Seven Years for Seven Stars

Forty years ago, I came up with what I thought would be a great concept for a Dungeons and Dragons campaign, an epic quest for an emperor's lost 7 years. The idea was inspired by a fairy tale by Henry Beston, titled "The Lost Half-Hour." In the fairy tale, the final boss is defeated by a man's Lost Patience, which takes the form of a magical grenade. I intended to simplify it to a Lost Temper, which would still be explosive, but would be easier for a modern audience to understand. I tried to run the campaign, and got through about 6 or 7 sessions, but the party kept running away from all the plot hooks I tried to dangle in front of them, and I eventually gave up on it. The idea stuck with me over the years, and I kept thinking I ought to do something with it, but I couldn't find a good hook to write it as a novel, and my experience had taught me that I couldn't maintain a long campaign as a Game Master. But then, a little over two years ago, I got in the mood to try an old-school dungeon crawl, and since our gaming group was between campaigns, we agreed to let me start a provisional fantasy campaign. I decided to try the old idea again, vastly modified since I had learned many things over the intervening 40 years. I titled the campaign "Seven Years for Seven Stars" and we began playing in July of 2021. We continued playing for the last two years, through health scares and monster storms and a system change and my own inexperience at running a long campaign, and finally, on October 2, 2023, we finished the final battle. I have spent the last 40 years thinking I would never get to tell this story, but I finally have. I am very thankful to the people in my group who let me finally get this out of my system.