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15. Longest campaign played
The longest game I’ve ever played was (QAGS co-founder) Leighton Connor’s “Ficton” super-hero game (not to be confused with The Hex Ficton), which I’ve mentioned here before. It think it lasted around six years, but I’m not sure if it would technically be considered a single campaign; the climax was rooted in stuff that had been there from the beginning, but the PC group changed several times over the course of the game. The part of the game with a more or less stable core character group who were central to the big story probably started around year two. Around the same time, I was running a fantasy game that ran for nearly as long as Leighton’s game, but it was really several successive campaigns with mostly completely new character groups.
16. Longest games session played
I know I played some marathon D&D sessions in high school, but I don’t remember much about them, so I’m going to pick something I do remember. Although it was technically at least 3 sessions (depending on if you count stopping to go out for food a session break), the Hex crew once played an entire campaign over the course of the weekend. One year at Gencon, Leighton and Josh came up with an idea for doing a huge Hex crossover event that incorporated all of our games. Being incredibly self-absorbed, we all really wanted to play it. Unfortunately, the Hex staff is a little spread out geographically (The others live Cincinnati, Columbus, Lexington, Louisville, Nashville, and Toledo, and I’m out in the boonies where places have names like Possum Trot and Monkey’s Eyebrow), so we couldn’t really do a weekly game. Skype and Google Hangouts might have been around then, but they were either in their early days or a couple of us had connections too slow to use them. So, we descended on Stately Connor Manor in Cincinnati one Friday and spent the next two-and-a half days playing a game where hobomancers, laser ponies, members of the Herrick Agency and Edison Force, Sindbad, assorted super-heroes, and a bunch of other characters traveled across the multiverse on the Platonic Ideal of a Train to save reality. The train was driven by Jesus, except for a brief period when J.C. had to venture into Hell to save Elvis. William Faulkner took over conductor duties for that stretch of the trip. We rotated GMs and PCs, with each of us taking a shift as GM and playing 3-4 different characters over the course of the game. We stopped playing to eat, sleep, shit, and shower, but spent so much time gaming that it felt like one big session. It was definitely the best weekend of gaming I’ve ever experienced.
