Sly Flourishs

Running Epic Tier D&D Games

by Michael E. Shea

Copyright 2011 by Michael E. Shea

http://mikeshea.net/about
Cover art Copyright 2011 by Jared von Hindman
http://headinjurytheater.com
See Mikes other book, Sly Flourishs Dungeon Master Tips, at http://slyflourish.com/book/
Visit http://SlyFlourish.com for D&D 4e Dungeon Master Tips
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First Printing February 2011
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DUNGEONS & DRAGONS 4th Edition PLAYERS HANDBOOK, written by Rob Heinsoo, Andy Collins,
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Be kind to them at Heroic

Be even-handed at Paragon
Be a bastard at Epic

Table of Contents

How to Use This Book!................................................................................................5

Tell Epic Stories!..........................................................................................................7
Prepare Yourself for Epic Battles!.............................................................................11
Know Epic PC Roles!................................................................................................13
Designing Epic Encounters!......................................................................................19
Prepare for Epic Offensive Power!............................................................................23
Deal With Epic Defenses!.........................................................................................27
Scale Epic Battles for 6 PCs!....................................................................................31
Run Fast Epic Encounters!........................................................................................35
Finish Your Epic Tier Campaign!...............................................................................40
Run Epic One-Shot Games!......................................................................................43
In Review: Six Tips for Running Epic Tier D&D Games!...........................................46
About the Author!.......................................................................................................50
About the Artist!.........................................................................................................50
Special Thanks!.........................................................................................................51

How to Use This Book

This book is written for Dungeon Masters (DMs) planning to run epic tier
Dungeons and Dragons 4th Edition games. It assumes youve run a bunch
of D&D 4th edition games at this point and have a firm understanding of
the basics. Youve prepped adventures, youve developed and ran a lot of
encounters, you know the ins and outs of 4th Edition but ahead lurks the
dark waters of the epic tier.
Maybe your campaign has finally reached past level 20 and youre about to
dive into the stories where the player characters (PCs) have power beyond
that of mere mortals. Maybe youve always wanted to run some epic-level
battles against the most dangerous opponents in the multi-verse. Maybe
you want to run a couple of one-shots against the oldest dragons to fly the
skies. If any of these situations are true, this book is for you.
Running epic tier D&D 4th edition games is very different from running
games at the heroic or paragon tier. With the vast number of feats, powers,
and items available by any single PC, some devastating combinations of
powers will no doubt show up at your table. PCs can recover hit points
without using healing surges. They can kill minions with no actions spent.
They can paralyze and quickly slay just about any single monster, solo or
not. Dealing with all of this while you run a great game is challenging.

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This short book is designed to help you run fun, challenging, and fantastic
epic tier D&D games. Well talk about building awesome stories worthy of
epic PCs. Youll learn tricks to deal with the increase in PCs power above
level 20. Youll learn how to keep combat challenging without increasing
the time it takes to run it.
This is not a book for beginners. If youre looking for tips to help you build
great D&D games at all tiers, take a look at Sly Flourishs Dungeon Master
Tips along with the Dungeon Masters Guide, the Dungeon Masters Guide
2, or the Dungeon Masters Kit. If you have a handle on all of that, however,
and are ready to take your PCs all the way to the top, look no further.
If youre looking for a summary to quickly improve your epic tier
adventures, jump to the last chapter in this book where we summarize the
best six tips for improving your epic campaign.
Otherwise, lets begin by building stories worthy of your epic tier PCs.

Tell Epic Stories

Building the right environment and story for an epic tier campaign is as
important as tweaking the mechanics to make sure it runs well. Once your
PCs have reached level 21 and are on the path to level 30, they are no longer
simple heroes. They are the best of the best. They have saved kingdoms and
battled the mightiest foes to walk the mortal worlds. They are the idols of
entire global populations. How do you build an environment worthy of
their stature? Where can you find the inspiration to create these worlds?
Superheroes
Your epic tier PCs are nothing short of superheroes. They arent Tolkeins
Legolas, theyre Marvels Hawkeye. Your wizard is going to be a lot more
like Dr. Strange than Gandalf at this tier. Your barbarian is less like Conan
and more like the Hulk. Traveling across worlds is common for
superheroes. Fighting threats to entire civilizations is a daily duty for them.
When you need inspiration for your epic tier campaign, you can do a lot
worse than traveling through the pages of the Justice League of America or
the Avengers.
You even have the option to run a stable of characters in a Superhero
campaign rather than a single character per player. Players could each have
two or three characters as part of this large league of heroes and choose the
epic hero they want to play for each particular adventure.

Sly Flourish's Running Epic Tier D&D Games / Michael E. Shea / 8

A campaign based on the Justice League would work very well at the epic
tier. The scale is right, the scope is right, and the characters are right. Take
a dip back into your favorite DC and Marvel comics to inspire your epic tier
campaigns.
Godstompers
A phrase I first heard by Dave Chalker of Critical Hits, Godstomping is a
simple level 27 to 30 campaign design that works very well for groups that
enjoy typical one-shot dungeon crawling. In this storyline, the PCs hunt
down each of the worst gods and demon princes of the multi-verse one after
another. You can design an overarching plot around this but it doesnt need
to be elaborate. Perhaps an ancient book gives instructions for opening up
portals to each of the gods or demon princes inner sanctum. To determine
who they should fight you can look at any solo creature above level 30 and
throw them at the end of a three-encounter dungeon delve. Godstomping
would also make for a fun series of level 30 one-shot adventures.
Epic settings and locales
Epic tier PCs need a home base worthy of their stature. Hanging out at the
local bar in Fallcrest simply wont cut it. Instead, give the PCs a secret
headquarters inside the center of an earthmote floating over the Elemental
Chaos or a massive Spelljammer soaring through the Astral Sea or a tower
in the famed City of Brass.
Give the PCs an amazing place they can call their own. As they travel
through the final nine levels of the game, they should have a location they
can fill out with all of their greatest desires. Permanent teleportation

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circles, iron golem guardians, treasure rooms as large as the halls of kings;
give them what theyve dreamed theyd have for the past 21 levels. Once
they have it, avoid the temptation to attack it constantly or take it away.
Even Superman had a Fortress of Solitude that, for the most part, was left
alone.
Everyone knows your name
At the epic tier the PCs have no doubt made a name for themselves. Even in
the outer reaches of the Astral Sea or deep in the cavernous maws of the
Abyss, the angels and fiends have learned of the PCs. Their reputations
should almost always precede them. The story for your campaign should
begin to revolve around the PCs and their actions instead of a story paved
by someone else that the PCs merely follow. Even the mightiest demon
princes should take careful note when the PCs take notice of them.
Threats worthy of demigods
Always keep in mind how to scale your adventures and your campaign to
the point worthy of demigods or superheroes. At level 21 and above, saving
a kingdom simply wont do. Huge, ancient, and multi-verse changing
threats are almost always the only threats worthy of their attention.
Sentient planets on a path of galactic destruction, ancient primordial evils
awoken in the depths that threaten global annihilation, a ten-thousandyear plot of a demon prince; these are the threats your players should
expect to see. Treat your PCs as the demigods they are and show them what
it means to face the greatest threats ever conceived.

