Recently I saw a discussion online asking what makes Epic Fantasy. Of course I posted my onw opinion- being the author of something that is easily considered epic in scope- and one or two of the responses seemed a bit… limiting. One answer was along the lines of basing Epic Fantasy very strictly on Tolkein, that is there can only be One hero, the rest being supporting characters, and it Must involve a hero’s journey from Point A to Point B. that to me is a small sub-genre of a Tolkien Quest, but an Epic Fantasy need not be limited to that alone.

By the very nature of the word, Epic implies something with very little limits. You need not be limited to one quest from from location to another, and you need not limit things to just a single main character. Need an example? The Civil War, World War 1, World War 2, the Revolutionary War… You get the idea. Any one of them is an actual real life epic, involving far more than simply a single lone hero’s journey, and a whole lot more than just the one main character.
So for an epic Fantasy, you could use those examples but just throw in the magic, wizards, fantastic creatures, and the very limits of your imagination. The Hero’s Journey, Tolkein style or not, need not be the only kind of story in this genre. If you want something truly broad in scope, add in more than one Main character; two, three, a dozen. Whatever the story can handle, as well as the secondary and support characters. But then make sure you have a large enough canvas on which to hold this story, a big enough threat. The entire world as the characters know it should be at stake, the villain one able to easily handle the combined forces of all the good guys involved (by force or craftiness), and the ups and downs of the plot should be numerous and torturous. You should also never be afraid to kill off a main character if the logic of the situation calls for it.

And of course there are the surprises. Plot Point A should logically connect to Plot Point B, but there is always the unexpected, developments unknown to the characters or the reader that suddenly make themselves known, though even these should follow from whatever background details that the writer has planned out but has not yet revealed. Such twists should drastically change things in a big way, for good and/or bad.

Epic implies No Limits, so your plot should press your fantasy world to whatever limits it has then a step beyond. Do NOT let anyone limit what you should put into such a story just because “Well, Tolkein did it that way”, or “That’s what my literature teacher taught me.” Just Let the imagination run wild and free.

My own idea of epic? My Maldene series is 13 novels long, has 5.2 million words in total, some 250 characters, combines fantasy AND Science Fiction, spans Several worlds beyond that of Maldene, and covers a span of time many thousands of years long. You want to know epic? I’ll show you Epic.