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Message: <blockquote data-quote="takyris" data-source="post: 763116" data-attributes="member: 5171">I think one characteristic of being epic is making the heroes feel more like Gandalf than like Frodo.For example:The heroes start at level 1.  The world is big and nasty and full of dangers, and over time they establish themselves as heroes.  They see that the world is being threatened by some great enemy that wants to destroy the world in order to channel the energy necessary to birth an evil god.  The party, growing in power, fights minions, disrupts plans as best they can, but even as they get more powerful, they realize that they're too late.At last, they're at some level that the DM declares is WAY powerful.  In a low-power game, Level 12.  In a more powerful game, Levels 16-18.  In an epic game, they're in the mid-twenties.   The time of recknoning draws closer.  The party has done their research.  They take their best shot.They lose.They manage to stop the process of the dead god getting birthed, but not before the energy is released that will destroy the world.  As a last-ditch effort, the party finds an artifact that will take them to "Some other place."  They use it in an attempt to flee, as the world crumbles around them.  Everything goes dark.They arrive in the new location.Same world, 5000 years ago.While researching the evil enemy creature, they learned that what set its minions on the path to power was the infiltration of the Radiant Empire, which lasted for more than a thousand years and set in place the infrastructure that enabled the forces of the enemy to convert thousands of followers and surreptitiously garner enough power to, thousands of years later, destroy the world despite the best efforts of the party.The party now knows the stakes.  They know what they have to do.  They have to use their awesome power to become advisors to the Emperor of the Radiant Empire.  They have to decide which menaces to the empire they should fight.  They might have to destroy the Radiant Empire and create a new Dark Age, rather than let the enemy use the Empire's resources to its own ends.  They have to do all this stuff because they KNOW what's going to happen.They might even be plagued by a band of young heroes who consider the party to be an shadowy cabal using the Emperor as their catspaw while claiming to be learned advisors -- and the young heroes, in their own way, are correct.  The party knows that telling the young heroes will only get them killed.  The party is dealing with empires now -- sneaking off in the middle of the night to slay an ARMY of adult red dragons so that the Draconic Armada never reaches the Empire in the first place.  Descending into hell to stop the Demon Lord from ever raising an army against the Empire.  Working behind the scenes to stop the Empire's greatest general from being as successful as he originally was -- stopping the Empire from growing too quickly, taking too much, becoming too much of a target for the enemy's forces.History might record them as bad guys.  They know that they're saving the world.I dunno.  Epic?  Or just really really messed up?-Tacky</blockquote>

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