Sly Flourish's Running Epic Tier D&D Games / Michael E. Shea / 10

Good stories will carry your players interest as they progress through the
epic tier but in order to properly challenge them, you have to prepare
yourself for what youll see in combat from these powerful characters.

Prepare Yourself for Epic Battles

If youve run paragon-tier games before, you likely have seen a large
increase in the power and capability of your PCs. Your ranged strikers slide
away from attacks, your melee defenders shrug off massive amounts of
damage, your controllers manage to lock down an entire battlefield of
monsters. The jump from the heroic to the paragon tier increases the power
of each PC quite a bit.
Expect even more of that at the epic tier. With both paragon paths and epic
destinies at their disposal, along with 13 to 18 feats, dozens of utility
powers, combat powers, and magical items; the combination of effects
youll begin to see from level 21 to 30 will stagger you.
Minions will die the second you put them on the table. The biggest brutes
you can find will become paralyzed and killed without launching a single
attack. Solo creatures will find themselves pinned down, chain stunned,
and killed in two rounds of combat. The PCs can shrug off the most
powerful hits, heal for free, resist nearly everything, and gain vast sums of
temporary hit points.
Beyond the individual power of an epic tier PC, youll also begin to see
powerful combinations between multiple epic tier PCs as well. Warlords
will add +9 to the attacks of a ranger able to attack every creature within

Sly Flourish's Running Epic Tier D&D Games / Michael E. Shea / 12

sight. Characters might score critical hits nearly every round and trigger a
series of free attacks from everyone else in the party every time they do.
Characters, boosted by their allies, might dish out 300 damage in a single
turn. Youll have to prepare for these combinations if you want the game to
be something more than a monster holocaust.
Gone are the days where monsters out of the book could threaten PCs.
Youre going to have to pull out a lot of tricks to keep players challenged.
Environmental effects, fantastic terrain, traps and hazards, in-battle skill
challenges; youll have to use all of these tools to keep battles interesting,
challenging, and fun.
The first step in this preparation is knowing how the traditional roles of PCs
scale into the epic tier.

Know Epic PC Roles

In order to apply the right challenge to your group for a particular

encounter, you need to understand the capabilities of each of your PCs.
Your goal isnt to directly counteract their abilities, but to build an
encounter that will let the PCs use their vast power and still face a suitable
challenge.
Nuking strikers
Powerful strikers with the right combination of items, feats, and powers can
inflict up to 300 points of damage in a single round. They often have lots of
escapes from attacks, are able to avoid terrain elements and visual
obscurity, and pour out damage continually throughout a fight.
Adding brutes is an easy way to increase the amount of total hit points in an
encounter. You have to be careful, though. Too many hit points and the
battle will grind to a halt. Ensure a large battle has some form of success
criteria rather than simply killing every monster.
Example: The black dragons bodyguards You want to run a highlevel solo black dragon but you know that the strikers in your party will
quickly cut him down. Add in four or five Yuan-ti brutes as worshippers of
the dragon who can also bring a threat to the party. Give these brutes the
ability to take damage instead of the dragon as an interrupt so that massive

Sly Flourish's Running Epic Tier D&D Games / Michael E. Shea / 14

damage doesnt hit the dragon directly every time. When the dragon dies,
however, so do the brutes whose life forces were tied directly to it. This way
you have a way to remove some massive damage from the dragon but the
battle wont turn into a slog-fest when the dragon dies.
Ranged strikers in particular are notorious for their ability to avoid nearly
all threats. Counteract this with some artillery of your own, map-wide
environmental effects, and creatures with reach.
Example: The donut aura One way to keep the threat high on your
ranged attackers is with a tool called the donut aura. This aura only affects
squares outside of a certain range from your central boss monster. For
example. A level 25 lich causes a field of natural disruption that affects all
squares outside of five squares from the lich. Anyone that begins or enters
squares greater than five from the lich takes 25 points of necrotic damage
and receives no benefits from heals. Now you have a constant way to keep
ranged attackers on their toes and moving around the battlefield
throughout the battle. Mix this with a traditional aura and you give PCs a
choice, although neither of them are very good, which brings its own sort of
fun.
Super-sticky defenders
Good epic tier defenders are like flypaper for monsters. They draw
monsters in and mark them with marks so powerful that it would be idiotic
to attack anyone else. Automatic damage, -3 to defenses, and applied status
effects as free actions arent uncommon from an epic tier defender.
Incredibly high defenses, oceans of temporary hit points, and a dozen ways
to heal prepare the defender to take these hits.

