The final multi-boss battle of our 86-session, three-year D&D fifth edition campaign was as stressful and exhilarating as we could have hoped. Every party member was on point, scouring their 12th level character sheets to pull out every possible trick we had up our sleeves. Our cleric cast Twilight Sanctuary early on to give us all bonus HP throughout the battle. We ended up all rolling very close to max for bonus HP every round, which always came in clutch. Our monk and barbarian exchanged massive blows with our enemies, a storm giant and an eldritch knight. Shortly after defeating the storm giant, the monk and barbarian went down along with our cleric. As the last party member standing with single digit HP and no spell slots left, my only option was to try eldritch blasting the remaining knight because I was out of spell slots. Somehow, the dice blessed me, enabling me to hit the knight with an AC of 21 and doing nearly max damage on two blasts needed to end the battle. I would have been more stressed if I wasn’t used to nearly every major battle of ours coming down to the wire just like this. We couldn’t have asked for a more cinematic finish to our bloody quest. Our DM wrapped the session by noting that our final session in two weeks would be an RP-heavy epilogue to send off our characters and conclude the campaign. I fully expect to tear up as we say goodbye to our now 13th level characters, who have grown with us since March 30th, 2020.

I am so grateful that our virtual table of five has persisted despite the fact that two folks independently moved internationally three times during the campaign, and we now span Japan and US West coast time zones. It’s been the most surprisingly successful way for me to stay in touch with these friends who were all at one point living in the same city as me. I’m excited to continue adventuring with these folks as we switch to using the Star Wars: Edge of the Empire system in 2024 for our next campaign. I’ve already started crafting my character for this new setting:

A young retired inventor who is living in a house boat-like space ship suddenly loses their retirement funds and has to bring on renters and do odd jobs to make ends meet. Before they retired, they invented something that ended up being used to further subjugate lower classes of society, which the retiree now finds themselves a part of. Being subjected to the ill-effects of their invention motivates them to work towards the expensive endeavor of researching and developing a counter invention to right the wrongs of their original one.

I like that this character has both a short-term goal (keep the roof over their head) and long-term goal (redemption) with ample plot hooks (how they lost their retirement funds as well as the specifics of the invention are being left up to the DM). I still haven’t read the Core Rulebook yet, so the species, name, and other specifics are yet to be determined, but there is interest amongst the group to play an oops all droids party with one token organic friend (my partner’s character), so I’ll likely be a bot for this game. I’m excited to work out the details and hopefully add a more detailed writeup to my OCs page in the future. In the meantime, if you have any actual play recommendations for either Edge of the Empire campaigns or one-shots, please reach out. Thanks!