The Breakdown of Intersecting Prophecies
The recent trip to attend a couple of surprise family functions was the closest thing I’ve had to a holiday in almost 3 years, and only the second in about 5. Anticipating that it would be difficult to get back into the work habits that had built up in that time period, I even made the effort to write a number of shorter articles while away (raising the question of how much of a ‘vacation’ it really was, I suppose). Nevertheless, this preparation has not been enough. The final part of the Tavern Generator series was teetering on the knife edge of being finished if I pushed the deadline by 24 hours when unanticipated problems arose in the writing – specifically, one small element that I thought was a no-brainer and all figured out suddenly turned out to be not figured out at all, and requiring quite a bit of careful thought. What Stan Lee used to call “The Dreaded Deadline Doom” had struck again!
I try always to have a contingency plan in my games for the times when things go pear-shaped, and I’ve applied the same principles of Prep, Planning, and backups to Campaign Mastery from pretty much the very beginning. That’s why I’ve only missed one deadline that I can remember (and had to extend another by a day) over the last 7-odd years of twice-a-week publishing – and why I was even able to pinch-hit for Johnn a few times when the real world smacked his schedule around.
In this case, I had a number of small “filler” articles in the back of my mind, ready to pull out when the occasion warranted. Well, the occasion warrants….

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FreeImages.com/Ruxandra Moldoveanu
I was once told, or read somewhere, that every RPG prophecy should contain three parts:
– One part that is literally true;
– One part that is metaphorically or allegorically or symbolically true;
– and One part that is outright fabrication, wrong, mistranslated, or simply misinterpreted.
Or, in other words, a truth, a half-truth, and a falsehood. Makes a superficial kind of sense, doesn’t it?
Except that it doesn’t. Any prophecy that can be subdivided in this way is in fact a melange of smaller prophecies, each of which only possesses one of these attributes.
Or, to look at it from the other direction, the collective term for prophecy shouldn’t be prophecies, the plural, it should be prophecy, the singular. And that offers a very useful and interesting tool to the GM.
Many Hands & Chinese Whispers
It’s routinely assumed that a prophecy will have only one author, or it will be described as a collection of prophecies. That collection may be thematically related, may even be ordered and structured in such a way that they appear to form a coherent narrative of sorts. I remember reading a fascinating book in which the prophecies of Nostradamus were sequenced in such a way. Why?
Well, because the prophet himself wrote them in poor poetry, used metaphors and poetic imagery as identifications, translated them into a language in which he was only half fluent at best, then encoded that before randomly ordering them, because what he was doing could be construed as witchcraft, and could lead to his violent death.
And, if you consider each quatrain as a single prophecy, which most Nostradamus interpreters do, it’s easy to apply that three-part breakdown; and, if you do, it becomes very easy to assign an interpretation to each that appears to have been fulfilled by one or more key historical events, guaranteeing your employment as an interpreter and visionary either directly or in print.
In fact, every Nostradamus Prophecy has had multiple hands involved – the prophet himself, the translator, the interpreter, the author, the historian(s) used as reference, and the editor of the translated book – and each of these may in fact be several individuals. It’s a collective effort that masquerades as a single individual.
The Power Of Fraud
In fact, it’s this three-element nature of prophecy, coupled with shrewdness, honed powers of observation, and – occasionally – planted stooges, that make many so-called mentalists and mystics appear credible, even completely convincing. Throw in the occasional use of probability, and you have a winning formula that has been applied to fleece the gullible on many occasions for a great many years.
Probability, you ask? It works like this: How many people do you know, or have you known, even if only in passing? Hundreds? Thousands? Take a room full of relative strangers – let’s say an audience of fifty – and multiply the first figure by the size of the audience. Now pick a slightly-uncommon name, like Persephone – what are the odds that the name will mean something to one of the audience members? You can even gild the chances of a match by being a little vague about the name – “Perse-something, hard to make out, might be Persephone or Percival…”
The bigger the audience, the more certainty there is of a match.
In older times, when there was less homogenization and less travel, it was even easier. A little research into names that were once popular locally but have fallen into disuse, and you can greatly increase the chances of a match.
It works the same way with prophecies. When you have all of subsequent history to pick from, the likelihood of a matching event occurring sometime by sheer chance goes way up, especially if your prophecy has been rendered a little vague in the documentary process.
Verifiability
For a prophecy to be genuinely verifiable, it has to be specific as to time, place, circumstances, participants, referents, and content. There aren’t all that many that are – and, to the best of my knowledge, every prophecy that fits this description has failed utterly. Most of them being prophecies of the end of the world, I must admit. There was even one, as I recall, that wasn’t published until after the foretold date of doomsday! The most recent example that springs to mind is that of the Mayan Calendar.
Predictions, on the other hand – meaning speculations based on observable trends and best knowledge – have a much better track record, especially if a little looseness is also allowed in interpretation. The history of Science Fiction is full of successful predictions that X would be discovered or invented.
Even there, selective memory – we tend to remember the successes and forget the multitude of failures – gilds the perceptive lily. Nevertheless, this sort of “prophecy” and “prophetic fiction” is worth reading purely for the mental stimulation of thinking about the future, and what it might hold. But, because most Science Fiction needs to at least pretend to plausibility, some level of engineering discussion is frequently included, and that makes these predictions far more verifiable than old-style prophecy.
Prophecies In RPGs
This melange of facts provides opportunities to the GM when it comes to prophecies in an RPG. Some GMs hate the things, and so do some players; they see the prophecy as binding them to a plot train. Even if the prophecy deals only in circumstances and confrontations, and never in outcomes, players feel like the choices they make are going to be measured against the standards of trending toward delivering the prophesied circumstance, and the GM will bias his interpretations of those choices accordingly.