Sly Flourish's Running Epic Tier D&D Games / Michael E. Shea / 15

Challenge a party that has a powerful defender by ensuring no single

creature acts as the primary damage dealer. Even in battles against
powerful solos, environmental effects, auras, and extra creatures often will
be the only threat to non-defenders in a group.
Multiple simultaneous bosses, expansive battlefields, hard-to-reach
artillery, lots of brutes, movement-hindering terrain, creatures and
environments that daze; all of these are good ways to deal with strong
defenders without preventing the defender from performing his or her job.
Example: Replacing solos with elites Instead of running a battle with
a single powerful solo monster, consider replacing that solo monster with
three elite monsters instead. Say you were planning an encounter against a
massive epic-level Elder Purple Worm. Instead, replace that purple worm
with three ancient abyssal worms (level 30 elites from Demonomicon.
Three elites are a lot harder for a defender to lock down than a single solo
worm. Want to be really mean? Give them both.
Incapacitating controllers
Strong controllers create powerful zones that inhibit or damage creatures
within it. They create apparitions that pin creatures down and inflict
continuing damage. They kill minions with hardly a thought and paralyze
single creatures with a rainbow of various status effects.
Like the super-sticky defender, youll want an expansive battlefield for your
controllers. As many of the controllers zones require minor actions to
sustain, a carefully placed stun or daze can often eliminate them. Dont do it
too soon or too often. The player shouldnt feel like he or she got screwed

Sly Flourish's Running Epic Tier D&D Games / Michael E. Shea / 16

out of a daily. But if that zone seems to be completely removing the

challenge of a battle, you might want a way around it.
Catastrophic area attackers
Strikers, leaders, and controllers all often wield very powerful area attacks.
Though most dangerous to minions, these area attacks can also dish out a
lot of damage or control a big section of a battlefield.
Again, large battlefields, a good number of obstructions, or a network of
hallways can help you keep your monsters apart from one another so they
arent all hit by the area attack. Adding a few more hit points to your
monsters, adding a few monsters, or upgrading your monsters to brutes can
also ensure they arent wiped out in these area attacks.
Example: The minion generator Big area attacks eat minions faster
than a lawn mower. A minion generator helps solve this problem. Say your
wizard boss has four portals in his throne room. Every round, at the end of
his turn, have the wizard summon four devil minions from these portals
who act immediately after the wizard. This way they get at least one round
before getting killed and keep coming every round. With three minor-action
skill check successes, the PCs can disable these portals to prevent the
summoning of the devils. This setup gives minions a fighting chance at
being something other than battlefield decoration against heavy area
attackers.
Super boosting leaders
Leaders that boost a groups defenses, attacks, and damage can turn the
threat of a battle very quickly. With a powerful Warlord, for example, the

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bonuses they give to the party essentially guarantee hits. Rather than fight
this, simply accept that PCs will almost always hit and learn to deal with the
damage and status effects rather than worry about defenses.
Strong leaders might toss around lots of temporary hit points. Large areas
of ongoing damage whittle down those temporary hit points and give PCs
an added threat to worry about.
Forcing the separation of a party can also reduce the effectiveness of a
boosting leader. Roper-like forced movement, complex hallways, creatures
that kidnap and teleport PCs, these are all tricky ways to split up a party.
Use this with care, however.
Example: The fire shield Late in epic tier games, warlords in particular
can give out an amazing amount of free-action attacks. Give your boss a fire
shield of sorts to deal with all of these free attacks. Any time your boss takes
damage, it inflicts 30 fire damage on the attacker with no action required.
Because this can be particularly nasty, limit the duration by letting PCs
disable this fire shield with three minor-action skill check successes, one
per round. You can also see an example of this type of power with the Adult
Black Dragon in the Monster Vault.
Challenging but not contradicting
When designing encounters for such high-level PCs, you need to keep a
careful balance to ensure you dont simply counteract your PCs advantages
but still provide a challenge to them. Your players worked hard to get these
powers, after all, and they want a chance to use them. Sometimes
dominating the entire battlefield is the fun your PCs seek. There is always a

Sly Flourish's Running Epic Tier D&D Games / Michael E. Shea / 18

careful balance between challenge and fun. Keep this balance in mind as
you prepare your encounters for these superhuman PCs.
With a firm understanding of your player characters and their role, youre
now ready to design the framework for your epic tier encounters.

Designing Epic Encounters

Designing an epic encounter requires a lot more from a DM than designing

encounters in the heroic and paragon tiers. It isnt as easy as picking out a
number of monsters, calculating the experience budget, and putting them
on a table. Most published epic tier encounters wont run like youd expect.
Here are a few tips for designing solid epic tier encounters.
Ignore experience budgets
The experience budget, described in the Dungeon Masters Guide and
Dungeon Masters Kit, is a useful guide to ensure you have the right
challenge facing your party. It ensures you have enough monsters at the
right level to keep your PCs on their toes without overwhelming them. It
also lets you scale battles up or down depending on how hard a challenge
you want them to face.
Unfortunately, it helps very little above level 21. The wild combination of
effects generated by epic-level PCs makes it extremely difficult to judge the
true challenge of a battle. A battle three levels above your PCs might end up
being a cakewalk while a battle of equal level that includes a lot of
environmental effects may prove very challenging. Instead of using the
experience budget as a guide, youre going to need do a few different things
to maintain the right challenge for your PCs.

Sly Flourish's Running Epic Tier D&D Games / Michael E. Shea / 20

Prepare to improvise
All the planning in the world wont tell you exactly how an epic battle is
going to go. Youll want to be prepared to change the battle around during
combat to tune it on the fly and keep it fun. Youll also want to do this
without the players realizing that youre changing the battle based on what
is going on. If they feel like youre just changing the game whenever you
want, theyll feel like all their special powers and items arent really
effective. What is the point of all these numbers and rolling if youre just
going to change things whenever it goes well or poorly?
The way to counteract this feeling is to prepare for it ahead of time. Add an
overdrive power to elites and solos. If the PCs are having too easy a time,
this overdrive power might add the needed threat. An overdrive power
might increase an auras damage above normal, add additional damage to
attacks, or adding immunities to status effects.
Another way is to add a reserve team. Additional monsters might come to
the aid of the original group if things go particularly badly. Again, youll
want to have this reserve team already planned out and then decide midbattle if you really need it or not.
Sometimes youll need to go the other way. Maybe your encounter turned
out to be too hard or its simply going too long. Try reducing the monsters
hit points mid-battle to speed things up. As long as your players arent
aware of the sudden reduction, this adjustment can work out nicely.
Monsters might become winded, reducing their defenses and damage
output. If the battle is going long but the PCs can still use a bit of a

