What makes a fantasy 'journey' truly epic?

[Mortaneus]

Whatever you decide, make sure you plan this epic journey before the party gains access to teleportation. Once of sufficiently high level, the party has better things to do than to trampse around some dangerous wilderness and will just teleport.

This tends to be a problem in a lot of D&D games. It's hard to do epic journeys after the characters have reached 5th level. At that point, it's a steady succession of spells that either greatly aid or eliminate travel difficulties:

Fly and Mass Fly
Wind Walk
Teleport and TPWE
Plane Shift and Gate


Combine Teleport with Scrying, and the game turns into series of adventure sites, with quick hops in between.

It's a shame, really...

 

[maddman75]

A high level group can have an epic journey if they aren't certian where they are supposed to be going! See Piratecat's story hour - his 17th-20th level group is on what could arguably be called an 'epic journey' through the underdark. So far they've seen a dwarven city, dwarven ruins, the ancient halls of a dwarf king, and an underground trading city.

There's a saying about converting books to movies - you can't tell, you have to show. In a book, it works very well for one character to describe an epic battle to another. In a movie, we need to see it.

I'd say that in a movie, it works very well to show epic landscapes and fanciful locations. In an RPG, the characters need to DO something with it.

There's a huge, wild raging river - that the PCs must get across.

There's a beautiful range of treacherous mountains - and the PCs must find a safe way to cross them.

There's ancient crumbling ruins - whose mysteries the PCs must discover.

The DM can't just desribe with the wonders they are seeing. They need to interact with it some way.