It’s a strange thing, coming to the end of a story, especially when it’s a story that you’ve only half written yourself.

My made-up, mashed-up, terrible piece of game design Kill-Team role-playing campaign has been going for more than two years now. And with a bit of luck, by the end of this year it’ll be finished. It’s been one hell of an undertaking getting this far – we have weathered real-world hiatuses of many months in the process of reaching the gripping conclusion of the narrative just in time for one of my players to go off travelling at the start of next year. Thankfully, I haven’t had to rush things – I wouldn’t have wanted to end the story without him there, but the story was already drawing towards its end, and so all we have to do is make sure that the bad guys are defeated and the planet saved within the next two sessions.

Two more sessions, to tie it all together. Well, most of it. I’m not going to answer every question when I’ve got the seeds of a sequel story in my head, and despite the imminent departure of one player that still leaves three players and their characters to work with. And if our travelling companion happens to be back in town at the right time, I’m sure Stefan ‘I Already Ran In’ Cadavore could make a guest appearance in the future.

Assuming that any of them survive the next two sessions, of course. Given that two players have ended up inside a nuclear reactor full of explosives and the other two are racing to join them before an entire city is blown to kingdom come, this is very much not a certainty. But I reckon they’ll make it out. They may not have done anything quite as mad as this before, but it’s pretty close.

Because while I can write up the environment and plan ahead for the fight scenes, while I can steer them in whatever direction is necessary to keep the plot moving along, ultimately this isn’t my story. Not entirely. This is their story, my four players. I’m just trying to keep the plot coherent and desperately improvising dialogue for an alien circus performer with a Welsh accent. It’s their (bafflingly stupid) decisions that drive the narrative forward at the end of the day. I may be storyboarding a lot more than the average DnD game (my excuse being that I have to physically build the sets for every Big Fight each time so I do need some idea of what’s going to happen), but it’s my boys who decide who to shoot in the face and what to blow up. It’s them who befriended the bird-man space pirate and the aforementioned Welsh clown. It’s them who took tango lessons from an orangutan. It’s them who will, at the end of the day, save this city or die trying. Horribly and messily, most likely.

I’ll miss this story when it’s done. It’s my first attempt at a proper role-playing campaign and while it’s absolutely clunky, railroading and messy, I am still very proud of it. I think I did a good job. My players tell me that I’m doing a good job, anyway. And ultimately that’s all I want: for my friends to have a good time playing my stupid little game.

Now I have about a week to get everything written up, decide on the rules for the small army of baddies I’ll be throwing at the lads this time around, and finish building a prop nuclear reactor. You know, normal author things.