Sly Flourish's Running Epic Tier D&D Games / Michael E. Shea / 21

thrashing, start adding 10, 15, or 20 damage to an attack and reduce an

equal number (twice the number if its a solo) from the monsters hit points.
The key to improvising is planning. Design your encounters ahead of time
with options to scale the difficulty up or down or reduce time. When
running a battle, dont feel locked into your design. Make small tweaks
during the game to keep the challenge high and the game fun.
Award experience based on effort
If youve thrown out experience budgeting as a method to design
encounters at the epic tier, now you need a new way to actually reward
experience points. Some DMs simply choose to level up the PCs at certain
points in the story. This can work well but it removes one of the few
tangible rewards players receive from battle experience points. Sure,
experience points dont really mean anything but its a nice number to
watch go up. Players might feel like theyre being led along if PCs only level
when you say.
Instead, award experience points based on the effort of the battle. Use your
own judgment on how hard the battle was and award experience to each
player based on that range. To find the right amount of experience, look up
a single creatures experience value at a level that matches the difficulty of
the encounter. Make sure that creature is a normal creature, not an elite,
solo, or minion. That creatures experience value is the amount to award
each PC in a group.
Example: Effort-based experience So you planned out a few
encounters for your level 24 group; two easy ones, one medium, and one

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very hard encounter. As it turns out, one of the easy encounters turned out
to be harder than expected, the medium worked out as you would have
thought, but the very hard encounter turned out to be a pushover. Since
your group is level 24, youll give the experience of a level 22 creature to
each member for the easy battle, the experience of a level 24 for the other
easy and the medium encounter, and level 26 experience for the hard
encounter instead of the 28 you would have expected. This way theyre
getting experience for their effort in the battle instead of a static number.
You can award experience for quests, skill challenges, and story rewards the
same way. This system is an easy way to quickly award experience based on
the effort of the PCs.
Stay flexible
The key to running great battles is to build a system around your encounter
design that gives you the freedom and flexibility to increase and decrease
the challenge of the encounter on the fly. As far as your players are
concerned, everything is by the book. As far as you are concerned, you can
build the battles you want to build without inhibiting restrictions on what
you might throw at them. Stay flexible and plan ahead.
With a general framework for epic tier encounters ready, you now need to
ensure your monsters are up to the challenge when facing epic PCs. You
start by preparing for epic offensive power.

Prepare for Epic Offensive Power

Unless you have highly limited character options (by running a D&D
Essentials only campaign for example) you must prepare to see incredible
combinations of effects and extremely high damage output. It is not
uncommon to see characters inflicting 100, 200, and in some cases 300
damage in a single turn. For some battles this might be fine. You throw a
bunch of monsters at your party and they cut them down with ease. They
are epic characters after all. Sometimes, though, when you want to really
challenge the PCs, youll have to find a way to deal with these spikes in
damage and combination of effects.
Skill challenge based defenses
You will find, more and more, a reliance of in-battle skill challenges to
change the pace of combat in the epic tier. In-combat skill challenges can
end a battle early or they can protect against these surges in effectiveness in
combat.
Use skill challenges to defend your monsters or create situations even more
dangerous than the monsters themselves. Instead of performing their
powerful combinations of attacks, they have to deal with the challenge or
face the consequences.

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Example: The chamber of blood The party enters a chamber with large
pools of blood on the floor. The doors slam shut and four coffins open up
revealing Ancient Warrior Wights. The wights attack but they are not the
real danger. Blood begins to flow into the entire room from the mouth of a
demonic carving on the wall. Within four rounds the entire room will be
filled up. Only by manipulating the mechanisms within the four coffins
(three minor actions per coffin to disable 1/4 of the trap) can they stop the
torrent of blood. In the beginning, the monsters might take all the attention
but when the party is up to their necks in necrotic blood (20 necrotic
damage every round) will they realize the need to work on the trap. This
trap forces players to move around the map and focus on disabling the trap
rather than simply cutting down the Wights.
Other skill challenges might prevent damage from landing on your primary
villain.
Example: The prismatic sphere A scintillating prismatic orb might
surround the Lich Lord. Only by disabling the four prismatic pillars around
the room can they begin to hit him. Each pillar grants him one protection;
radiant damage, elemental damage, status effects, and resist 20 damage.
Each pillar might take a particular skill to destroy such as arcane for the
elemental damage and status effects, religion for the radiant damage, and
athletics for the damage resistance. The nice thing about this protection is
that PCs can simply fight through it if they want to. Breaking down the
prismatic layers helps them but they can choose to ignore it. The battle will
just be harder.

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These in-battle skill challenges keep your battles unique, force PCs to move
around the room, and protect your primary villains from getting killed or
incapacitated too quickly.
Build multi-staged battles
For particularly important battles, you might combine two encounters
together without a short rest between them. Such multi-stage battles would
have one set of monsters come out first to wear down the party and then
the second wave comes in to bring the real challenge.
In the heroic and paragon tier, such a battle might result in PCs exhausting
encounter and daily abilities early on but at the epic tier, PCs have so many
options they arent likely to exhaust all of their resources even with two
battles back to back.
Such double-length battles will likely take a long time, up to two hours in
some circumstances, so you will want to be prepared for such a long battle.
Youll also want to change up the environmental effects of the encounter so
the whole map itself stays interesting across two battles. Battles like this
will bring a real challenge to your players whatever level they are, though
epic-level PCs will have an easier time with such combined battles.
Prepare your lightning rods
Sometimes youll need a sacrificial creature to take the brunt of the PCs
wrath. Such a creature is designed to take the main abuse your PCs can
muster. From the beginning these poor doomed creatures step forward
taking piles of damage and sucking down status effects. They might never
get a chance to attack, but that doesnt mean they dont have a purpose.

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Large flashy brutes make good lightning rods. They hit hard, if they ever
actually manage to hit. They have low defenses so theyre satisfying to hit,
and theyre usually big. A good single brute stands out from the rest of the
crowd and gets the players eyes to focus down on it. Yet instead of being
your primary threat, its really a pillow for them to punch while the real
dangers come out in packs of skirmishers or artillery.
Use multiple bosses
Instead of having a single boss who will incur the wrath of the entire party,
split your bosses up into a few different creatures. Maybe a trio of sorceress
liches runs the Abyssal cabal instead of a single queen. Maybe the demon
princes advisor is just as dangerous as the demon prince. Combining a few
different villains together avoids a single villain getting killed too quickly.
One of these villains, however, is likely to die a quick and horrible death.
Thats the cost for battling an epic-level party.
Never fall in love with your monsters
Always remember that the ultimate purpose and end of even your best
monsters is death. Dont forget that the PCs are the center of the story, not
your special shiny beast. Sometimes your powerful boss will be killed a lot
faster than you think. Let the PCs explore the full strength of their power.
Let the story unfold as it does, let your grip loosen, and you will all be a lot
happier.
With a good understanding of the potential for offensive power under your
belt, youre now ready to deal with the strong defenses of epic tier PCs.

