Out with a bang

[Fuseboy]

I'm looking for vague advice and anecdotes about ending story arcs.

Our Burning Gdinsk has somewhat exceeded its originally planned length of six sessions; tonight's will be the eleventh session. A number of the bangs along the way were somewhat.. expansive, and so the story moved somewhat out of the boundaries set by the original burning.

The shared belief is about finding a way to resuscitate Kursk, who, by way of being in a coma has been a sort of MacGuffin. Most of the conflict centred around an upswell of cultist activity, culminating in the murder of a noble cultist and (later) an all-out fight with some sorcerers and their orc underlings.

A little while ago we talked about it as a group, and it seems that it's time to bring the arc to closure. The characters are poised to achieve their goals, and the obvious bad guys have been felled.

I'm meditating on the perfect bangs to play to keep the pressure on, but without introducing tangents that will interfere with closure.

As I said I'm not really looking for specific bangs (you'd need a lot more information), just vague advice, anecdotes and general wisdom about ending story arcs.

[quixoteles]

I was talking to a friend of mine and her claimed that most fantasy novels ended in death or self-imposed exile. Orson Scott Card says that children end novels when they accept families like Pellaz did at the end of Wraethlu book one and adults end novels when they find communities to support like Ender did at the end of Speaker for the Dead. Can your players recognize any of community that needs them to stop being MLK or Genghis khan or Conan or something and settle down. There has to be some way to get the players back to boring, where they started from, the endless years waiting for something cool to happen.

[Fuseboy]

That's interesting. When you say, "children end novels", do you mean child protagonists in novels or immature authors?

[wreckage]

Well, in drama, there used to be two endings: everyone dies horribly as an ultimately inevitable result of events set in motion by the main character (Tragedy).... or, everyone finds their place in society- usually involving marriage or impending marriage, I suppose- which was the ending for Comedy.

Maybe you could have the characters, now advanced in years and well into the rewards (or damnation) of their chosen retirement/peace/normalcy, with lifepaths and so on as appropriate, and run the last bangs as reminiscence or flashback.

[eruditus]

Most arcs I develop now-a-days have an end condition... after six sessions if you have not done X then Y happens. It was written into the game.

I understand that wasn't your approach and that's cool but I mention is because maybe the natural end to a story-arc is the beginning of another. Maybe a specified goal for the archs ending is in order now (see below for sudden occurances that alter the stakes).

Do you plan on staying with the game and some of the characters? Or are you moving on to something entirely different?

Rachel did a few nice montages to wrap things up. Allow each player a wrap up scene. Ask them "how would you like things to end in context to the events at hand?" Find the obstacles to having that ending according to their BITs and have a few rolls getting them to that point one way or the other. I suspect that would make a nice wrapup with some closure for the PCs.

If they are moving onto a new story arc then discuss the new story arc, institute a little closure but move forward and incorporate some threads in their beliefs that might still refer to the old story arch bringing in NPCs and locales from the old arch into the new one.

Or HAVE a climactic scene. What even would be inspired by the events of past sessions but change them forever? What might happen that would make the character have one final push? Maybe a sudden deadline. Maybe an unexpected death.

Finally, discuss with one another how beliefs will now change. What beliefs have resolved? What are unlikely to resolve? How would those beliefs change in a way that pushes the story to a close?

Is that at all helpful?
- Don

[Fuseboy]

Rachel did a few nice montages to wrap things up. Allow each player a wrap up scene. Ask them "how would you like things to end in context to the events at hand?" Find the obstacles to having that ending according to their BITs and have a few rolls getting them to that point one way or the other. I suspect that would make a nice wrapup with some closure for the PCs.

The game was last night, and I'd say it came off well; we managed to have a satisfying conclusion. Coincidentally, what you describe is exactly what we did. Most of the epilogues that the players narrated involved an element of risk, and I thought it would be fun to incorporate a test to add an element of uncertainty to it.

I'll post a longer write-up elsewhere.

Thanks for your ruminations, everyone!