Every good RPG has to come to an end someday, it’s a sad fact of life. Even if your gaming group isn’t breaking up, sometimes you have to move on to a new game. That begs the question, how do you end your campaign? Do you have to plan out a pre-scripted ending? Is your game doomed to die a slow, drawn out death while your players eventually get bored and leave? Or is there a happy medium to be somewhere in-between?

The most hysterical way to end your campaign is, of course, with a total-party-wipe. This is where, in one massive, soul crushing, defeat, all player characters are viciously and horrifically murdered, leaving no one to resurrect them (see the Tomb of Horrors). While this can occasionally be pre-planned, it is more often than not, an unexpected occurrence that can (and sometimes MUST) lead to physical violence in the real world.

The classic way to end an RPG campaign is to have the party achieve their ultimate goal. They’ve finally slew the Great Red Wyrm, or toppled the evil Galactic Overlords, or successfully removed all the parasitic-alien-butt-maggots from the collective asses of humanity. This kind of ending however, is predicated on your campaign having had an overarching goal to begin with. Not all campaigns fit into this mold. Personally, I prefer to run more open world games, where the players dictate the direction of the story.

This type of open-ended campaign can prove much more difficult to bring to a satisfying conclusion. There are a few tips I can offer however. One suggestion is to pepper in a slow burning, overarching plot through the campaign. You shouldn’t railroad your players, but if you’re flexible, you can work your story in around them. If you’re subtle about it, it can build up, event upon seemingly unrelated event, without them even noticing. This can create great surprise moments for your players and even bring about the “classic ending” scenario. This isn’t always possible though, so the question still remains of how to end a completely open ended campaign? Allow me to relate an anecdote.

Recently, my weekly Wednesday night Pathfinder game hit a crossroads. We’d been playing since the summer, but things had been lagging and we were gearing up to switch games and have someone else take over as GM. Without a long explanation, my players were trouncing around an archipelago called Dracos, nominally searching for the missing pieces of an ancient artifact. In reality, they were murder-hobo-ing their way from town to town with no real agenda in mind. They ended up back in the port city of Kraken’s Rest, which they had left in a bit of hurry a few weeks before, after murdering the stable master in a horse-related disagreement, and then slaughtering a few city guards while fleeing. Additionally, they had been contracted by the Drakir (a governor of sorts), to kill a rival Drakir in a neighboring province. The party had, of course, completely forgotten about most of this, and waltzed back into town like nothing was wrong. After a series of mishaps, they end up in violent barroom clash with the Drakir and a number of city guards. Somehow, one of the player characters, Captain Randall (a notorious riot-starter and horse-murderer) managed to get the upper hand and kill the Drakir during the fight.

It was at this point that as the GM, I saw an opportunity that I could either seize, or let pass by. I had not really fleshed out the political system of this region, so I had a certain amount of flexibility here. I decided at that moment that the title of Drakir could be something won by combat, so upon seeing the old Drakir’s death, all the city guardsmen drop to their knees to declare Captain Randall the new Drakir. There was a little more role-playing to be done to wrap things up, but this provided us with a good stopping point. We will likely get back to these characters at some point, but even if not, leaving them in a new found position of power, ruling over a city, provided a decently satisfying conclusion to their adventure. Even if it wasn’t the conclusion they were necessarily looking for.