Deal With Epic Defenses

Epic tier PCs have numerous ways to avoid taking damage. Immediate
interrupts let them shift away or disappear from combat directly. Magical
items let them ignore the bulk of elemental attacks. Free healing and
temporary hit points mitigate a lot of the damage done by monsters. Zones
and auras threaten the most powerful monsters with repeated status effects
and damage.
Theres a very delicate balance between keeping the threat high in a battle
and ruining the players fun of having such powerful defenses. Mastering
this balance is the key to running awesome epic tier battles.
Crash against the rocks
First off, its important that players get to use these defenses. The best way
to do that is to ensure monsters crash up against these defenses regularly.
Even if your entire party has resist necrotic 15, you should attack them with
necrotic damage anyway so they can feel the usefulness of that resistance. If
a character is particularly good at dicing up minions, be sure to give he or
she some minions to dice. PCs didnt come all this way to simply have their
magic armor negated or their minion-hacking powers found useless. Let
them show off their power with some of the very things they want to see,
just dont count on it giving them much of a threat.

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Mix up artillery with brutes

Large brutes can be very effective against a highly-defensive epic tier party.
First, they have extended reaches so they never actually get next to a PC,
thus getting past most shift when adjacent interrupts. Second, they do
considerable damage even if their attacks are reduced or their damage is
mitigated. Third, their low defenses and high hit points make them fun to
fight. Brutes should be the cornerstone of many of your epic encounters.
Artillery monsters are also able to get past many defenses. Any PC mobility
defenses usually dont work against artillery monsters. They just fire away
at one or more PCs within range. Their low hit points mean youll either
want a few of them spread out, hidden, or staying within some other
defensive position. Like brutes, they usually inflict a lot of damage.
Mix up damage types
PCs are likely to have a lot of elemental resistance at the epic tier. Its not
uncommon to find PCs that resist 15 damage from four or five different
elemental types. Add additional damage types to attacks from epic tier
creatures and youre a little more likely to see the damage go through
without eliminating the need for resist gear completely. Sometimes the PC
will get lucky and have both resists available. Other times the PC will not be
so lucky and the damage goes through.
Adding about ten extra damage to certain elemental attacks is another easy
way to ensure you get the bulk of damage past resistances without
completely eliminating the usefulness of resistances. Youll want to use this

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concept carefully and not tip your hand to your players or they will feel like
having resistance gear is a waste in the first place.
Example: The Lich Few monsters are as impotent as the Lich in the
Monster Manual 1. Its very weak 5 necrotic damage aura is unlikely to ever
affect any PC. Instead, gauge the resistance of your party and give the Lich
a fighting chance to affect them. Consider replacing that 5 necrotic aura
with a 25 necrotic aura that increases to 40 when it becomes bloodied. Now
it has teeth!
Deal with marks
Epic tier defenders are likely to have very sticky marking effects. Their
marks will be so effective that it will make very little sense for a marked
creature to ever attack anyone but the marking PC. Learning to deal with
these marks without ruining their usefulness is tricky. Creatures that can
attack more than one PC with a single attack are able to get around marks
but still ensure that one attack will hit the marked target. For example, a
Flameskull with a fire ray that can target one or two targets will fire one ray
at the defender and one ray at someone else. This wont trip the mark but
still lets the Flameskull threaten someone other than the marked target.
Youll also likely want to rule that any multiple-attack action doesnt trip a
mark if any of those attacks hit the marked target.
Example: The Heroslayer Hydra The Heroslayer Hydra from Monster
Manual 2 has a standard bite attack and a multi-headed bite attack.
Consider ruling that as long as one head hits the marker, the others are free
to attack anyone else without triggering the mark. Of course, with the

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Heroslayer, the bonus versus marking targets might sway you to go all out
on the defender.
Higher damage trumps everything
The extra monster damage released in the June 2010 Dungeon Master
Guide update available in the Wizards rules update archive includes higher
damage expressions throughout all tiers. This extra damage is especially
important at the epic tier and using these higher damage expressions
throughout your game is the best way to deal with all of the defenses of epic
tier PCs. Higher damage gets past resistances, breaks through temporary
hit points, reduces the effectiveness of free healing, and keeps the threat
high even when attacks miss or are reduced.
Ensure all of your epic tier creatures, traps, and effects are using the new
damage expressions.
Only by watching your PCs deal with epic tier encounters will you know
their true capability in mitigating damage and defending against attacks.
Learn of their capabilities and have a few tricks up your sleeve to ensure
you can keep the threat against them strong without removing the fun of
having those powerful defenses.
Dealing with epic offensive and defensive power is critical for challenging
groups. Keeping that challenge high when you might have more than five
PCs is equally important. Now we will move on to scaling battles for six
PCs.

Scale Epic Battles for 6 PCs

Typically, when you have more than five players at your table, you can scale
up a D&D encounter by adding an extra monster or making one of the
existing monsters an elite. Unfortunately this easy solution doesnt work as
well in the epic tier. There are two added complications when scaling
battles for more than five players above level 21.
First, with the extra combined power of an additional PC, one monster
alone wont match up to the increase in PC power. Not only does an extra
epic tier character bring a lot of power to the table, but the extra synergistic
power of the team grows as well. One monster simply wont add much of a
threat.
Second, adding more monsters often just makes battles run longer. Were
already looking for ways to keep epic-level battles running fast and adding
more monsters alone wont help.
Instead, here are three ways to scale a battle for six PCs without adding
extra time to the game.
Add environmental damage
Add damage onto existing environmental effects or create new ones to scale
up the threat of a battle. Increasing existing damage will put greater stress

