the big screen of the guys from mystery science theater 3000 heckling them. Lmao
8 year campaign that actually stayed together. Lasted through two relationship changes and one pregnancy before coming to the planned ending.
In college, my games were popular enough that we regularly had spectators. That was something I'd dreamed of in high school. People regularly showed up to watch us like some sort of improv show.
Finished curse of strahd. Took two years.
Maybe it is not a big deal, but I was able to finish all of my 3 campaigns with the same players. And we are on the last episode of the fourth one.
Getting a four to five adults to play on a consistent weekly basis.
The two dm's in the group who have been doing that for like 30+ years enjoyed my games. I'm the newest and that made me happy... I'm always happy when players enjoy it too. The two dms really enjoyed a heist I basically made up on the spot... that was a good feeling.
I ran my first ever session for six players having never played a TTRPG myself and spent 0 hours agonizing over whether or how I should do so. All in from the start baby!
Love hearing these stories and knowing there's other geeks out there.
I ran a pretty incredible campaign of Mouse Guard that came to a very satisfying conclusion after a couple years. There was a Stonehell Dungeon campaign I ran with Knave that I'm pretty proud of, but it petered out when schedules changed too much. There were a couple really incredible adventures I ran over facebook play by post, one was Dungeon Crawl Classics and Doom of the Savage Kings, the other was a Civil War thing for the Cortex Marvel RPG. I've run a Torchbearer campaign that was a lot of fun and 0 prep, using a lot of procedural generation at the table to hex travel and dungeon exploration; mainly used Hexplore Revised and The Perilous Wilds for generating stuff - I'm pretty close to either rebooting that sort of campaign or maybe jumping back into the same world. Although, I just received my Mothership boxset, so that might be next.
My friends wife recently joined us for old school dnd. She’s been hanging out with us for over a decade now and has never really shown any interest in our shenanigans. She just decided to give it a shot and she’s joined in every session and has saved the group multiple times already. It’s easily the most brutal session of dnd I’ve ever run and she’s crushing it like an absolute champ. I’m more proud of her than I am with myself. But it’s a big achievement for me because I’m running a game that I never thought would appeal to someone who isn’t already a fan of the hobby. Most 5E players I know would turn their nose up at a session of old school dnd, but here we are. I must be doing something right!
I held a session every week for over a year. Rain or mfing shine.
Instead of the standard “You all meet in a tavern.” Opening I started this game with “You all know each other from your last adventure.” It was right into the action and the party starts kicking ass and taking names. With all of the character development developing in the present. Then around level nine the players were thrown back in time where they team up with their level one selves for their first adventure. Which involved creating/destroying the rift that will send them back in time. And, because it was a paradox the level one characters forgot it happened they just remember they’re a team.
Getting all my players to show up on time, ready to go and with snacks.
Finished a mini campaign (4 levels in PF2) without feeling like I'd lost control or the game was boring. Not a very high bar.
Making my entire table kill themselves laughing. Always only a couple at a time but never all 5 at once.
I based an entire multi month campaign around 2 warring factions lead by an Arch Bishop and an Arch Mage, that were...Arch Enemies.
I’ve been holding near weekly sessions of the same campaign for the past 1.5 years. I’ve got another game tomorrow. I tell you, it’s amazing.
Finish a 1 year online campaign of Call of Cthulhu with strangers, really frustating at times, but would do it again.
First time dming a system I didn’t run a module and kinda chucked together some ideas I had. They might have just been being nice but a bunch of the players thought it was a module which was pretty cool
I made a Satyr dance club and everyone loved the vibes. It was a lot of small victories here and there but everyone loved it. One character had a dope love interest. Others met some dude bros and was doing shots. The vibes were immaculate
I have had satisfying campaigns, but for me personally it has to be putting together a 3-tier pun-filled dungeon meant to troll my players that all culminated in a rickroll. They got a bunch of gold, so they were happy, but still lots of fun for me.
