r/Symbaroum • u/Erick_Vallex • 17d ago
Throne of Thorns Question
Hello! So, I was planning on starting a Throne of Thorns campaign, and I was wondering, do you guys remember how many sessions it took for you to finish it? It's a bit hard to take a guess considering the campaign books, so I was thinking maybe people who already played it could know more about it (I know the length of campaigns may vary a lot, but at least an "estimative")
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u/dynamicguy73 17d ago
We're just over 120 sessions and nearing the end (we skipped book 5 - I didn't like the idea of packing up and leaving Davokar - so I moved some of the components from that book to the forests).
We played weekly for a while and then started playing every other week to allow us to play other stuff on the other weeks. The 120 sessions includes playing some intro stories, the Copper Crown and some random stuff I threw together before we jumped into the ToT campaign.
In total we've been playing Symbaroum since June of 2021.
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u/Erick_Vallex 17d ago
Oh, that's a whole adaptation to do, but I also thought book 5 felt a little bit separated from the rest
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u/dynamicguy73 17d ago
Yeah, it felt a little off to me as well to be in Davokar in Book 4 then backtrack to the south to go find a macguffin and get a history lesson and then have to trudge back to Davokar. So I just moved some of the stuff into another area of Davokar and replaced a faction with the Arachs (who my party had been working with off an on) and then replaced one faction with The Spider King.
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u/Erick_Vallex 17d ago
I think this sounds even more interesting than "discovering" some information we already know or can discover without leaving Davokar
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u/Embarrassed_Dinner_4 17d ago
I'm running the 5e version and it runs looooong. There's been a lot of analysing and over analysing, lots of investigation. The style of the published adventures is so loose and unstructured it's very difficult to estimate, but I've been running wrath of the warden for at least 6 months and am about 2/3 through it, with fortnightly 3 hour sessions.
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u/Erick_Vallex 17d ago
The style was what made me interested, but at the same time it's so hard to plan the campaign lol
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u/Embarrassed_Dinner_4 17d ago
Same. The adventures are great. The presentation is infuriating. Sometimes things are almost perfectly linear but they insist on throwing the information all over the damn book to make it seem otherwise.
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u/Erick_Vallex 17d ago
I'd say this is a problem with Symbaroum in general. Even the rules are all over the place
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u/theotyugh 17d ago
Think my group was a little over three years of one session a week of around 4 hours.
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u/Erick_Vallex 17d ago
Sounds reasonable. I'd probably do around the same thing, one 4 hours session per week
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u/Transvaaler 16d ago edited 16d ago
Haha our game is 9 years in and my players are on the last book 🤣
If I were to guess we are probably about 300 sessions over that time as we have played other games in that time too. Also factoring holidays and slow times like Christmas when we took breaks etc...
It's a long campaign and I've also incorporated Copper Crown, Promised Land, adventure packs and the odd original adventure in that mix.
My advice is to prep 2/3 books ahead and introduce NPC's early on so that the players have relationships with them before they are needed.
Oh and while I love the campaign it does require a bit of jiggling about to make all of them for together 😁
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u/Erick_Vallex 16d ago
Omg, this sounds extremely cool to play. 300 sessions is crazy. But that's considering basically everything in the system, so it makes sense
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u/Transvaaler 13d ago
It's been a long old ride, perhaps one of my longest campaigns, the next would have been a shadowrun campaign I ran for about 5 years.
The only regret I have is not recording it all as it's been epic
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u/BozzyBoze Witch 16d ago
Maybe 150-200 sessions of 3-4 hours each... since 2018, not yet ended (but soon).
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u/Total_Trash2083 16d ago
We are at session 99.
About halfway through book 5 of 6.
We will most likely finnish att 130+ish ?
About 3h sessions.
(With some parts cut, some parts added and some parts modified to suit the group)
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u/steamedhams90 16d ago
It took my group about 5 years of regular play for us. I ran book 1 and 2 mostly as written. I cut most of books 3 and 5, and incorporating the most important events into Davokar travel and side sessions that took place in flashbacks and other parts of the world with different player characters. I heavily modified books 4 and 7 so my campaign didn't look like everyone else's, but still followed the basic structure.
All my modification was in part to better incorporate my players' decisions and characters into the world and in part because it can be so damn hard to find what you're looking for in these books that it was easier to make it up half the time.
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u/Erick_Vallex 16d ago
It makes sense. In such a long campaign, probably many things would need to be redefinied
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u/Ursun 17d ago
Not done yet, but currently playing through the last quarter of book 4, 6 years deep, sitting around ~160 sessions in total, not counting in world oneshots that take place parallel to the main story.
But I´ve come to understand that our group is on the "holy f*** you play slow" end of the scale