As a DM, it is often difficult to find material to run an epic game.  Afterall, no DM has time to reinvent the wheel.  In fact, most of the time there isn’t space or time to build an epic NPC or create a new monster just for a single session.  Well, here are some sources and tricks for dealing with that problem.

Sources

  Obviously, the epic handbook makes a decent source for both the rules, some difficult spells, and a number of monsters.  My only complaint about the epic monsters in that fine book stems from the extreme weirdness of many of them and a certain distaste for so much deific intervention.  An entire section of abominations all owe their existance to some mistake of the gods of one kind or another, while subsequent monsters often have little cause to exist save as challenges for epic characters.  While I applaud the idea of some templates to make epic challenges, the paragon and psuedonatural templates have limited use within some campaigns and frankly, it can get a little boring.  Besides which applying those template isn’t a whole lot different than building a monster from the ground up, except for the fact that the CR is estimated for the character.  The other major flaw the epic handbook suffers is that it’s aimed at truly epic characters.  The challenge ratings on many of the monsters breaks 30, which means that your 21st level characters get left in the lurch.  So, let’s turn to some additional material.

  One of my favorite books for low epic material is the Draconimicon.  Dragons are great because the age catagories enable them to scale to almost every challenge rating, there are good and bad dragons, and every dragon is sure to be a real challenge, not an inflated CR.  The only downside is that Dragons are hard to run.  When I say that, let’s use the comparison of running a warrior, a wizard, and a beholder all at the same time.  The physical and magical prowess of dragons coupled with their breath weapons and other special abilities make them comparably difficult to run with the important caveat that dragons are supposed to be SMART.  They know their own capabilities better than the DM is ever likely to, but in a one hit encounter, they’re unlikely to get to showcase any significant portion of these abilities.  Still, this isn’t a problem dragons have a monopoly on.  Most epic creatures suffer from too many abilities and not enough turns to live.  So that deals with the epic progression at low levels, but what about when your characters hit level 50 and have run out of challenges to deal with from the standard reference document?  There is a slightly more time consuming response to that as well.

At 50th level, characters are, if not actually immortal, still liable to live longer than others of their race and possibly any minor deities that get in their way.  Thus, the Deities and Demigods book is a good source for epic opponents.  In fact, there are rules for creating a host of minor deities that could still challenge the characters.  The book has some major flaws, however.  The fact that the book doesn’t make use of epic rules is one of the most major.  This means that every deity really needs a host of epic feats to be viable contenders with your PCs.  The second drawback is a total lack of magical equipment.  Even deities signature weapons are likely to fall far short of whatever your PCs have been using for 30 levels since becoming epic.  However, once equipped and given a new feat selection, the divine abilities should make any deity a solid challenge for PCs.

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Methods

  I promised some methods for reducing the workload as a DM.  One tried and true method involves the recurring villain.  By making a recurring villain, it will only take you as long as adding a few levels to make it a challenge for the party once again.  I recommend using an outsider or undead as the party can actually kill the thing, but it will just come back.  Liches or vampires come back through the use of a coffin or phylactery and outsiders just return home awaiting the next time they get back to the prime plane.  At epic levels, the worm that walks is a great option for a recurring bad guy with arcane or divine powers.  Similarly, there are a number of demons and devils that start close enough to epic already that a little work adding class levels and/or hit dice will make them an epic challenge.  Don’t forget to equip them appropriately.  The challenge rating of class levels assumes a degree of magical equipment.

  Another option at epic levels involves the creation of a monster that realistically could have thousands of representatives.  The best way to do that is a new menace from an outer plane, mad wizard, etc.  This combines nicely with the previous method since you could have a worm that walks create this race of creatures.  If they spawn rapidly enough, it could keep your characters busy for quite a while, or your characters could quite easily fail and the world could be plunged into apocalyptic doom.  Better yet, by having lots of creatures you can capitalize on the major limitation of your character’s resources.  There is still only one of them.  Two first level fighters can be in more places at once than any 50th level fighter.  This is a major weakness and one that the DM needs to exploit at every opportunity to keep the player’s from feeling too godlike and being too willing to ignore everyone else in the world in favor of their own awesomeness.  Plus, it allows for effective use of such feats as Leadership, which otherwise can feel like wasted feats.

  Finally, for a fast adventure, steal their character sheets, copy, and change the names.  Instant villains.  This is a really cheap trick and you might want to go ahead and make cosmetic changes, but it can also be really fun for the characters to recognize how powerful they are when confronted with themselves.  Of course, this goes with the assumption that their character sheets are even legible, which by this point in their careers might be too big of an assumption.

  So, next time you make an adventure, go with the bad guy that keeps giving.  Afterall, a villain that challenges the whole party now can always team up with several other like villains to challenge the party in five or six levels.