Planning an Epic Campaign

[Cj304]

Hello,

So my friends and I have been playing campaigns for years, and eventually I decided that given how slow we tend to level up our characters, the only way we were going to play an Epic campaign at this rate was to make one myself.

And now I need advice.

It's been years since I DM'd a campaign, and aside from the normal things one needs to worry about, I also need to make this a good Epic level Campaign.

Has anyone played with the Epic Handbook recently, and if so, what do I need to watch out for the most?

I have a story vaguely decided upon, and I'm pretty much just trying to have a three part campaign where everyone can play up a level 21 character for a little while.

Session 1 will introduce the setting ,the backstory, have a bunch of mini quests then can do in the twelve hours they have before things go pear shaped, and a fight with a literal army of npcs of super low level for fun, followed by a wonderful combination of 20+ LA bonus of Templates stacked on top of each other in the form of a large were-direbear trying to maul them.

Session 2 will have the quirky mini-boss squad they can either kill or subvert, plus the chance to weaken the main villain before the boss fight, or raid his floating fortress in the sky.

Session 3 will literally just be a fight between the main villain, the Final Boss so to speak, and the conclusion of the story.

As someone who's not DM'd in a long while, am I missing anything, and what is there that's different about DMing for an Epic Campaign?

Thanks,

[MrSandman]

My personal advice would be to focus more on the story than om the challenges. At epic levels characters can deal with pretty much anything and it is really easy to start pulling off extremely powerful shenanigans.

You can answer that by shutting your players' characters' power down or by spending hours and hours creating challenging monsters and encounters (the monsters in the epic manual aren't all that challenging). I wouldn't do either. Personally, I'd focus on making the story interesting and let the players feel the power of their epic characters.

[Doorhandle]

The guy behind the immortal's handbook has a bunch of advice on this area.

In summary:

1. Feel free to have huge battles, but try to abstract some of them.
2. Aim high with encounter difficulty: particle with opponents that are supposed to be major setting players.
3. Embrace collateral damage, peementient damage to the setting even.
4. Uses cutscenes or vinigetts so the players can get a sense of how far the epic character have come.
5. Involve strange plains or environments they'd have no hope of surviving
6. Fixed-level encounter should go. Instead rely on a defcon system, with the encounters getting harder the longer/more obvious the players are.
7. Try to figure out a way to run truly massive monsters.
8. Embrace politicking, kingdom-building...even becoming a deity and managing worshippers.
9. Similarly, try to get the players invested in the little people.
10. Epic weapons should be sufficiently nutty.

The main advice I'd give you is to try and keep it simple, stat-wise, as you'll have a lot of maths and tactics to consider already.