Casting Shadows

The last few questions for RPGaday 2015 were rough. I am glad to see that Day 15 is steering us to more pleasant waters. Today’s question asks us about the longest campaign we have ever played. I favor campaign play myself, so this is a question that has my interest. I have a certain measure of envy for those souls out there whose lives have enjoyed greater stability of location and game group than mine, and who can count the years their campaigns have run in decades. Maybe one day I will get there.

The longest campaign I have ever run is a question we could look at in multiple lights. One being the longest period in which a campaign was considered active, and another being the longest period the campaign saw active and regular play. By way of explanation my early forays in D&D soon coalesced into a consistent campaign world, but play was sporadic as we shifted from DM to DM, and flirted with the varied expressions of the game all competing with each other in the 80s. My Basic campaign ostensibly ran for about 4 years, and my Advanced campaign for perhaps 3, but that is purely calendar time, not time spent in full-on, regular play of those worlds. We gamed several times a week, but who ran the game and in what setting, shared or independent, was pretty much random. These campaigns were active for years, but we were not regularly active within any of them.

For this question, I think we need to go with the second interpretation – or at least that is the direction I wish to go. I think for this answer, I will use the longest instance of a consistent and persistent game world, played on a regular schedule, with me as the sole GM. For me, that is a campaign that ran for just short of 6 years, set in the original World of Darkness and coming to incorporate each of the 5 classic games as they were released. Play was primarily focused on Werewolf and Mage with a very strong foundation of Vampire and Mummy, with a hint of Wraith. Mortals and Changelings were an infrequent aperitif.

The benefits of such a long-running campaign were in seeing players grow to take on more and different characters, spin off their own Chronicles, borrow lore from important events to form the foundations of wholly new Chronicles, and keep coming back for more Stories set within the campaign we all cut our teeth on – The Lie in Belief.

Since then, the longest campaigns I have managed to run have been of the 1-2 year variety as players come and go. Life in Korea has its perks, but group stability cannot be counted among them.

#rgaday2015