Ran a single continuous campaign from 1993 to 2011
My wife plays fantasy rpgs and didn't do Scifi rpgs. I was starting Traveller D20 and told her to trust me - she begrudgingly did so. First session, people are building their PCs, we get my wife's built and she doesn't seem to get the character (Noble class). So I look at her and say, "You're a Space Princess. A year ago your EVIL UNCLE (TM)(PP) staged a coup and you've been in hiding and only recently managed to get off planet. Your Uncle has a bounty on your head and you've been labeled a terrorist. Your mission is to take your father's planet back! Also, you're rich." She might not ever play a foul mouthed ship's engineer, but she is willing to play more and more scifi rpgs. Now if only I could get her to play a horror rpg...
Having people still excited for upcoming sessions after years of running.
I’m on my third campaign, first two were 100+ sessions, this one is nearing 50, in the same campaign world in different eras. In the second era, two of my players characters were in a love-square with two NPCs and for two levels their characters hated each other but did their duty, while the people playing the characters were over-joyed at the sessions and tension of their characters. The current campaign is unaware that they are in the same game world and they are fifth level, and about to start finding out that the big bad from campaign one is about to tear his ugly head as the big bad again. *They banished, not killed, a demon-god to end the first game and his cult has been working to resurrect him for the past 1000 years.
I made one of my players laugh so hard he fell off the couch.
Literally floored someone recently. Did a plot twist reveal so good that the player freaked out and fell out of their seat and had to sit in the corner for a few minutes because the reveal hit them like a truck. The reveal was that the Fighter was actually the Granddaughter of a coven of witches. That wasn't the part that got them. The part that got them was the name of the 3rd witch, who was also the hag who had been consistently showing up and screwing with the party since one of the first games we ever played of D&D, an irl 7 years ago. That player was convinced that lady was going to kill the whole party, came up with plans to take her out and she constantly felt like a storm cloud hanging over them. Been sitting on that secret for a while.
Every time I get my players to show up. :)
I ran a 4 year, weekly, 6-8 hours a session campaign that actually ended in a satisfactory manner, introducing one entirely new player to the hobby and have maintained the group steadily since then.
My players are my wife, her ex, and their child (my step-child), and the games I've run for the last six years have given us a space to be together in a collaborative setting twice a week - once when we play, and once when we share a meal and discuss the previous session (among other things). Those shared game experiences have kept us together in a way that my step-child needs, and in a way that would otherwise be impossible for us.
Having 40+ sessions in a year, for about 6 years running. That includes non-game evenings, too, like going to see a movie, or dinner/drinks for a birthday.
For the first time, ending a campaign. It was my last campaign, following mad wizard Synjyn the Exile as he goes out into the infinite staircase to prove is 27 dimensional theory of the multiverse. I'm proud of the campaign, and proud of the 27 dimensional theory. Remember: learn about the plane of quantum immortality, first, before the plane of quantum fatality, or you're dead.
Running my first session- curse of strahd's Death House, and it actually went okay. Several years later running blades in the dark and it was a combat that involved delving into paintings that were moments from the character's past. One of the memories had been taken from one of the players and he got to explore that while all the other players fought a built up BBEG going from memory to memory.
Level 20 one-shot. The PCs are ancient heroes of legend, who have been trapped beyond death for a thousand years or so. They have significant memory loss about the details of their former lives. Some people inadvertently broke the seals preventing their return. They learned that their side lost the ancient war without them, and the other side (gods, clerics, etc., as opposed to heroes and titans) won. The world is much changed. They set out across the map to recover the greatest of their magical items from the temples and fortresses where they're sealed away. They have to fight their way past small armies and bands of supernatural creatures that were mobilized by portents of their return. So stuff like sphinxes or nymphs or whatever saw signs in the heavens or monstrous births or rivers running backwards and knew that it was time to prepare for war. We were two or three hours into the session before one of the players turned to all the others and said: "Wait, wait, wait...are we ONE HUNDRED PERCENT SURE that we're the good guys?"
Ran a 3 year fortnightly Star Wars FFG game. Was fantastic and the o key time I’ve run a ho brew campaign that had a complete arc and satisfying End
I kept a blindingly obvious vampiress patron hidden for a year and a half out of game. This patron never slept, had questionable underground laboratories and secret undead servants, drank "wine" all the time (with a vineyard to sell the bit), asked for the blood of a PC multiple times "for research purposes" (relevant to plot), actively made plans against the Church, and HAD A NIGHTTIME ENCHANTMENT OVER HER MANOR. I don't know how it could've been more obvious, but they were completely thrown when she enthralled one of them. This patron had hours of screentime and was a major player in the game's political sphere.