Sly Flourish's Running Epic Tier D&D Games / Michael E. Shea / 32

on the PCs without adding more time onto the game. If an existing
environmental effect or bit of fantastic terrain inflicts 15 elemental damage,
increase it to 25. If there is currently no fantastic terrain, add some. Using
the basic model of 10 damage per tier works very well to add damaging
elements to an existing battlefield.
Example: Scaling the mummy crypt You want to scale a crypt battle
involving four Mummy Lords and two Lich Nagas for a group of six PCs.
Instead of adding more Mummies or Nagas, add two necrotic pillars.
Whenever a PC enters or begins within two squares of these pillars, the PC
takes 30 necrotic damage. Since this is straight damage with no attack roll,
it will run fast but still keeps PCs on their toes. You might assign small skill
challenges to destroy the pillars to give the PCs something else to do instead
of just killing monsters.
Powerful fantastic terrain increases the threat to a larger group without
adding extra time to the battle.
Add multi-target attacks to existing monsters
Your basic goal when designing encounters for six epic tier PCs is to ensure
every character faces a challenge. Add multi-targeting attacks to your
existing ranged attackers and they can meet this goal.
Example: Rot Slingers You have a battle with two Rot Slingers and four
Abyssal Ghouls and want to scale it up for six. Add an additional target to
the Rot Slingers Orb of Decay attack so it can now target two enemies
with this attack instead of just one. During the whole battle, the Rot Slinger
can target two different creatures a round, threatening all six of the PCs.

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Adding attacks against multiple targets like in this example has the added
benefit of avoiding penalties for marks. Since the marking PC is one of the
two targets, the attack doesnt trigger the mark.
These additional multi-attacks work particularly well for elites and solos
who are likely to stick around longer than a normal monster.
Add two artillery or lurker monsters for every additional player
While adding more monsters isnt an ideal solution, doing it smartly can
work very well. Instead of just throwing more random monsters into a
battle, carefully choose the best creatures to increase the encounters
danger without adding a lot of time. Very simple artillery or lurker
creatures can do this very well.
Example: Flame Skulls You decide against adding necrotic pillars to
your Naga Lich / Mummy Lord encounter. Instead youre going to add a
pair of flame skulls. The flame skulls have very simple artillery attacks and
dont take a lot of damage to kill. They will add an extra threat onto your
group without adding a lot of time.
Add threat without adding time
The key to all of these suggestions is to keep the challenge on your party
without adding a lot of time. There are many other solutions to scale battles
up for six players. Youre going to need to do something to keep the threat
in line with the number of PCs but you want to do so without making the
encounter run any longer than it needs to. Adding a sixth player will
already add a fair bit of time to a game, dont exacerbate that problem by
adding more complexity to an already complex battle.

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Regardless of how many players you have, managing the length of an

encounter is critical to keeping it fast and fun. Now well discuss how to run
fast epic encounters.

Run Fast Epic Encounters

Running an epic tier battle requires a bit more attention than battles earlier
in the game. Players have a lot more options from which to choose,
monsters get more complicated, and giving the PCs a challenging fight
requires more monsters, effects, traps, and hazards on the table. Stack this
on top of your desire and the desire of the players to have a battle started
and finished within an hour and you have quite the challenge ahead of you.
Here are a few tips for managing an epic tier battle at your table.
Always be rolling
Though its important for any DM at any tier of play, it is especially
important at the epic tier to keep the game moving forward all the time.
Always be aware of the pace of the battle, move things along when needed,
and help players prepare for their turns. Try standing up during a battle.
When you stand you are less likely to slow down, mentally wander off, or
get into off-topic conversations. Standing gives you a good view of your own
material, the map, and the other players. It literally keeps you on your toes
as the battle moves forward.
Ask players to plan their actions before their turn so their turn is simply
focused on committing actions they have already chosen.

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Help your players prepare their character sheets

The number of options available to epic tier players is the most likely
obstacle to a fast battle. Epic tier PCs have dozens of possible actions they
can take. Studies have shown that human beings, when faced with too many
options, take much longer to decide and make worse decisions than those
with fewer options.
Help your players simplify their actions by helping them manage their
character sheet. Have them take a large marker and write the type of action
of each power or item such as Interrupt, Reaction, Minor, Move, and
Standard. If its an interrupt or reaction, have them write the trigger such as
when attacked or when monster moves adjacent or when I drop to 0.
The players might even organize their power cards by action so instead of
choosing among thirty possible powers every phase they instead only need
to choose one of seven standard actions and one of four minor actions.
Organizing PC character sheets by action type can help them decide quickly
what actions they want to take and get your game moving smoother.
Pause for interrupts and reactions
When characters reach the epic tier, they are likely to have numerous
powers that interrupt and react to monster actions. Its not uncommon to
go through an entire turn of monster actions only to have a player say oh
yeah, I interrupt that first attack. Now you either have to roll back a whole
series of turns or you have to tell the player its too late. It is better to pause
during monster turns and, if needed, ask if anyone is going to interrupt. As
you get to know your epic tier PCs, youll begin to know what sort of
interrupts and reactions they might have which will let you pause at the

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right place. Moving too quickly through monster turns could result in
having to unravel an entire series of turns, which further slows down the
game. Give enough time for players to react to the actions of monsters.
Reveal defenses
At the right point in your battle, reveal the defenses of the creatures on the
table using monster defense cards. A 5x8 card folded in half like a tent card
with the monsters name and four defenses listed will help players roll their
attacks ahead of their turn. Instead of going back and forth with the DM on
each attack, all the player has to do is let you know how much damage they
inflicted and any effect the attack had. This might look like youre pulling
the curtain too far back, so you might not want to do it with every creature
and you might not want to do it right away. Give players a chance to roll
monster knowledge checks to reveal the card. In practice, however, the
convenience and speed these cards add to the game makes it worthwhile.
This tip, along with making the combat initiative order visible to your whole
group, will dramatically cut down on the duration of your battles and is
good for any level of the game.
Keep environmental effects simple but effective
In the epic tier youre going to make even more use of fantastic terrain,
environmental effects, and environmental powers. Epic games are already
going to be complicated, however, so dont make these effects too
complicated. Each effect you have in the encounter should focus around
one thing such as damage or a status effect. A slimy area of the battlefield
should simply slow any creatures that step within it. A necrotic aura
radiating off of an unholy shrine should inflict 25 necrotic damage to all

