My Ravnica game has been going for over six years at this point. I never expected it to.
Ironically, I credit the pandemic, which initially disrupted it shortly after it began (I literally had my first session on March 1st of 2020, two weeks before the Covid lockdowns started). But once I became familiar with online tools like Roll20 and Zoom (later Discord,) it became logistically easier to run because no one had to drive across LA and find parking in my neighborhood (which has only gotten worse, parking-wise, in the thirteen years I've lived in this part of town).
The campaign has also gone on so long because I had so much to get through. I sped through tier 1, simply having a few one-session adventures there to introduce the guilds (usually putting two in conflict with one another, with the party acting on behalf of the Chamber of the Guildpact to resolve disputes) and to introduce the clandestine conspiracy that wound up being a Phyrexian plot to take over the plane.
Tier 2 was entirely dedicated to taking out one member of this conspiracy, a Simic doctor who had built essentially a sleeper-agent cloning facility. Then, tier 3 was all about dealing with the conspirators in each of the other 9 guilds, each of which had a dedicated adventure associated with it (though we admittedly sped a bit through the Selesnya one).
Now, if I were to do this again, I would have A: shortened each of the guild-themed adventures and B: especially gotten the party started on them earlier, probably making the Simic chapter a lot shorter and letting them take out other foes in tier 2. I ultimately wound up pushing the final conspirator, from House Dimir, into tier 4 because I just couldn't justify not letting them level up after taking out multiple major villains.
As we're nearing level 19, having spent level 18 jumping between six other planes to collect shards of the Golgothian Sylex, a canonical doomsday weapon (that actually wound up becoming part of the real plot in WotC's own Phyrexian arc, which all came out after I had come up with this plot), and the party will journey to the plane formerly known as Mirrodin that now serves as "New Phyrexia," I've been thinking about how to keep the journey through the nine layers of the plane quick and not have them stuck at level 19 for a full year.
While I think I've got the general idea there (mainly just limiting each layer to at most a five-room dungeon with one or two combat encounters, as well as not really having much happen on some of the layers, like Mirrex and even skipping the inner-most layers like the Mycosynth Lattice - we're probably finishing things at the Fair Basilica) I've also been giving a lot of thought to how I want my next campaign to go.
Basically, I have so many ideas for campaigns, and having now run basically just two campaigns over nearly 11 years of D&D, I'd like to pick up the pace a little.
So, here are the ideas I'm moving forward with:
First, we're not going to go to level 20. I promised my players in this one that we will, and I do think seeing your character get all of its cool, endgame features is very exciting. But even though they've made a concerted effort to give us tougher foes for players to fight, the fact of the matter is that there's just too much going on at later levels, and combat gets bogged down even just because of the number of dice we need to roll, even if the players are 100% on top of what they want to do with their turns.
I do think that my campaigns will generally start at level 3 - I think players who are already comfortable with the system will get a little bored at levels 1 and 2. To be fair, you can have very epic stories at these low levels (see The Wizard the Witch and the Wild One, which ends its first season by leveling up to 2, or to an even greater extreme, Exandria Unlimited: Divergence, in which just hitting level 1 is this epic moment, as the characters prior to this have like CR 1/4 NPC stat blocks) but I like getting at least a little into the strategic crunch of the mechanics.
Second, we're going to seriously rein in the plot. In part because of the structure of Magic's worlds, which need to operate on those five colors (and thus ten guilds in Ravnica,) there's a powerful urge to work in cycles. It would have felt weird and wrong for my Ravnica game to just really prominently feature, say, the Simic Combine and Izzet League but not really do anything with the Gruul Clans or Golgari Swarm. In another setting, though, it would feel totally fine for me to, say, focus in a lot on the Cult of the Dragon and not worry so much about the Red Wizards of Thay or the Drow of Menzoberranzan.
Third, I tried to take some time, mostly in tier 3, to give the party adventures related to their backstories. These took up significant chunks of time, but they were also kind of bolted in to this grand Phyrexian plot. In truth, these could have been the basis for their own campaign.
Now, given the structure of the Wildemount game I've been playing in, focusing entirely on backstory-focused plots does have some pitfalls: first, it can lack cohesion - after like four or five years playing this campaign, we're still barely scratching the surface, for example, of a conspiracy called the Epistolary Discordancy, merely finding messages between people code-named "The Esteemed Colleague" or "The Respected Tutor." Secondly, sometimes a player will remain out of the spotlight for a pretty lengthy time.
So, what I might do is, at session zero (and frankly, I always feel like a single session isn't quite enough to cover everything) present my players with a broad thematic idea that they should try to write their backstories to. For example, one of the leading options for my next campaign is one set in my world's equivalent of the Wild West, and so not only would I want people to make Western-genre-appropriate heroes, but I'd also get into some of the specifics of what is going on there, including that the primary antagonists would likely be devils (basically, there's a faction there that appears to be a powerful gang of outlaws but is actually a diabolic plot to establish infernal domain on the region with tyranny, oppression, and the like).
The goal here, then, would be to encourage players to write backstories that I can naturally and easily tie into the main plot, building connections with the primary and secondary NPCs of the story so that there's real overlap between the personal and the broader plots.
In the past, I've been very open to trying to accommodate any and all kinds of characters, and while I still like to keep character options open, I'd at least like to guide peoples' hands a little more, because that will make it easier for me to weave in stories that work for them.
Facing the Logistical Realities:
I'm planning on going back to running games in person again after the Ravnica campaign ends. This, sadly, will probably mean some of my players won't be joining the next one, and it also means we're probably far more likely to cancel games more frequently.
The truth is, in a year, you only have so many sessions (assuming you're usually meeting once a week) and I think that means I really need to pare down whatever grand ambitions I have to a few discrete set-pieces or dungeons.
The scope of my Ravnica campaign, when I step back, is actually insane. Just the Izzet chapter had the party: A: travel to another region of the plane, B: discover that there was some horrible Phyrexian experimentation being performed by the blue dragon in charge of the Automation Lab there, C: help rescue survivors after the conspiracy's forces downed a Boros airship, D: travel into a Gruul-controlled Rubblebelt wasteland with corrupted magic to find a guy with an airship fast enough to evade the flying lab's defenses, E: disable the shield generators and a number of satellite laboratories also floating above the district and then finally F: go to the Automation Lab, fight their way to the top, and kill the blue dragon.
That was all what they did at level 12. And there was comparable complexity for most of the other guild-themed adventures.
So, yeah, basically I need to let my internal editor rein me in.
