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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jack7" data-source="post: 5679417" data-attributes="member: 54707">In my opinion the elements listed below qualify as  some of the components of what constitute a Great Quest. Not all are necessary  for any one adventure (or to be more accurate series of adventures) to become a  Quest, but most of these elements are common to Great Quests.    ELEMENTS OF A GREAT QUEST  1. The object or objective of the Quest must  be of highly personal significance to those undertaking the Quest. If not  it is simply a search, and not a Quest.  2. The Quest must be  perilous. Usually people think of peril as being mere physical  peril, and physical peril is often an important sub-component of the overall  Peril, but the peril can and often should be mental,  psychological, spiritual, and even cultural or societal.   3. There should be a highly important spiritual or  religious or metaphysical, or sometimes all three, aspect to the  Quest.  4. The Quest should be impossible to complete  successfully unless it is undertaken by the proper "Questors," but the Quest  should be of much greater overall significance than the identity or personal  value of the individual Questor(s).  5. The Quest often chooses the Questor(s) rather  than the other way around. (Although anyone willing may at least attempt the  Quest.)  6. There should be a series of strenuous and  exhausting challenges which either disqualify certain Questors as being improper  or unfit for the Quest, or which verify that the Questor is qualified to proceed  deeper into the Quest.  7. Quests often involves Mazes or Complexes which  are extremely difficult to traverse or complete.  8. Quests often involve difficult to solve  Riddles, which are multi-layered and may have more than one interpretive meaning  or answer.  9. The objective of the Quest should be an  extremely rare or ultimately entirely unique object, device, relic,  artefact, event, occurrence, or person.  10. A Quest should be costly, and often in many  different ways. Quests are often both Heroic, and Romantic.  11. In addition to being perilous and dangerous a  Quest must also be extremely difficult to complete successfully. If not Quests  would be easy and any and everyone would undertake them, and any and everyone  would survive them.  12. Not everyone will survive the Quest, even  those who come close to completing it. Sometimes it will even cost the life of  those who do successfully complete it. Those who do survive often suffer some  type of difficult to recover from, or grievous and life-long, injury or  illness.  13. A Quest will sometimes have a "false  conclusion." That is to say it will seem to have been successfully concluded by  a particular Questor or group of Questors, but in fact it will not have yet been  successfully concluded.  14. Secrets and mysteries surround the  Quest.  15. Quests may go on for a very long period of  time, sometimes even for centuries or millennia (certainly they may go on for most of a single lifetime) before being successfully  concluded, and may have killed numerous Questors before finally being  successfully resolved. Few Quests are resolved quickly, and none are resolved  without great effort.  16. Powerful (and often otherworldly) creatures,  monsters, characters, and beings will be encountered and will surround various  stages of the Quest.  17. A very dangerous and potentially lethal  creature, monster, character, and/or being will guard the final objective of the  Quest.  18. To successfully complete the Quest the Questor  must pass a final test that is very often posed by the Ultimate Objective or  Object of the Quest itself, and often this objective or object may itself be  extremely dangerous, even potentially lethal.   19. Quests are almost never about personal Ego and  aggrandizement, but rather usually instill in the Questor both a sense of real  humility and an appreciation of their own (and a universal) Heroic and selfless  nature. (This is a point almost entirely lost on most modern men and on modern  society, and one reason why real Quests are so rare in modern sensibilities.)  20. By the end of the Quest the survivor and/or  the conqueror of the Quest is a very different and very changed Man or Woman,  especially psychologically and spiritually, and sometimes mentally and  physically as well. </blockquote>

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