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who step near it. You should have probably no more than three of these
effects as a maximum in any one battle and each of them should be
designed for simplicity and powerful effect. Avoid terrain features that
make attack rolls or randomly determined damage. Instead just inflict a
static amount of damage. This makes them much easier to run and very
effective against PCs regardless of their defenses.
Simple but powerful environmental effects can add a good challenge to the
battle without adding extra time to the duration of the fight.
Example: The skirmish, light on creatures, heavy on
environmentals If youre looking to have a quick side battle, go light on
creatures and heavy on environmental effects. For example, a sealed room
with an elite Iron Golem Juggernaught might be filling up with poison gas
that begins at 30 poison damage at the beginning of each creatures turn
and goes up by 10 damage every round. Every round the party takes to kill
the Juggernaught is another round that takes them closer to death. The
battle will no doubt be short but might be quite deadly if not handled
correctly.
Prepare for longer battles
Sometimes you might have a battle against a longtime villain of the PCs.
Battles like this shouldnt be rushed through in order to get them done in
under an hour. Instead, plan for a double-length encounter with multiple
phases and shifting tactics throughout the battle. If youve planned for
these longer battles and if the fights themselves are dynamic enough to
keep the players interested, they can make for some very memorable and

Sly Flourish's Running Epic Tier D&D Games / Michael E. Shea / 39

rewarding fights. Not all battles need to be done quickly, but you should
know and plan ahead of time for the ones that will take longer.
Example: The Necromancer The party faces a dark necromancer in the
upper tower of his keep. The necromancer, protected by four pillars of
necrotic energy, watches as his powerful flesh golems and skeletal knights
battles the party. This counts as phase 1. The party finishes phase 1 and
enters phase 2 when they have broken the dark enchantments. This
destroys any skeletal knights that remain and breaks the necromancers
protective wards, opening up a new section of the battlefield. Now, the
necromancer himself, a high level solo monster, attacks the party in phase
2. When the necromancer is slain, all remaining creatures are likewise
slain.
Manage the flow
Managing an epic tier battle will require more from you than managing
lower level games, but it doesnt need to take longer and can still offer
powerful, dynamic, and challenging fights. Watch the interests of your
players and find ways to add tension, bring them back in with lore and
knowledge checks, or find other ways to re-engage them into the game.
With a great story, good encounters, and well-managed combat all
prepared, its now time to think about how to end your epic tier campaign.

Finish Your Epic Tier Campaign

Finding out the right way to finish your campaign might be harder than any
other story element youve had to come up with so far. Whether your group
has traveled all the way from level 1 to 30 or whether you began the story in
the later levels, finding the right way to end an epic tier story adds its own
challenges. Here are a few possible ways to end your epic-level campaign.
The cliffhanger
Half the fun is not knowing exactly where the story is going to go, so dont
let it ever really end. End the campaign at a cliffhanger. Dont end it
without the group fighting your main bad guy, but add a little twist to the
end to keep them continually on their toes. Maybe they find one last
mystery and the story simply leaves them following this one last lead.
Maybe after saving the Raven Queen from Orcuss evil assassination plot
they step outside of her door only to see Lolths massive spider-shaped
chaos ship standing over it.
Godhood
Going a more traditional route, perhaps your epic tier party finally
traverses the boundary between mortality and immortality. Perhaps they
make a name for themselves in the pantheon. Perhaps they fill the thrones

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now empty from their actions. Perhaps they become the right hands of the
elder Gods they serve.
Retirement to innkeeper
Theres nothing wrong with hanging up your +6 vorpal greatsword over the
hearth of your very own inn in a faraway place. The pace of excitement may
simply be too much to sustain. Sure, you smote down the demon princes of
the Abyss but that doesnt mean you cant re-learn how to scrub a pot.
Godhood isnt for everyone, maybe your group just wants a taste of the
simple life.
Dont end it
Why end it at all? Instead, switch the campaign over to one of the other
story types. Your long-time mystery campaign can switch over to a
Godstomper campaign described earlier pretty easily. Switch from a longstanding story to a series of one-shot adventures you might run every so
often in between the adventures of your new campaign.
All of the above
Theres no reason to presuppose your end. Let the end of your campaign
flow from the actions and desires of your players. Let them choose where
the story ends up. Dont worry about tying together every loose end and
making it all neat. A story that flows naturally usually doesnt have a very
solid (or sometimes satisfying) conclusion. Instead, find the right place to
step away and step away. Your PCs can always unsheathe that +6 vorpal
greatsword and get back into the action.

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While many will run an epic tier campaign through the full range of levels,
sometimes you just want to run a single quick game that still has all the fun
of fighting the worst that the multiverse has to offer. For this, youll need to
know how to run a great epic tier one-shot game.

Run Epic One-Shot Games

Normally running a one-shot epic tier game would not be a very good idea.
The extra demands on the dungeon master, the large number of unknown
player options, and the difficulty of building challenging encounters that
dont take two hours to run might lead you to focus one-shot games at the
heroic and paragon tier. Running a couple of one-shot epic tier games,
however, gives you a great advantage if you plan to ever run a full epic tier
campaign. It shows you the pitfalls and gives you an idea what to expect
when you run your epic tier campaign. Hopefully, this book can give you
enough tips to help you build fun one-shot epic tier adventures. Here are a
few specific tips to help you build awesome one-shot epic tier adventures.
Let players build their own characters
You might be tempted to generate characters for your players to use. If your
group is experienced at all, and they should be if youre running an epic tier
one-shot game, they probably wont like characters they didnt build
themselves. Since you arent actually playing the PC, youre not going to do
as thorough a job as they would in generating that character. Character
generation is also one of the things that bonds players to characters. When
you remove that, you break this bond. It wont feel like theyre playing their
own character, it feels like theyre playing someone elses. Unless you have
no choice (like if youre going to run a convention game) youre better off
letting players generate their own characters.