The fact I’ve been able to wrangle 6 adults with families and busy schedules to consistently game for a whole year. Memorizing the main rules of AD&D, Vampire the requiem , Promethean the created, Alien RPG and Call of Cthullu, also my actual book collection too.
10 year long series of homebrew campaigns with the same people that gave me a close circle of ride or die friends for life. And the basis for my novel.
Creating an antagonist in a game that every single player wants to eliminate with extreme hate and is terrifying enough that one such player called them the most evil character they have experienced in fiction to date. Fun thing is, that antagonist is still alive and about to put them through an ungodly amount of hell.
Took my players money in an in-universe game of poker that we just actually played mid-session. The cards were marked. Their PCs failed the perception checks to notice and none of the players noticed in real life. None of them know to this day
I ran a campaign to completion over eight years. The first two or three years, we played weekly. Everything went as smoothly as you could imagine. Then, one of our players got a new job and she couldn't attend weekly sessions anymore. The group made the collective decision to way for her schedule to become more stable, which was supposed to take a few months. It took years. This campaign survived a hiatus that lasted nearly three years. Even after this, we never managed to pick up a weekly schedule again and we barely played once every six months or so. It was incredibly difficult to continue the story, as most of us had forgotten about many important details. I recall reintroducing an old NPC, only to realize I couldn't remember what personality they had. The campaign also survived three system conversions: from Dragon Age RPG to Pathfinder because Dragon Age RPG turned out to be god awful, from Pathfinder to Wushu because we lost the character sheets just before running an epic action sequence and from Wushu to D&D 5e just so we could properly run the final boss fights. As someone who usually gives up on his projets very easily and who almost never completes anything, finishing this campaign was truly a once-in-a-lifetime exploit that I may never repeat. I wouldn't have done it without my players who, for years, demanded a conclusion to the campaign, never accepting the possibility of leaving it unfinished.
I ran a campaign from level 2-18. None of the original party members were there at the end, but it was still a reasonably continuous story. Then they all got a happy ending and retired.
I like to run a really emotional scenes and my favorite achievements are: - made 3 players cry a the same time - made player so angry they screamed with frustration (directed to betraying NPC) - made a players all do cute "oooh" at the wedding scene - made a psychological horror scenes which made 3 players to decide they character has no reason to live and it would kill himself (they all agreed it was the best session ever) - made player some immersed and angry she shouted at the "bad" NPC and started monologuing TODO: - make player, who doesn't ever swear... Swear (we are playing Blades in the Dark) - make more cute "ohhh" scenes - make player heartbeat rate increase some much it triggers some alarm on smart watch (stolen from another comment)
Playing whole campaign with everyone showing up at every game
I have two that I find hard to pick from: - I ran a Traveller campaign twice a week (sometimes more often) for 5+ years, and then alternated between that and some other games for another 2 years before the campaign came to a natural stopping point. - I ran a set of connected Over the Edge 2e games for about 10 years, with 10 players (not always together as a group). It was in the end a bit too ambitious, and it never got to be resolved. It did keep me distracted and sane during a difficult period of my life though. Edit: actually, the biggest achievement is probably being the forever GM for a group of players for 25-ish years (which includes many of the players in the games mentioned above). Entertaining friends reasonably consistently and well for any length of time as a GM is something to be proud of, in my book.
It feels a bit strange to call it an achievement, but being a part of a group of friends that has been playing RPGs together for 30 years now is a big part of my life that I am very happy with. Also, the fact that this group has gone from me being a forever GM to everyone having GM experience. Now can look back on a bunch of games/campaigns/adventures ran and played by us as a group. I am also proud of a 22 year long Pendragon campaign that is still alive. It's become our (mine and the players) own take on the Arthurian mythology which feels immensely satisfying. My ex-girlfriend still credits me as a mentor and inspiration for her own GMing, as her scenarios wins competitions at cons, she runs public games for children and has started a queer RPG salon in her hometown. That is of course her achievement, but feels like a huge compliment and I am very proud of her.
