Rifts
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Ah, my Rifts campaign. What else can be said about it, other than this probably made me the DM I am today.
Mainly because this was the one where I made all my mistakes...
I suppose technically this could be under Kev's campaigns because he was the one who started it, while I was intending to just run a character. Then when he lost the DMing enthusiasm after that one adventure I took over and kept my character as a kind of fellow PC, then NPC, and eventually retired him off to live with his beautiful psychic girlfriend. A result of mistake 1 - never forget that the heroes should be the heart of the story. Not your NPCs.
Then I started inventing all manner of stuff to fill in blanks on the world map (there weren't the 30-odd supplements there are now). But I wasn't that restrained in my efforts so all my stuff was better and cooler than the gear in the book. Mistake 2 - don't let the power level of the campaign get too high, too quick.
Of course once the PCs got their dirty little mitts on the cool technology then the bad guys had to keep being upgraded to keep up. A massive arms race built up, with me constantly trying to up the ante from the last mission. So what started with buildings being blown up led to whole complexes being blown up, to towns being smashed, cities being destroyed, until the apocalyptic ending where I destroyed three space stations and five cities in one session. Mistake 3 - don't try and top your last adventure every time. It only leads to trouble...
Still, somethings I got right. Some of the recurring villains were fun, even though (or perhaps because) they came back each time with more bionic parts thanks to their last encounter. And the idea of the shadowy evil in the background (in this case the sorceror Nostrous) who most often sends his minions to do the dirty work and rarely appears in person first appeared in my adventures here. Oh, and the idea of starting sub-plots without knowing where they will end up (as with Nostrous' first appearance where he sent his orc minions to steal Craig's character's cat). I had no idea when I wrote that adventure why he wanted the cat but it just felt quite fun and eventually became a major plot.
Oh yes, the characters, and mistakes 4 and 5. Mistake 4 came when I had a fight going on and rolled the damage that killed Craig's character. Unfortunately my next adventure relied on Craig's character being alive. So I fudged it and Craig's character came back from the dead for no other reason than I needed him to. Mistake 4 - don't write stuff that you can't find a reason to drag at least three members of the party into. Kev had his robot, Helix, with a taste for t-shirts and long black coats. And Adam had his dragon Krath (from whence came the Lizardman Krath in the Taladas campaign...) which leads me into mistake 5 - don't let Adam play a superpowerful character, because he'll only try to hog the action.
You have to learn these things the hard way.
Alex
Okay, so you probably would have ended up blowing up the Earth if you caried on much longer, but playing that sort of scale of destruction was damn fine fun. You didn't learn from mistake 5 though, Adam still ended up playing his Troll-Slayer in your WFRP game...
Craig
Technically that would be mistake 6 - don't be too generous with the experience. In WFRP he shouldn't have got to the end of the Giant Slayer career by the end of the campaign, but because I was too generous with the xp he got everything and when your CV lists you as a suicidal dwarf nutcase there aren't that many career options to move into. I ended up inventing the dragon slayer career for him and so he just got harder and harder...
Hey ho.
At least with my new Rifts campaign I'm starting them at level one, banning the uber-character classes and making sure I don't forget to keep track of ammo use, mistake 7. Your guys would just go through clips like it was a scene in The Matrix, and I never made you keep track of such things. My new campaign will hopefully be better at such things.
Alex
