Good god this is a dull word, right?
Cancon was a fun convention, I liked it a lot. But while I was there, I saw this word being worn into a groove in my brain. It was an all-purpose descriptor, a vague and generic positivity, a detailer of scope and an encouragement for engaging, and every time I saw it I felt a bit of my brain shut down in response. I think some of this is just the normal overuse of meaningless words. If someone described a game as being ‘lit’ I would probably also just as much immediately ignore that descriptor. Packing peanut language, that kind of thing.
And I know it’s rich, coming from me to complain about overuse of cliche. I just said ‘packing peanuts’ which is something I am very selfconscious about saying a lot.
It’s not just the ungoogleable game Epic by Wise ‘Maybe We Don’t Want To Be Called White Wizards Any More’ Wizards. It’s also games like Epic Spell Wars of the Battle Wizards: Duel at Mt Skullzfyre or Epic Resort or Tiny Epic and their franchise of genuinely exciting little games, or Crafting Epic Dungeons or Epic Scenery or Epicness Incarnate or Warhammer Epic or Epic Confrontation and you might not know if I made any of these games up, or all the other things I saw on the convention floor that just kept using the term, and every single time made me realise that in so doing, I now knew less about them than I would if almost any word was in that space.
What is ‘epic’ for?
I saw it being used to describe campaign sourcebooks and TTRPG material. It’s an interesting quirk of language that back when I was playing 3rd edition D&D, epic was a specific term used to describe the game after 20th level, which is to say, the point when the game’s rules started to break down and all the power design got exceptionally dumb. Of course that’s an old term from an older time – 3rd edition hasn’t been a meaningful frame of reference since the ye olden times of 2019 when Pathfinder 2e came out. In 4e — the best edition — the term is used to describe the last 10 levels of the game, where the game stops being about the movement of heroes and monsters and starts being about the will of demigods and resolutions of kingdoms.
Still, it looks to me now like ‘Epic’ is a thing that is used to describe a campaign that is long and has a huge scope. That’s cool and all, I can imagine a reason to want that, but I think this runs into a problem I have with the landscape of TTRPGs with prebuilt content in the first place. I don’t actually have much interest in modules or campaign setting information myself because I will almost always want to make my own, to tell my own story. Buying a campaign is weird enough to me, but then buying a big campaign, especially an extremely long campaign has all the aspirational purchase energy of the kind of person who buys roof racks for their sports utility vehicle that’s never going to be used to drive anywhere but work in the city and the shops.
Epic dungeons are somewhat in the same space in that they’re very large commitments of time and energy to a large space. Spaces are interesting to me because a space has an ideology and a purpose. The nature of a dungeon is that it’s a place with a purpose and you have to work out exactly what that means for a world — if there’s a dungeon the size of the Imperial City underneath the ground somewhere with its own ecosystem, I’m left wondering why it’s there, what’s the ideology of a structure like that.
Epic Dungeons are Dungeons, but big! Dungeons where you go down into them and what, have to spend time making beachheads and establishing places you can come back to? This is an idea that always feels to me like it works better for a videogame like Diablo, where there’s a system in place that lets you ‘save’ your progress, or a game world like Dark Souls where you can operate completely at your very edge of survival, where the nature of the place you’re going gives you a chance to restock yourself, and you don’t have to leave it except to empty your pockets.
And like, those worlds make for fun videogames but that’s a videogame? There’s no sense of verisimilitude or ideology of place in a videogame, certainly not compared to the vast freedom of a TTRPG. Yes, I’m saying Dark Souls is worse at giving a sense of place and a world than graph paper. And I should, because I’m right.
So like, what use is an Epic Dungeon as a thing you buy and drop into a world? It seems like you need a world that’s made for it, a world where it made sense for there to be an epic dungeon and a playstyle that supports it.
Epic challenges also feels like a strange place to start because what about them is epic? The scope of them? I guess that can be a way to make something feel big and impressive, but when a RPG sourcebook is promising ‘epic challenges’ I have to wonder how they make that feel that way. I remember keenly Exalted with its vast scope and how little that scope felt like it existed or mattered because the world kept winding around the same four or five people and the same villain. Are these games full of really good structural design that allows you to convey a deeply complicated scale of a problem with a huge variety of variables in a meaningfully handleable way? Or are they just full of art that shows very big things? Is it a dwarf with a big axe leaping through the air? Because that just feels like heroic fantasy, and I’ve got that.
I feel that in some cases there’s also an element of low-key snobbery around some of these ‘epic’ encounters where what they mean by ‘epic’ is ‘players can fail.’ Like there’s something about ‘epic challenges’ that means I know how to represent a real challenge, you don’t, and with all this there’s the precarity of a failure state hovering over things, a failure state that, being honest, for an appropriately epic sized kind of challenge, you won’t really see, because, like…
You don’t tend to survive epic failures.
Worlds don’t tend to survive epic failures.
It isn’t that any of the time, the impulse to use the word epic is a bad thing. It’s not like any of these companies are going to hurt for using a word that I personally just happen to think exists at the same level of writing effort as a gamer webcomic about two guys on a sofa complaining about the size of an Xbox controller.
I predict if Ettin gets to read this, he’s going to, before he finishes reading the article, send me a discord message saying ‘lol, epic.’