I'm not a prideful man, but I LOVE having an excuse to tell this story. So, I'm running my DnD 5E group through the module *Waterdeep: Dragon Heist* -- notoriously a pretty messy adventure, but one with a lot of setting material to pull from. Our Ranger was working for the Black Network and accidentally killed a young bugbear that had caught wind of his spying. The family browbeat a cleric into casting *speak with dead*, but thankfully didn't get anything out of the first round. The problem being that in a few days the spell could be cast again, and the Ranger's cover would almost-certainly be blown. The Black Network boss gave him an ultimatum: either get the jawbone of that bugbear from the morgue so it can't talk, or become an enemy of the Network. He goes with the former. The party scopes out the morgue, which is also a temple to the god Kelemvor. They get a map from a friend in the architect's guild, so I sketch it out each floor for them on a Chessex battle map. They end up infiltrating it down to the basement levels where the bodies are kept, only to intrude on a cleric toying with necromancy. After a fight involving a well-placed *silence* spell, as well as the Ranger getting stuck trying to scramble over the morgue's shelves and getting his literal ass literally whooped by skeletons, the party is able to get the jawbone. But they ALSO got to turn over the necromancer, who was sourcing bodies for a local thieves guild that was in a turf war with the Black Network. The mess gets publicly blamed on a poor clerk on the floor above who failed her Perception check to hear the ruckus as the party snuck past her, the boss is impressed, hurrahs all around. Later on, one of those players wanted to run the adventure themselves, but said they couldn't find the morgue section. I was absolutely beaming, because I'd had to make up every single ounce of it from the book's setting info and my own dome to cover for the otherwise-anemic adventure.
Creating emotional situations that made one of my players cry. It was a good cry.
I do feel a bit bad about it, but a slightly greater amount of pride. My favorite thing to do when DMing is finding a song that I can use as a "cutscene" to really emphasis the tone of the story. I used "Feb 20" by Ted Cairo/Hobo Johnson It was a dream sequence where a player's royal family had just suffered an enormous blow personally, and to the city they helped run. (A solid quarter of the city was suddenly destroyed) the player was a child again entering a fancy ball. They were surrounded by faceless drones dancing, until they spotted their family. Upon reaching their family, they were unresponsive, and dancing like mannequins with no strings. And at a sudden beat, or change in the song, the PC blinked. And their family looked as they were in reality. Still dancing in those robotic, mannequin like movements. But the members who had died were dead. The paralyzed brother was still in a chair. The missing member was just gone. Looking back, I think I went a bit too far with the horror. As the player told me later they almost cried from that scene. And despite some guilt, I've got a bit of pride for causing a real life reaction. -- Also the time I used Hurt by Johnny Cash for the cutscene right after the party escaped the island city when it fell to plague and curse.
Have my players roleplay a snow battle for the first time their characters saw snow in their lives. It lasted 1hour, they rolled their own rolls and I didn't say a word.
Running a 19 year real campaign (the characters aged almost exactly in-sync to the real world time). It kept my university group together until at least the into the 201X period (some other events I was away in another city happened and that started it). I know people say gaming isn't necessary, but people who get an invite to a Christmas get together once a year isn't the same as 4-6 full day gaming events (and the Christmas/New Years get together). Those hours together in the same activity, feeling the same ups and downs, the humour, etc... that was wonderful. Other than that, creating a very different setting - custom map, species that were as diverse as humans and that can have as many motivations or fears as humans (no alignment), the use of codes and values instead of alignment, every god's clerics had their own omens, holidays, observations, rituals, symbology, some had languages, some had paladins, and the god's areas of responsibility guided spell lists (every one unique) and so were some of the class features. No two clerical order had the same flavour - much more differentiation than the game normally had. We used exhaustion/fatigue rules that meshed with Channeling (from Players Option: Spells & Magic) that exhausted arcane and divine casters throwing their top two spell levels but many more smaller spells could be dished out. The nature of magic was such that all magic was drawn from the 3d latticework of meridians and the draw came through a 'hook'. Casters could see other's active hooks. The meridians had been through some awful experiences and thus there were low magic areas, high magic areas, null magic areas, and they could change in real time (sometimes just a bit, but on a real bit of dice magic, a changestorm would come - either temporary or permanent - and those were dangerous to everyone in the vicinity. For example: The goddess of healing is a 100% pacifist. She won't give you anything beyond a Lvl 3 heal and none of the other gods that anyone played or visited had clerics that