I had problems with some of the preceding sessions of Pakh Pakh. I think that when you've reached the end of your three-year journey, and you're ready to lead armies from all the civilisations that you've encountered en route against an army from another planet (the moon crash-landed, and brought Evil with it), there really is some sort of narrative momentum that the GM should convey - and I feel that that mood often wasn't present in the last couple of weeks.
This is minor quibbling, though, because today's two (back to back) sessions were immensely enjoyable, and not just because a long campaign ended with a heroic last-gasp victory.
Some of it was geekish fun: Brian had given us 10 million XP last week, and we had two sessions today, so we got to level up twice in one day. In a perverted sense, the AD&D rules started getting easy again, as my THAC0 was now 0, so I was hitting armour class minus <whatever the die roll was>, rather than having to do maths.
But the most important thing was atmosphere. Good, appropriate music was always playing, there was hardly any pissing about, there was a fair amount of good in-character roleplaying and heroic speeches, a final battle between huge armies full of stupid amounts of magic that lasted a week, and finally a one-on-one battle with a God, on the moon, involving magical artifacts, prophecies, the hardest spell in the rulebook (which my character survived), and the final killing blow being delivered, in her dying moment, by the party's stone-handed thief, whose remains are now officially the world's first holy relic.
(By which I mean surviving body parts of a saint or hero, as opposed to any other kind of magic item, which our wizard was making by the bucket-load as we travelled to the final battle.)
And we got to do all the fun end of campaign stuff, like deleted scenes, finding out what the world actually looked like (compared to our crude inconsistent scale map that we'd drawn throughout the campaign), Brian telling us about stuff that we'd missed / had ignored completely, that sort of thing. Which was important, as we'd just had a big huge climax, and you need to wind down from that gently. I won't go into details, because that's boring "Don't tell me about your character" stuff you don't want to hear.
I wouldn't say that Pakh Pakh was perfect, by any means - although most of this was to do with it being AD&D, and that's fair enough, given that we signed up to play AD&D, not a wonderful fantasy campaign. But I think it ended on a high, when it could easily have not, and all credit to Brian for that.
