We’ve Finally Finished Playing Drakkenheim After Three Years Of Sessions And I Can’t Help But Feel

We’ve finally finished playing Drakkenheim after three years of sessions and I can’t help but feel such a weird sense of grief over Chris’ ending, despite the party having "won" the adventure.

The final chunk of the campaign suffered quite a lot due to external reasons -- the final 10-ish sessions took us an entire year to get through due to scheduling issues, absolutely killing the momentum of the campaign, and for various reasons the DM was unable to commit the time/thought the campaign really needed to wrap up the story in a satisfying way.

Drakkenheim as a campaign book is very story-driven, featuring faction intrigue and a larger, overarching plot to keep things moving while having players choose a specific goal/quest for their character to tie them directly into the story. But by the end of the campaign, we were completely glossing over NPC interactions and faction relationships, and essentially hand-waving the completion of half of the party’s personal quests, ruining what we had been building up to throughout the whole campaign.

Chris’ personal quest -- to study the eldritch corruption taking over the city, and someday reverse it -- was never resolved. His character arc involving his relationship with one of the factions was dropped, and his bond with his mentor mostly ignored.

It felt unearned to use his character epilogue to resolve all of his struggles that should have been addressed in the main campaign, and so it ended up much more ambiguous than the rest of the party -- where other party members were looking towards the future, becoming nobility or attaining pseudo-godhood or traveling the planes or whatever else, Chris was left exactly where he was at the start of the campaign: trying to find a way to cleanse the contamination, something that may or may not ever be achievable.

There’s nothing stopping me from writing a continuation to Chris' story, and the DM has encouraged us to do as we please with our characters from here. But it feels weird knowing anything I do from here is for myself alone, when we spent the last three years making this story together.

The DM has mentioned possibly coming back together in the future for a short adventure where we track down and kill the Duchess a year or so after the campaign ends, and I could see Chris hoping to extract some information about the contamination from her -- depending on how that adventure goes, maybe that will redeem the ending of the main campaign. Or maybe not; we’ll see.

Ultimately, I think I will eventually figure out a better epilogue for him. I love the world of Drakkenheim and the lore has so much fun stuff to build off of. I want him to have something greater than what he got, and the world is so detailed and creative I know I can give him the ending he deserves. Maybe I'll illustrate some fun post-game comics or similar to make it feel more "real."

But we’ll see. For now, things are raw, so I’m gonna take some time to sit on things and mull over where I’m gonna go with him from here.