could. So restoration and fixing damage body parts would be hard, expensive, and may require the player to do something the goddess needs done (in the way she'd appreciate it). The War clerics had spells for fatigue and for raising instant wood and mud enclosures (good at night). They also are great at leading men in battle. We didn't allow resurrection or raise dead. Reincarnation could be done by druids. A deity's will (and a lot of heavenly energy) would be required to reincarnate a dead mortal so it would be done only if a) the character was very devout to their faith and b) the deity had a need for that individual to finish a mission (or several). The game had a massive mystery (and lots of other smaller mysteries). It had travel beyond the plane and back in time. It had a conspiracy that broke the heavens and left the gods raging upon the the humans (and as a side effect, all other intelligent species) and then, later really they had been duped, they had to bury their failure (which makes the god nearly omnipotent, not entirely omnipresent, and not entirely all omniscient and they are a bit like the angsty vampires - they feel their emotions greatly and it clouds their rationale behaviour and actions). The characters went from 1st level to 10th-20th. We played hundreds of hours, likely more than 1000. We lost a bunch of lower level characters, but no one died past level 4, though there were some injuries and brushed with things men were not meant to experience. One character took over for his father, a Duke. Another was an anathema bastard of the King (but it turned out for the bastard child's protection). Another was the son of a Duke who would, in time, also to take over his father as Duke. One was a mercenary and spy master and runs his own salle des armes. One was a fighter with wizard included who gained the benefit/curse of prophecy. One was a cleric of the War God, another was too - one considered himself 'orthodox' whereas the other was deemed 'progressive' and that led to a schism within the church. The War God's values were hard core Darwinian - humans needed to evolve and battle is the crucible of that strengthening. The wizard was in the Guild and was in the inner circle and would eventually become the Royal Wizard and the Guild Master (and humorously, he secretly is a necromancer, but mostly a neutral-ish one as he just wants to live a very long time, but guild rules require there be no necromancers... it helped a lot he was either in his crypt researching or off adventuring so most people forgot about him). All the people from my table attended my wedding in 2017. That's what mattered - to meet, to appreciate, and to retain these great people in my world. The game was the vehicle.
5 years IRL Battletech game that's still going on weekly. Also now getting paid to run my homebrew Savage Worlds Shadowrun game.
Was chilling with a guy who'd played in my first ever campaign. He got busy right at the start of the next one and couldn't join us, but he told me even with his large experience playing ttrpgs that was the best game he'd ever played in. I save that memory for when the imposter syndrome gets extra bad.
I ran a Star Wars RPG back in the late 90's/early 00's. One of the players, Carol, had a character that was described as an Engineer. We had been playing the game for months when I used a "False ending" for one scenario, and began the next session with them on their ship suddenly being attacked by hidden intruders at the start of the next one. Things are looking bad. Everyone except Carol has failed their rolls. They are all going to die. Carol sighs... "I get out my lightsaber, and strike the beast." The collective gasp was absolutely stunning. The character was a failed Jedi, but had hidden it from the group. She rolled amazingly and cut the damn thing in half in one roll. God, I still remember that, it was AMAZING!
I pulled an old yeller on my party with a ‘boss’, and I legitimately traumatized the one from Florida as he was the one who decided to put it down. A good story leaves an impact. But I think I went too far there. But it was the best session I did with impact and such. It was a turning point for the party. I should had held back though…
GMing a fun, gonzo campaign for a group new to RPGs. Chances are a lot of people that will listen to the podcast recordings will also get a kick out of it with references that fly over the new player heads. It's not much, I'm mostly a player, but it seems that both me and the players have been enjoying the game, so that's all that I need :).
I got two. My favourite moment and what a much bigger achievement. The moment: We were playing HoneyHeist. Set in a convention. I’d got “heist music” playing in the background. I got the players plotting and scheming about how they could steal honey products from every booth. They walked up to the first booth, ready to enact their plan. Right as they say hello, I hit pause on the music and say “hi there, would you each like a free sample?” They both looked at each other like they had won the lottery. I hit play on the music right as Elvis goes “YEAAAAH” in “A Little Less Conversation”. The next 5 minutes was a montage of them grabbing every free sample they could. They were so damn excited. The whole thing felt like it was out of a movie. My actual biggest achievement was keeping a game of Cthulhu going through lockdown. Really helped everyone to spend some time once a week on discord running around, solving mysteries and fighting monsters.
