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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Upper_Krust" data-source="post: 5392509" data-attributes="member: 326">Hey KidSnide! <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />The simple solution then (as others have mentioned) would be to bring the planes to your world. Perhaps some planar BBEG is behind the rise to power of a neighbouring kingdom. This 'outside threat' doesn't have to be the power behind the throne. It may only be allied to NPCs.Just because some antagonist NPC can command a Balor, Angel or Starspawn doesn't mean all your world's NPCs become obsolete. But thats my point. The scale of the thing is epic. Swop multiple planets for multiple planes and you have the same sort of scope. I never saw our campaign as planar in that sense. We had worldly kingdoms and empires operate in tandem with planar kingdoms and empires.If your campaign is primarily focused on court intrigue, then I fail to see how the lack of worldly epic monsters is a problem. Sounds more like NPCs play a much bigger role in your game than monsters.  I don't have anything but peripheral knowledge of that specific adventure path, but I have often thought the idea of an adventure path or campaign adventure is a slightly flawed one in that there is a single overarching theme. That may be its greatest strength, but its also its greatest weakness.It seems you are having the campaign world revolve around the PCs rather than say for instance, setting up a campaign world (or universe) and then letting events play out along a planned timeline with the PCs as the 'Butterfly Effect' within said timeline.For example if you know the campaign world left unchecked is going to have half a dozen major events shape its history over the next year/decade/generation and only the PCs have the ability to affect the outcome of those events. Probably because you are running with a single theme over a long amount of time. Rather than planning several smaller themes...and I am not saying one approach is better than another (although the latter is easier to cater for).For instance if a given campaign is primarily involving an Undead Empire for the whole of the epic tier, or a Demonic Invasion for the whole of the Epic Tier then you are limited as to various creatures you can draw upon. Its impossible for WotC to deliver a full campaign worth of same-theme creatures and please everyone (because different people might want to run different themed campaigns). Whats more likely, and what we actually have, is a scattering of different themes, no one of which is able to sustain a full campaign across an entire tier of play.Whereas if you plan say, maybe half a dozen major events unfolding over the course of the epic tier, then you can almost certainly find enough monsters to make things interesting (with the proviso that you pick Demons, Devils, Dragons, Elementals and Undead as your themes...since there basically are no other themes explored in any depth whatsoever. Perhaps arguably Drow and Yuan-ti as of MM3.Although I admit, the epic tier is still very light on monsters. By my own calculations you need at least 10 monsters per level to make things interesting enough. So over a 10 level stretch that is the epic tier, you would need about 100 monsters. A quick browse shows:MM1 = 74MM2 = 50MM3 = 74Over the course of these three books you have at best, about 20 Epic level Undead and less than that Demons, Dragons and so on. So it would be impossible to sustain an undead themed Adventure Path without creating a lot of new monsters (as shown by E1-3, which introduced lots of new monsters and variants of existing monsters).Personally I am convinced that the way forward for 4E 'monster books' is to have more monsters of a given theme, but less themes. So for instance in MM4 (if such a book were to come out) we have 30 themes, maybe averaging 10 monsters per theme (with a given theme spanning about 5-7 levels). So lets say we have 12 Heroic Tier Themes, 10 Paragon Tier themes and 8 Epic Tier Themes.Each individual theme might not simply have monsters, but traps/hazards, NPCs, magic items and so forth.What specific epic tier themes would people want I wonder?- Asmodeus Realm and servants (Astral)- A new primordial and its followers (Elemental)- Something from the Far Realm and various Star-spawn (Far Realm)- The Fomorian King or one of the Arch-Fey and its servants (Feywild) - An undead theme (Shadowfell)- Some new 'Earthly' threat (Earthly)- An epic humanoid race...maybe time travellers (Temporal)- A 'catch all' epic monsters theme (Various)I'm sure everyone has various ideas and themes they'd like to see explored and flesh out.</blockquote>

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