So my group and I have been playing our current campaign for almost 3 years and it is finally coming towards its end, with a huge fight against the BBEG and his army. My players think that this is it, that this is the campaigns finale, they kill the BBEG hurrah campaign beautifully wrapped up, but there is going to be a bit of a twist that leads to a little more campaign and a real final fight.

A little context, but if you don't want to read just skip this. The BBEG is a fallen Empyrean (Very powerful angel) who the party freed from imprisonment much earlier in the campaign. Now he is coming to dominate the world. He was a servant of the god of the party cleric, but this god was almost killed and essentially fell out of existence. Empyrean's have an ability that I am loosely interpreting to mean they come back to life in their divine domain unless their god chooses to stop them, which he isn't around to do. As such the party will kill him, he will be reborn and come back. Then the party will bring back this God before they can kill the BBEG for good (this will neatly wrap up our cleric's story too).

In short I'm a little worried about leaving the players feeling that this is a cheesy 'oh he comes back to life and you have to kill him again' and feeling robbed of their ending. A couple of them have mentioned that they think we are coming into the final sessions. I want to make sure that this feels like a climax of the campaign, but then there is a twist and lucky them there is more campaign to go! Just wondering how other DM's have dealt with this sort of aspect of a campaign.

Any advice is appreciated, thanks in advance!

Well, one thing to do is to seed this idea, ideally you’d have been doing that. But just give some hints about the nature of the BBEG. 

The larger question is: Are you sure they want to continue. Three years is a long time, they might be getting excited about some new characters and ready for it to end. 

In this case, I would definitely foreshadow that something might not work as expected. In particular, you might want the BBEG to be particularly confident in the final encounter and leading up to it so that it is clear to the players that for some reason the BBEG sees this as a simple set back. Since you are using the BBEG and their armies then the PCs likely have allies and their armies and their intelligence gathering networks. The enemy has the same.

If it looks like the allies have a good chance of winning then the opponent is likely to change their plans or respond to the threat. Perhaps, foreshadow what is coming by some intelligence coming to light that the BBEG inner circle is confident, that the opposing forces will be decimated and destroyed even if they also suffer losses. Perhaps hint that the BBEG may have some sort of plan but information on what that plan might be will be difficult or impossible to find (unless it is common knowledge about the life cycle of a fallen Empyrean requiring the diety who created them allow for their demise).

This also brings up a question about whether this might be information the party cleric might know or have access to. Would they know about how difficult it will be to kill an Empyrean?

Depending on how much information you give them, it is possible that they will guess that the god has to be alive to ensure the Empyrean falls. However, it may be too late to redirect their allies and the final battle without allowing the Empyrean to win outright so they may have to accept a pyrrhic victory before they can put in place everything needed to finally defeat the Empyrean.

It can work either way, but I would avoid letting the players go into this part of the plot arc thinking it is the end without foreshadowing that it might not be.

Honestly, this is where I ask my players to drive the bus.

When they have their big, climatic BBEG battle and celebrate their victory, flat out tell them, "We can stop now, right here, and do something else. Or we can continue. The story, as I wrote it, doesn't stop here, but this is a good moment to ask if we really want more."

Then honor their replies.

That let's you keep the BBEG coming back (trope) if they want more, or they just stop and never know. :)

So, back in June, my last campaign ended. It was very long (3 years is my way of saying it nicely) and nearly everyone died at the end.

After 5 years of work on a new setting (that will now be my new “permanent” setting), we start up a new campaign in January. 

The end of the last campaign was a massive fight against a demon army and in the last few moments the surviving characters entered a brand new world (the new setting). THe demon was vanquished and all that. The old characters were retired.

HOwever (insert ominous background music here)…

as a side mission should they choose to tug on the strings throughout the next campaign (distinct from the setting, but taking place on it), they can return to the small town that the last campaign ended in, and there they will find a shocking thing: a Demon Lord has been raising a demon army and…

… can you say sequel?

I mention all of that because the above notes are very good. If they characters are a reasonably high level, after three years they are going to have earned their victory and stuff and really, layers may be kinda wanting new stuff. Three years is around the maximum for my group. After that, they get pretty itchy, and I note that among all of us, we have five main and two secondary DMs, none of whom run the same kind of world or the same characters, so there is already variety.

None of this is to say you shouldn’t move forward with your original plan, merely to suggest that perhaps you should save it as a sequel, which will give the players a whole new spin on things and tie it back to the last one and they can go seek advance or whatever from themselves as NPCs, etc etc.

All of that said, notes specific to what you asked:

It doesn’t sound cheesy, it sounds pretty epic. It might feel cheesy in the moment, but Barbie is the biggest movie in the world and it is about a doll, so c’mon.

IF you do go down that route, remember that the players will always surprise you. They may come up wth a way to kill the BBEG that you never expected. Taking that away can sometimes be a problem, so be sure that before you do it you lay in foreshadowing (hints about returning) and make sure they at least have heard about the whole rule of “without a god he cannot die” *in game*, as their characters.

THey have to have it remembered, too, so it can’t be offhand, it needs to be something that is pointed and kinda in their face, but with enough deniability that they think it can be dismissed. Maybe an example of a time when such a being wasn’t brought back even though a go was dead.

You have to earn that resurrection, lol. Perhaps a cadre of Clerics, high level (just having them around gives the possibility of it anyway, so…).

Don’t forget that after a false climax, there is a cool down, and it is only at the end of the cool down do you reveal The Shocking Twist — gotta have that cliffhanger at the end of the session, and the players should be totally in charge during the cool down.

Make it fun, and remember that they have to have buy in, basically.

Quote from RossPott >>

In short I'm a little worried about leaving the players feeling that this is a cheesy 'oh he comes back to life and you have to kill him again' and feeling robbed of their ending.

 So, let's think about why you want to surprise them with this. I assume you thought it would be fun to have a twist, but now you're feeling like it won't land right. This is because as a DM, you completely control the information your party gets. You have decided how the BBEG works and decided how much the party knows about it.

Maybe it's just not great as a surprise twist because the twist is basically "Surprise! You failed!" And it's hard to hear you failed because the DM set you up to fail. Maybe it's more interesting (and fair) if the party finds out beforehand - not from hinting or foreshadowing or vague references because those never work, I'm talking the party just straight up knows he will come back.

There's still the "oh crap" moment when they find out they can't just kill the BBEG. And likely they'll go bring back their god first before the fight, which is all stuff you intend to do anyway, just in a different order.