What was your longest Dark Heresy campaign? Is it still going on? What XP did you end at, and why did the campaign end?

I'm curious. I was perusing the Star Wars forums and came upon a similar thread, and I'm impressed with the length of some people's campaigns. Star Wars is a franchise many are familiar with and has a long tradition of role playing games, so campaigns of several years weren't uncommon.

Still doing an ongoing campaign in DH1. Our group did the math about two sessions ago and realized it's been going on for a little over two years now, and the GM expects it'll still be a couple months before it wraps up.

Can't say I have any complaints regarding the length though, it's been quite a fun ride so far. Right now we're just breaking past the 8000 XP mark. So far we've burned a total of 7 fate points and had one character death. Not been an easy road, but it's been a good one.

How often do you play a month, then? And what sort of XP is handed out per session?

I'm in the ending stages of GMing an Only War campaign that started in March - it is our longest yet, and we've been playing once per week for most of this span of time. I hand out the recommended 400 XP per session, so a couple characters are nearing 10k XP. I've lost count of player deaths and burned fate points, because it has been a ton

We TRY to play once a week, but life's gotten in the way more than once. XP is variable, but usually somewhere between 140 and 170 per session. GM has a Q&A XP system where he tests our "investigative skills as players" where he'll pose a series of questions and we're awarded more XP the closer our answers are to the truth. I think the most we've ever received was somewhere around 205 or so, and the least was around 120 or so.

I've got an actual 2 years old campaign. Players are close to 10 000 XP. It's a DH1 campaign, obviously, but with so many house rules I made based on black crusade and only war that it is very close to DH2. We do not play regularly, but we still played a lot of games, and when we play, it's something like from 8 to 12 hours a game, so we compensate this way.

Otherwise, I had an ascension campaign that started at 12 000 XP and finished at 54 000 thousand XP. We played regularly (one game a week, + mega game of 8-10 hours sometimes). It was a good one and it finished in blood and drama, but was awesome.

I'm only about 16 sessions in on my DH campaign and it's still going (I'll be running it tonight , in fact). I'd love it if it runs as long as some of my previous campaigns, but I'll be lucky if I even live that long.

I ran about year long campaign once with weekly sessions. There were breaks in between what I called 'seasons', so I think the total count was 25-30 sessions, which was Dark Pursuits followed by Forgotten Gods. There are games out there though that have been going on for several years. I'm sure someone has hit the half decade mark by now. I know some guys from college had a D&D game going off and on for over twenty years. There is a movie on netflix called the ' The Dungeon Masters ' where one of these massive projects has been examined.

These days what I'm trying to do is cut my campaigns into roughly 8-10 session stories with 2-3 session chapters. Is this the ideal format? I don't know. I tend to run out of a pre-gen campaign book, so that the length of the pre-gen book does have an effect on the story.

I'd like to one day do a full Haarlock campaign Tattered Fates to Mara, but I have so much trouble finding reliable people and keeping it interesting I'll probably keep my format.

Slightly off topic, but I've only just started GMing Dark Heresy and I've been pleasantly surprised to find that the Dark Pursuits intro adventure (after I had fleshed out a bit), is good for about 18-20 hours of game time. We've done 15 hours so far and the final session will be at the end of the month.

Slightly off topic, but I've only just started GMing Dark Heresy and I've been pleasantly surprised to find that the Dark Pursuits intro adventure (after I had fleshed out a bit), is good for about 18-20 hours of game time. We've done 15 hours so far and the final session will be at the end of the month.

You should really consider picking up Forgotten Gods. That book is jammed full of content. My group plays almost weekly and it took us almost 6 months to get through it. It's great value and a really fun story.

That's really good to hear, I'll definitely be picking that up at somepoint!

Our group has been playing for quite a while now, running weekly sessions. We're up to about 11k experience. Our campaign has seen 3 character deaths, one character is currently at 1 fate point, another character has burned 2, not sure her current total, our highborn has burned 3 down to 3 remaining.

We've been running a super campaign across all the systems with interconnected events, retired PCs as major NPCs, etc. It's been going for years now.

I would like to learn a little more about this one, Levi

My DH1 campaign- started shortly after the release of that game- is still going. That's less heroic than it might sound, since we've been forced to take a number of breaks from regular gaming due to some personal crises among my players (the worst one: one of my players had to undergo two brain surgeries! ). The group recently passed Rank 8, and I have the broad strokes of the campaign plotted out through mid- Ascension level.

