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Message: <blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5395121" data-attributes="member: 82106">Stunjelly?!? You get to be a Stunjelly at level 2? Jeeze, in the old days we only got to be an orc or something, <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f609.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=";)" title="Wink    ;)"  data-smilie="2"data-shortname=";)" />Yeah, mostly I find what you're saying to be logical. It is pretty much how my own world is laid out. There are regions which are fairly civilized and most overt threats like epic dragons don't exist. The Kingdom of Gilduin is well enough organized that it probably CAN put together an expedition of 1000 men to go whack a dragon that moves in. On the border lands and wilds of the world there are more and less safe areas. An epic dragon is also probably not motivated to make a total wasteland of its territory either. For other more large scale epic threats there are the usual list of options, they evolve over time so they only appear now and then, there is a sort of balance of power where (mostly immortal) epic threats generally can't act overtly without endangering themselves, etc. I think though some of what I was suggesting in my earlier post was a that a lot of epic tier ADVERSARIES of the PCs aren't necessarily threats. They may simply be locations and beings with which the PCs are forced to interact due to whatever story considerations. The PCs may well fight them, and they are epic dangers, but they might never blow up into threats themselves. The ancient libraries of the Arcanum hold mighty secrets that the PCs need, but they aren't getting them without some hazard since the Keepers are not eager to part with their lore, etc.Let me give a bit of an example in the game I'm running now. There are demons and a demon summoning evil wizard. There are devils and a diabolic plan to overthrow a kingdom etc. There are undead, ancient beings of evil that hold ancient objects of power which the PCs might need later on. There are the Eldar (eledrin basically) who have great stockpiles of knowledge, but also ancient secrets and crimes they will fight to keep hidden. How exactly all these forces will interact with each other and the PCs as the game evolves (it is currently a low paragon tier campaign) isn't set in stone yet, but each of these factions (as well as some others I haven't mentioned) are potential epic level threats that could become manifest and need to be dealt with in the course of the campaign. Others the PCs will probably deal with during paragon tier and I'll keep them scaled down to work well at that level.One of the great things I find with 4e is that my threats can be pretty nebulous. I don't need to follow some specific rules about what they can do like in 3.x or (less so) in AD&D.  Monsters can have whatever powers I want them to and whatever ritual magic or whatever I want them to have. This was one of the things that always annoyed me about earlier editions, there was at least an unspoken rule that if a monster was going to be able to do something that it was supposed to fit in mostly with what PCs could do at a similar level.</blockquote>

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