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Limit source material

Though you want them to build their own characters, consider limiting the
source material players can use when building characters for your epic tier
one-shot game. Limiting their options to Essentials Only sources will help
avoid strange combinations of feats and powers available across the entire
range of source material such as Dungeon magazine, Dragon magazine, and
the wide range of sourcebooks.
Limit magical items
To reduce the high amount of options players must select from and to limit
the power of epic-level characters, consider using the alternate
advancement rules of the Dungeon Masters Guide 2 and the Dark Sun
Campaign Settings book for player power. This gives characters the magic
bonuses they would normally get from magical items without possessing
the items themselves. You might let the players choose a single magical
item up to one level above their character level so they have some sort of
option beyond straight attack and defense bonuses.
Review the Player Characters
When running a one-shot epic tier adventure, you will have no experience
with the PCs in combat. You wont yet know what combination of powers
and effects they might bring to your battles. For this reason you should
spend a good amount of time understanding the capabilities of the PCs the
players plan to run. Have your players describe their characters overall
theme and strengths. Because these characters were built from scratch at

Sly Flourish's Running Epic Tier D&D Games / Michael E. Shea / 45

this level of play theyre likely to be far more optimized than characters that
grew to this level naturally.
All other rules apply
Most of the other tips in this book apply just as much to one-shot games as
they do to full epic tier campaigns. Running an epic tier one-shot adventure
will teach you a lot about running epic-level adventures. Reading this book
alone wont help you get better at running epic tier adventures, running
them will. Running epic tier one-shots is the best way to gain experience
without diving headlong into a full epic tier campaign.

In Review: Six Tips for Running Epic Tier D&D Games

Now that weve reached the end of this book, its time to do a quick rundown of the most important things to remember when running an epic tier
D&D game. This review includes the six most important tips for running
awesome epic tier D&D games.
Build encounters, quests, and adventures worthy of epic tier PCs
Player characters at level 21 and above should no longer be saving the
young daughter of the local lord from a band of kobolds. Epic tier PCs
require adventures worthy of their progress and powers. Traveling across
the Astral Sea in search of ancient enemies planning to resurrect a dead
god, saving the planet from an oncoming planet-devouring entity from the
Far Realm, hunting demon princes in the Abyss; these are the sorts of
adventures your party should face. Every adventure, every challenge, and
every battle should be something that defines your PCs as epic heroes.
Limit PC source material
Consider limiting the source material used for character creation to deal
with the possible abuses stemming from the wide-ranging combination of
powers, feats, and items. Use the item rarity guidelines in the Dungeon
Masters Kit or Rules Compendium to keep items under control. Consider
using the alternate character advancement rules in the Dungeon Masters

Sly Flourish's Running Epic Tier D&D Games / Michael E. Shea / 47

Guide 2 and then give each character a small selection of uncommon or

rare items over a much longer period. Take care when using traditional
classes from the original Players Handbook as Wizards of the Coast
designed many of them before any of us saw exactly what the epic tier was
like.
As the Dungeon Master, limit your own source material to monster books
released after the Monster Manual 3. Monsters published before this are
woefully underpowered for epic tier PCs. The Monster Vault, Monster
Manual 3, Demonomicon, and Dark Sun Creature Catalogue are great
sources of challenging epic tier monsters.
Understand your PCs power and build encounters around it
In order to build challenging encounters you need to understand the
capabilities of the PCs. Epic tier PCs may or may not have the power to
completely pin down monsters, avoid or mitigate most attacks, limit
movement, or inflict incredible amounts of damage in a single turn. You
need to know which of these your particular group possesses and prepare
for it. Before you begin planning your game, review the character sheets of
the characters playing in your game. If youre running more than a single
adventure, carefully watch how the PCs act in different battles. Expect their
first few games to be monster slaughter festivals but take note of what you
see and plan around it.

Sly Flourish's Running Epic Tier D&D Games / Michael E. Shea / 48

Use environmental effects to challenge epic tier PCs

A simple room full of monsters will provide little challenge to your party.
Ensure you include environmental effects that add an extra threat to your
PCs, require them to move around the encounter area, and require a greater
degree of strategy on their part to defeat. Auras that damage players, reduce
their actions, and remove resistances are possible choices. Of course, dont
simply hinder the PCs capabilities. Design encounter areas to be fun,
unique, and challenging.
Increase monster damage
In the Dungeon Masters Guide Update available in the Wizards rules
update archive, Wizards of the Coast included a new chart for increasing
monster damage for all monsters created before July 2010. If you ARE
running monsters older than the publication of the Monster Manual 3,
ensure your epic tier monsters use these new damage expressions.
Protect bosses
Epic elite and solo creatures published before the Monster Manual 3 can be
easily incapacitated and killed by an epic-level party. Protect and improve
these boss monsters by adding status effect protection, high damage auras,
in-battle skill challenges, and escapes such as teleports to prevent them
from getting pinned down or killed too quickly. Dont simply counteract PC
power, but be prepared to deal with it to prevent your solo monster from
getting locked down and killed without a real fight.

Sly Flourish's Running Epic Tier D&D Games / Michael E. Shea / 49

Ensure your epic tier solo monsters include four basic things: Status effect
protection, a powerful aura, high damage output, and an escape when
pinned down.
Armed with these tips, youre well on your way to building epic tier
adventures that will stretch the minds of your players and give them battles
they will always remember.
Good luck.

About the Author

Michael E. Shea is a writer, technologist, and webmaster born in Chicago,

IL. Mike has played Dungeons and Dragons since 2nd edition in the 1980s
and continues to play D&D weekly at his home. Mike is the creator and
writer for http://slyflourish.com, a writer for http://critical-hits.com, and a
regular guest on the podcast http://thetomeshow.com. He also writes daily
DM tips at http://twitter.com/slyflourish.
Mike lives in Vienna, Virginia with his wife and editor, Michelle, and his
fiendish dire worg, Jebu - destroyer of tennis balls.

About the Artist

Jared von Hindman is an artist and sometime comedian who dug too
deep while researching Stupid Monsters of Dungeons & Dragons. He
awoke something dire and horrible (perhaps fiendish, even) and now he
spends his days playing with plastic elves and illustrating new and creative
ways to kill goblins. Currently he resides in Berlin with an older woman and
a snake named Slinky. Hes not sure why his pet needs to be included in his
bio, but all the cool kids seem to be doing it and Jareds a sucker for peer
pressure.

Special Thanks

Special thanks to my friends Jeff Greiner, Tracy Hurley, and Kent Linnebur
for reviewing and editing this book and to my wife who spent endless hours
discussing the concepts in this book, saw the result first hand in our own
epic game, and edited this book as well. I also want to thank the
Shieldbashers including Derek and Jessica LaHousse, Bryan Wire, Mike
Schiller, Mike Spute, Casey Creech, and Matt James without whom I never
would have experienced how much fun epic tier D&D can be. Thank you all.