I would like to learn a little more about this one, Levi

We started with RT. It ended after a huge number of shenanigans, including multiple dynastic marriages (the RT married the queen of Sepheris Secundus, the Arch Militant married the daughter of the Calixis Sector Governor, etc.), infiltration of the Calixis Inquisition, alliances with both the Lathes and with Hephaestus (a FW in the Koronus Expanse), appropriation of significant Eldar, Necron, and Tau tech (all duly handed over to AdMech reps, conveniently followed by "rediscovered" ancient human tech), and all manner of conquests, foundings, and discoveries. We also made an alliance with the Loyalist remnants of the Blood Ravens, arranging for several really nifty recruiting worlds being handed over to them. Oh, and our Arch Militant became widely recognized as a Living Saint (though there is some question as to whether it's legit or merely due to machinations by our Psyker). I think I mentioned elsewhere on these boards the planet of roaming tanker tribes that we established to recruit elite armored regiments...

We followed up with a DH campaign, as part of the newly founded Koronus Sector (under a governor controlled by our former RT dynasty). This led to the discovery and activation of the great gate that led to the Jericho reach. Meanwhile, the old RT, who'd made a deal with a daemon and donned a Halo Device, went rogue, leading to conflict with our Inquisition team.

This led to a DW campaign, leading to quite a bit of stomping around in the Reach, with cameo appearances by our old DH characters and with the remaining members of the RT dynasty leading the crusade in the Reach (or at least sponsoring it and contributing regiments of elite guardsmen). We had a Blood Angle devastator who pulled off some crazy stuff with Counter Attack, a Gargamel Knight (Smurf successor chapter that broke with the UMs and is generally hostile to UMs and their successors, and vice versa), a Blood Raven Librarian, and an Exorcist. The last several missions we ran after reworking the rules a bit to be super-high-lethality (no wounds, just crits).

We followed this up with a Black Crusade campaign, rolling an unidentified SM, a "renegade" assassin, and a freedom-obsessed psyker who have been hard at work building a massive warband (all the while the assassin has been trying to undermine all the heretics and traitors he encounters in the Vortex, and has been setting up contingencies in the event that his companions turn on him or try to invade the Imperium proper instead of merely stomping around the Vortex). This is still ongoing, and was started as the initial run of some test rules.

We did a further test run using DH again, with a two-man team of an AdMech and an Enforcer (the latter of whom didn't realize he was a latent psyker). It culminated in the Tech Priest becoming a full Inquisitor, and a Princeps for an Imperator Titan, and incidentally being corrupted such that he feeds off of Warp energy (making for some interesting interactions with Daemonic foes who didn't expect to be eaten by him...), and the Enforcer remains convinced that he's perfectly normal even though he's become essentially a Warp entity in his own right - he thinks his faith in the emperor is what allows him to do the odd things that he does. We used this to test changes and refinements to our DW no-wounds system, which led to some good tweaks.

Then we did yet another DH run, again with a Tech Priest (so we could test our new AdMech rules rework), but this time with a more standard Psyker (so we could test our new Psyker rules).

Our most recent campaign is a return to RT, where our team is working for an NPC Trader who has married into our old dynasty and wants to earn enough respect to get brought in on the really important stuff. We have a Callidus assassin (using test rules for assassin temples) who nobody knows is a Callidus, two DE renegades (one a wondering poet, the other a Psyker throwback who's been exiled from the webway cities due to the risk he poses), and a company of Tau mercenaries (gone rogue after escaping an Ethereal-run engram implantation clinic during a Farsight raid). The Tau are fun because I got to roll up a bunch of characters and can pick which one(s) to bring along depending on the mission.

I think we wound up around 50k xp for the first RT run, with between a quarter and half that total for some of the others. We have maybe a century or two of unique backstory integrated to our campaign now, stretching back to the original dynasty. House Thracian now controls two sectors and is making inroads to a third, while also running the crusade into the Jericho Reach. Some of the hard data I can look up if you want actual ranks and xp totals.

We have a huge collection of collated house rules and integrated mechanics from across all systems, including RT, DH, OW, DW, DH2 Beta, DH2, and BC. It's all in a collection of Google Docs, so we can make changes on the fly.

My Only War grand campiang which in fact was 4 campaings tied by some npc's and story that spanned over a hundred years ended after a year. Players had like 10 characters trough this time. At one point they had 15k XP and one of the player character from first campaing was end boss for the last campiang being possed by demon and such. I rewarded them with 400-600 xp per session (sometimes more after certain milestone) and we played once (sometimes twice) a week.