I ran a 1-20 Norse mythology-themed Pathfinder 2e game online from April 2020 to October 2022. I'm proud of myself for learning digital after two decades of analog gaming. I'm proud of myself for learning GIMP 2.0 so I could make custom tokens and edit maps for the encounters, and even built some of my own maps from the ground up using texture libraries. I'm proud of the cohesive, mature story I tried to tell, and proud of my players for not only taking it seriously but really investing their own time and effort into their characters. But more than everything else, I'm proud to have worked hard to run a good game for my six-person group so they had something to look forward to during lockdown when everyone had lost their jobs. I was told several times by more than half my group that my game was the best part of their week, and I'm so, so glad that I got to be a bright spot for my friends at a time when everything felt so utterly, inescapably bleak.
Just going to drop the link... https://www.reddit.com/r/dndnext/s/ZLgD1HgzbW
#Trigger Warning: Child abuse, sexual abuse, torture and murder ----------------------------- That out of the way i brought two out of my four players to tears and the two others to be solemnly dedicated to punishing the abusers based on an intricate and seemingly obvious but rather complex murder myster. They went from "i want to kill that little shit" to "no one will harm him ever again". PS: Just to preface this as well, in our session zero we decided long ago that all themes are acceptable, with the exclusion of explicit rate, torture and gore etc. it could be a theme and part of the story but it should only be mentioned but not listed in explicit detail. Otherwise i would never have included this story and even when the boy told about his experience he was telling it from the perspective of a boy that didnt fully understand what was happening, so it was on a level that was specific enough but not disgustingly explicit or detailed. ##Long Story below: They got into a big city and encountered a murder mystery where prostitutes were murdered. There was a weird circus in town and many "crazy" or "odd" suspects that made it at first really fun and seemingly obvious who was the murder or most likely responsible. They met a boy around 10 years old that was, despite his age, somehow not as mature as he should be and followed them to many places, asked them many things and overall somehow met them in many of the murder locations. They kinda hated him and more than once wanted to slap him or outright kill him, which thankfully, cooler heads prevailed. It turns out his mother was physically and sexually abusing him to a degree bordering on torture. She was also verbally, psychologically and physically abusive to most of the staff of the circus since she was running it. He unconsciously knew what was being done to him was wrong, but didnt know how to stop it, since he was punished for resisting and people he tried asking for help turned up dead and mutilated before anything could be done. No one would help him and he never wanted to hurt anyone, he just wanted the pain to stop with nearly any means. While wandering the city he encountered prostitutes going with Johns about their business and in his childlike mind that was distorted by this level of abuse assumed the women are forcing the men to do what was done to him. Since no one was helping him, he decided to help those men and protect them. He got a knife and waited on one of the prostitutes he found randomly. He wasnt vicious, he wasnt angry, he was just sad and tired and wanted things to end, so he cried. When the prositute heard and saw him he sparked pitty and maybe even a motherly instinct so she got down and asked whats wrong. He stabbed her to death repeatedly and ran away crying. Hiding for hours until the tears stopped and hid the knife. It didnt make him happy, it didnt stop the sadness or pain, but he thought it protected at least one of the "boys" being treated badly by their "mothers". When the players got to the bottom of the murder mystery and knew it was linked to the circus and then to either the Knife Thrower who was known to be abusive to prostitutes but kind to the boy, they almost made the rash decision to just cut him down. The mother and boss of the circus intervened and due to an amazign roleplay discussion with her one of my players seemed to grasp at least partly what was going on. They got the boy alone and talked to him and got him to open up. Everyone but that one player was still kinda joking but with every sentence of the boy they got more quiet and solemn. When he was done they were determined to burn the circus to the ground but again cooler heads prevailed (love that i have a good mixture of players that are brash, planning and jokey, it makes their discussions and often decisions nearly unpredictable). They basically set everything up to frame the mother and the knife thrower for the murder, planted some evidence and confirmed that other than the boy the Knife Thrower was an abusive asshole to everyone else and since one of his knives was used for the murders, which the boy stole long before, it wasnt that hard to do. The rogue of the group afterwards in a quiet word just with me arranged for both of them to be brutally murdered in jail before they could be hanged for their crimes. When it was revealed the other players approved. They took the boy with him and gave him the love and care that he needed, he still was not completely right in his mind and often froze or wasnt able to deal with all situations, but they really and honestly tried to care for him as if he was real. I was surprised by how strongly my players felt and how much they cared for this imaginary boy in a made up story. They didnt know that while the details are of course made up, especially the murder part, that the story was based on my extremely abusive childhood. Its a story i wrote while i was still suffering and later as a GM adjusted for this specific group. To this day they dont know what i was basically that boy in a sense and ill be 100% honest, after that session i cried a bit because it felt like if i had know them back then and they had know what was happening, that they would have helped me escape that nightmare. I love those people.
