Killing Darlings in D&D

 So, I have a lot planned for the remainder of my Ravnica-based D&D campaign.

The players are in the middle of a fight against one of the major "praetors," members of each of Ravnica's guild who have allied together to bring about Phyrexian "compleation" to the massive city plane, and for them to rule over it as a kind of Ravnican version of Phyrexia (rather than 5 praetors, like New Phyrexia, there would be ten). The players have fought the Simic, Rakdos, Izzet, and Azorius members of this conspiracy, and are now fighting the Golgari one, leaving Selesnya, Gruul, Boros, Orzhov, and Dimir to go.

On top of that, because I wanted to play around in the broader Magic multiverse, each player character actually possesses a planeswalker spark, which will ignite under certain circumstances for each of those player characters. Two have already ignited, and thus can travel to other planes.

Finally, the campaign's finale, which will take place at level 20, will see them attacking New Phyrexia and destroying Elesh Norn, the mastermind behind this plot.

As you might imagine, it's a lot to get through.

It might be too much to get through.

So, I've been thinking about ways to pare things down.

First off, the last few Praetor adventures have been quite long. I think this Golgari one has taken months, as there's been a kind of extended dungeon-like journey through the Undercity to reach the true, actual dungeon, which itself has taken a few sessions.

So, I think in most cases, the later Praetor stories will probably be built more as big set-pieces rather than extensive adventures - maybe two big things, like something that reveals the bad guy and the big confrontation.

Next, I think I need to restrain myself on how big the interplanar adventures will be. I had this idea for a long journey across all of Innistrad, but I think now I want to just drop them into a part of it (either Kessig or Nephalia, probably) and have a one-or-two session adventure there.

Finally, one of my players has this ongoing plot in which he is trying to free the pseudo-divine "elder shade" he worships (a former member of the Obzedat Council) from his prison, and I've, well, dragged it out a bit.

Now, this campaign is a lot of fun, but I also don't want it to go on forever. So I've been thinking about how to streamline it to get a bit more forward momentum.

Really, the plan for the campaign was itself part of the problem: I bit off a LOT. I think future campaigns are going to try to be built more around the player characters' plots and thus make sure that it's always stuff the players feel extra invested in.