3 Ways To Make The End Of The Arc Awesome

On Friday night my face-to-face 4e D&D group met for the final session of the current campaign arc. This session is the culmination of 9 months of play for this small group and after this we are adding two new players (one brand new to D&D and one new to 4e). The group is in the low paragon tier (level 12) and I wanted this battle to be a proper climax to the story and for it to be a memorable encounter for the group. I want to share with you 3 things I did to accomplish that goal…

1. Make it Dynamic

What do I mean by dynamic? A dynamic encounter engages the PCs in more ways than simply offering up creatures to beat on – it challenges them to take interesting actions. The two easiest ways to make an encounter dynamic are to add strange terrain and time constraints. When I say terrain I do not mean simply adding a couple of squares of difficult terrain to slow the PCs down. What I am talking about is adding terrain effects that change the context of the encounter. The time constraints can be connected to the terrain effect or be completely separate. Here is an example of how I used these two factors to make the encounter dynamic for this group:

The final battle of this arc took place in the Astral Plane. The party went there for various different reasons (which I will refrain from discussing here), and have arrived at a location called the Soul Spire. The Soul Spire is on a small island far out in an unstable area of the Astral Sea.

On this island is what appears to be a volcano spewing molten lava, fire, and smoke. Except it is an Astral Volcano… spewing Astral Lava, which chews through the fabric of space on the Astral plane and devours the island as it flows along, leaving nothing but astral sea in its wake. In other words, the PCs need to avoid this area or they will be lost into nothingness.

The time constraint comes into play when the players realize that the Astral Lava is flowing faster every time it moves. In the first round of combat, the ground shakes and tremors plague the island as the volcano lets the party know that it is active. In the second round of combat, lava spewed from the volcano and devoured a burst one size area around the roughly 2×2 square caldera (12 squares total destruction). Round four saw the devouring of a further burst 2 sized area (48 more squares). In round five, astral lava destroyed land in a burst 4 sized area. By this time, the lava has now devoured almost the entire island and the party will perish if they do not escape or come up with an interesting solution.

The Astral Lava and the resulting terrain change and time constraints had a large impact on the battle – their context changed. The players were suddenly aware that, while they would have to be mindful of the creatures they were fighting, they had to be even more mindful of the environment in which the fight was taking place. The context of the encounter was changed for the players as it turned from a fight with a death titan and his lackeys to a fight on a changing landscape that had to be resolved quickly and with ingenuity.

 

2. Give the Players Tough Choices

I am speaking about a moral choice – the “bring the baddie to justice or bring justice to the baddie?” type of question. This works much better if you have planned it far in advance, but it can also be done on the fly if you think quickly.

I try to give my villains good reasons for the things they do (at least in their minds). Because of that, major villains in my game are usually not just pure evil for evils sake – they have motives, rationale, and devise plans to achieve their goals. The best way to give the players pause is to have them identify with the villain. The easiest way is to have the  villain wronged in some way in the past, and now the villain has set in motion some evil machinations in order to right the wrongs done to them. Since the players understand the wrongs and why they are painful, it is easier for them to relate to the villain.

In my campaign arc the main villain is a human woman who was wronged by a clan of dwarves – they punished her and her dwarven husband by taking their children and selling them to a Githyanki slaver. This woman tried to pursue but was rebuffed. She then spent years finding a tutor and learning arcane skills in an effort to search for her children on the Astral Plane. By the time she succeeded in gaining entrance to the plane, she found that her children were dead. Her anguish and anger spurred her to evil actions to try and make amends for what was done to her family.

In the final battle the PCs come face to face with her. She is a sympathetic villain – her story, which the PCs know in much more detail than I have given here, causes them to have compassion for her. At the same time, her efforts to bring her children back are actively destroying the fabric of the Astral Plane and consequences are bleeding onto the mortal plane. The ultimate question here is “Do we use our knowledge of the wrongs done to her to try and convince her to stop, or do we destroy her without a chance for redemption? ” This is the type of question that makes for good role-playing.

 

3. Make it Meaningful

In general, this one is a bit easier to explain as it is the most intuitive of the three. Since this is the end of a campaign arc it is very important that the final encounter be worth it. You don’t want your players to feel like they just spent six months working through a story-line that ends in a fizzle. The best way to do this is to make sure that the outcome of the encounter has consequences that reach far and wide.

This can be accomplished in many ways and depends, in part, on the level of the party. For example: If this arc spanned levels 1-5, the outcome should affect the region of the world in which your party has been adventuring in some major way. They should become well known in the area and royalty may request their help from now on, or perhaps they are feared by those currently in power, leading to attempts at manipulation. Contrast that with an arc that covers levels 10-15. By the end of this arc, the PCs should be known throughout the world. Their deeds are well known, bards and scholars have written books about their exploits, and they have done some truly wondrous things already (e.g. fought off demons or perhaps visited the Feywild or Underdark). The interactions the PCs have with others in the world should reflect these facts. In other words, as soon as the final encounter is over, the people in the world will want to know about it and news will spread far and wide – role-playing some important interactions is the easiest way to bring this into focus.

Just as enhancing the game with tough choices makes it richer, varying the consequences of the party’s actions at the end of a story arc can cause the players (PCs) to invest more in the world. Sometimes the party will not succeed to the degree that they envisioned when starting the campaign. I try to work different degrees of success and failure into the campaign so that different consequences may be possible for a given arc. Perhaps the party succeeds in stopping an immediate threat, but they do not completely destroy the evil arch-mage – the commoners may welcome the PCs home with fanfare! At the same time there may be a new prevailing feeling of doubt and fear among the populace – akin to “if our heroes could not defeat big baddie, how can we ever hope to be safe? ” The PCs could encounter this pervasive attitude among the people and it may increase the possibility of war between nations, continents, or races.

As you plan out the last few sessions of the campaign arc, think about the consequences of success and failure in this endeavor. In the case of my campaign, success and failure were not the only two possible outcomes – they were simply the most obvious ends along a continuum. In this case, the party actually defeated the creatures in the battle, but failed to kill or convert the main villain (the human woman I talked about above). The fact that she survived the encounter (but that the party succeeded in destroying the soul spire) has consequences they do not yet realize. If they had killed her or not destroyed the spire, the consequences would be different. If the party had perished, the consequences would also be different, though the players would generate new PCs that would live in the world which reaped those consequences.

 

This post was much longer than I thought it was going to be! I hope these tips help you create an arc ending encounter that is meaningful, exciting, interesting and, most of all, fun. Until next time, I wish you good gaming.