First of all, sorry for not posting in ages. This forum sucks - the send button and few others don't work on my default browser and I usually don't feel like firing up Firefox just to make a post. Anyway.
We finished our campaign a few weeks ago. It was a Tamalir raze in the end, with four Lts present. I was facing Nanok, Jaes, Laurel and Thorn. We played with some minor tweaks as house rules, although none of them really had any effect on the outcome. We took feats in as soon as I got ToI, and the last two dungeons were played with them. At this point they weren't particularly overpowered. The campaign ended at the end of silver, with enough total conquest to move it to gold next week.
It was pretty clear what mistakes my heroes had made: they waited too long with getting new skills, ultimately allowing me to raze Frostgate before they got the goodies there. Also, they went to dungeons too recklessly, they should've used some weeks just to dig up better equipment from markets (it turns out these guys were quite unlucky with treasure draws: Laurel had more than enough weapons but the mages were especially poorly equipped). I think their biggest mistake was a too long trip to Olmric's Hut. This allowed me to place my Lts in end-game positions around Tamalir, massively reducing their options. As soon as I got three trap treachery, it was Dance of the Monkey God time which made Merick invincible. Not that I needed him - even Eliza was able to wipe out the heroes on their final hour. Our epic finale was really made of epic fail - the heroes rolled a whole lot of X and insufficient range. I had something like +6 command for all my units, so you can guess where it went from there.
Anyway, what's important is ... feedback. Me and my players all felt that most of the time, the campaign can feel very meaningless. Lt encounters and perhaps legendary dungeons aside, all the heroes are really doing is gather exp and equipment dungeon after dungeon. Simply put, the campaign lacks dynamics. Only once the game becomes a win or lose situation does it start to feel meaningful. Now, our sessions were quite short, a few hours each week, so at worst, just completing a dungeon took us three weeks.
It is quite clear that I won't touch RTL again once my other campaign finishes. It takes too much involvement, and the sessions are not quality time constantly. Vanilla just works better for me. Anyway, I still like the idea of a longer campaign, so what I'm thinking now is custom campaign(s). I have not yet decided how exactly I'm going to construct these. I do feel like there should be multiple plots, for both heroes and the OL, and every session should see at least one of them progress into some direction. Either way, I feel like, if I'm doing this, most of the rules in RTL will fly out of the window.
So. I guess it's time for Rewriting the Legend. Now all I need is some time and brainstorming sessions ...