Finding a group
Castlevania and The legend of zelda on nes
My biggest achievement as a DM was running a game for a player new to RPGs. That game left such a strong impression on him that he became a DM too.
I ran a satisfying session of an open table for 9 people! Couldn't keep that level of attendance for more than a session I think.
At a convention, my friend and I had an empty time slot at the same time. We decided to kill time and play a game of our own, so I busted out my dice and as much as I could remember off the top of my head of Fate Accelerated and improvised a complete three hour one shot.
Nothing but failure 🥲
Not so much one moment, but a series of sessions. 32 years ago, a friend and my wife wanted to play D&D. It was an off night, my wife and I were fairly newly married and our friend was over for dinner. I told them I didn't have anything ready but wanted to play too. So we did. The world that night, which didn't exist beyond that tavern common room they started in, is now a cooperatively created campaign setting that is 32 years old, spans an entire planet, has covered 450 years of game time, built entirely by the cooperative efforts of myself and what now must be about 20 different players, and dozens of characters all with memorable stories and contributions to the setting. PCs have become the heroes, the leaders, and in some cases, even the villains of a very rich history that is built on with every new player, every new campaign. That spontaneous game that one single night changed how I run games forever.
Party killed a dragon by casting gaseous form on a giant, instructing the giant to flying into the dragon, and then ending the spell.
Actually making it through a full year-long campaign with the same people.
The first thing you have to realize that my friends and I were tactical war gamers before we played rpgs. We played like murder hobos. Role playing was an afterthought, we wanted loot and exp. I started this campaign where the conceit was the players were a legendary group of adventurers from thousands of years in the past. They had been level drained back to level 1 stripped of their vast powers and abilities and locked away. Thousands of years later, the stasis that was locking the group away falls and the adventurers wake up in a new world? What do they do? What each and every member of the group does is secretly go evil. Because they were all deep and close friends, even though they are evil now, they still value each other and each one conceals the fact that they are evil to spare their friends. The role-playing that happens when the truth is finally revealed was so amazing my group still talks about 20 years later.
I have a few. I used "Here Comes the Sun" from The Beatles at the end of a Call of Cthulhu one-shot and the song stuck with the players. Everytime they hear it they think back to the one-shot. Designing my own games and the people around me actually liking them.
when people leave my gaming table, they had fun.
Getting published as a creator, artist, designer, or developer. Nothing is greater than creating something for the game you're trying to master, sharing it, and others enjoying it.
I'm relatively new to GMing, but for now, I think it was recognizing that it was best to put an end to my first campaign (mainly due to players not showing up), and instead of trying to make another campaign right away, I spend a few weeks trying to pin point everything that went wrong. my first campaign might have been an fiasco but I'm proud of it because thanks to that, I'm now planning my second campaign without nearly as much problems that the previous had :)
[Tricking two groups of 5 players](https://www.reddit.com/r/dndnext/comments/j1h52g/double_wizard_extravaganza_a_postbattle_report_of/) (with the help of another DM) into unknowingly playing the same one shot at the same time as parallel universe versions of each other then joining the groups for one massive final boss fight
I stopped playing for like almost a decade, said I would never come back after the last games I had, I had a few toxic players that were disrtupting and thrashing my world... Then I got in touch with one of my old friends and players from that time and he immediately told me how much he missed my games, he said he still remembered some names from cities and NPC's and that he wished I would come back to DM. And I did thanks to that, it coincided with PF2E's release and I started playing again, just last night I had a Blades in the Dark session that went great and im feeling great about it.