When your players fail horribly

[Quarotas]

Ok, so heres the thing, last night I was DM'ing a gestalt campaign that is reaching a close. The party had been recruited by a very regal looking man who claimed he wished to use an artifact to help his people and anyone else who agreed to his terms to create what would have essentially been a gigantic demiplane in order to escape the turmoil that is happening in the world (Big war going on, PCs got tired of it).

the situation:

Now here is the biggest issue, I decided to make it so that their employer would end up destroying the world or most of it in the process of creating his demiplane. They went to the temple, got to the room where the artifact was held and found a note that said "Ha Ha, fooled you." Upon exiting the temple they came across a group of secondary heroes that would either attempted to kill had they refused to assist them or traveled with them in hopes of fixing everything as well as revealing the BBEG's plan's side effects. Well they travel for three days and come across a small village of people the NPCs say are working with the BBEG (they were) and as such they killed the enemies therein and found a note confirming suspicions of their loyalty and the side effects.

After all of the roleplaying the Party leader says "Ok, who can scry?" No one says anything including the party they were traveling with. "Ok, who can teleport?" Again no answer, we agreed to just have the other party have a scroll of scrying and next time we get together they will find a means of travel.

We did this because the party wanted to finish the campaign but I want to avoid this in the future, so how should I handle this in later campaigns. This one has been going fo a while the party is a group of level 15 gestalts and they have become fairly attached to them ( well some, one player is on his second character that is just a druid gendarme charger on a lion with nothing about his character)

[wraithstrike]

Most parties at that level have teleport or greater teleport. If I was GM'ing the party and they had no access* to the spell I would not make a situation that required. Another idea is to have a friendly NPC give them the scroll. That is what one AP did.

*nobody knows the spell and/or there is no place to buy it from.

[Quarotas]

Well, the biggest thing is honestly we have a sorcerer, a druid, an oracle, and a summoner all level 15, in all honesty id assumed my relatively intelligent group had grabbed teleport or scrying, luckily the druid spell list contains transport via plants so they can actually get there now.

[Riuken]

Are they incapable of procuring a scroll? If a spell like that was absolutely necessary, I would have one "conveniently" located in the previous area.

[Hama]

I wouldn't...let them travel overland.

[Joegoat]

Hama wrote:

I wouldn't...let them travel overland.

Seconded, how are they getting around as is? Let them continue traveling by this means

[David knott 242]

Given the composition of your group, the only reason I can imagine none of them having Teleport spells is that your campaign up until this point has never made them seem useful. Are you sure you haven't done that?