In other words, that the GM will favor choices that follow his script and oppose, block, or nullify those that don’t.
Quite a long time ago, I wrote an article explaining why it didn’t have to be that way – The Perils Of Prophecy: Avoiding the Plot Locomotive – in which I discuss prophecies within RPGs, the benefits, the pitfalls, and how to avoid the problems (don’t skip the comments, there are some additional techniques worth considering described there).
But prophecies can be used in other ways, and those are worth exploring, too.
Prophecy for Character Generation
Time is a funny thing. A prophecy is no longer a prophecy once it has come true, or been overcome. That means that you can generate a set of prophecies about a character’s life – “tell their fortune” – and then change temporal perspective so that these predictions aren’t yet to happen but are in fact the character’s history. I devised and described just such a technique (with somewhat broader application) in Ten Million Stories: Breathing life into an urban population, based around the simple device of a deck of playing cards.
Many, many years ago, I wrote an article on doing the same thing with a Tarot deck, and using “traditional” Tarot layouts and interpretations. (I no longer have a link and am not even sure that the darned thing was ever published; it’s now just a vague memory). Nor was I the first to do so; there have been many similar suggestions made through the years. Why? Because such fortune-telling generally produces a tale of challenges to be overcome – or to fail to overcome – key events, and dramatic moments, cutting the dullness of day-to-day life out of the narrative as dull and unimportant.
Prophecy for Campaign Element Generation
But that’s not the only thing that such fortune-telling can be used for. Let’s say that you need to generate a city: Tell it’s fortune, and let that “prophecy” become part of the historical record that defines that city. Or a business, or a government, or a political movement.
There are three big advantages to this approach:
- First, there is an unpredictability that matches well with real life. You think events are trending one way, and suddenly, BAM! something happens that turns the entire situation on its side, if not its head.
- Secondly, your end goals can shape the narrative to whatever extent is necessary. If “predicted” events oppose that shape, they become a challenge that was successfully overcome; the only question is, “at what cost?”. If they don’t, they either help steer things in the desired direction or are a side-issue that adds color and depth. Or perhaps the challenge was too strong to overcome, but there was some sort of generational reaction or rise from the ashes of the past. Because you are in charge of the interpretation, you can make it both dramatic and have it service your ultimate needs while generating color and the sort of anarchic history that rings as authentic.
- Thirdly, you have the capacity to filter the prophecies through the matrix of the three interpretational types quoted earlier in the article. This constitutes an “emergency brake” on the whole generation system. I once generated an organization using this approach; the intention had been for this group to be on the cusp of achieving a particular “destiny” with only the PCs standing in their way. The challenges that beset the organization were, however, clearly more than they could handle; and little by little, their goals and ambitions and proprieties and core values were eroded away by the needs of sheer survival. Their “destiny” became a hollow promise that they no longer really believed was attainable, and the members were cynical and embittered. The PCs, rather than being the last roadblock, came to symbolize everything that had stood in their way. Rather than opposing the PCs because the prophecy said they had to overcome them in order to achieve their “destiny”, they became a group who hated the PCs with a passion, and who had shed any moral restrictions on what they might do in order to tear the PCs down – and rather more colorful and interesting for that passion. Ultimately, that fixation and hatred became an obsession, and that obsession led to the final destruction of the organization – but not before they had sewn a lot more mayhem into the PCs lives than the more impersonal “because it’s our destiny” that I started out with.
- And finally, prophecies can conflict with each other, and that is often when they are at their most interesting.
When Prophecies Collide
David Eddings made his name as a fantasy writer by expounding the concept of two contradictory Prophecies in active contention with each other, each attempting to orchestrate events in such a way that their foretelling would be the ultimate truth.
This was the concept at the heart of The Belgariad, though it was relatively subdued as a theme because of the device of telling the story through the eyes of Garion. In the sequel pentalogy (which might not be a word but should be), The Mallorean, Garion has become Belgarion, the instrument of one of the prophecies, and the theme is addressed more substantially; but it is only in the sequels to those, Belgarath The Sorcerer and Polgara The Sorceress that the theme comes to full flower and is subject to the closest examination. I tend to read them as a twelve-volume series.
The first set of five were central concepts in my development of the conflict between Order and Chaos in my Superhero Campaign and the path leading to Ragnerok, and to the conflict between The Gods and The Chaos Powers in the Fumanor campaign setting, and also to the conflict between the Creator (who so loved the idea of creation that he gave his life in order to preserve the existence of his creations) and his jealous offspring, the Angry Ones, that is central to my Shards Of Divinity campaign.
But Eddings’ works on the subject struggle with the need to have both sets of prophecies be literally true in between the points of confrontation between the two, critical moments whose outcome depends on the machinations set in motion leading up to singular event of collision between the contradictory prophecies. For dramatic purposes, it’s necessary for the outcome to be in doubt at each of these Events (his terminology) and yet the mere fact that the prophecies continue afterwards and show a trend towards another such Event is a clear indication that in the long run, it doesn’t matter; no matter which side seems to win, that victory will not be final.
This innate conflict between the validity of the prophecies and the necessary uncertainty of outcome can only be resolved by preselecting the path to the ultimate victory as “the one true prophecy”, one which could fail for all eternity at many points along the way, but which is shepherded through these moments of crisis by planning and preparations for either of the alternative outcomes.
The first time you read the series, this leaves you with a slightly dissatisfied impression, though most can’t put their mental fingers on the exact cause. It’s the subconscious impression that somehow, it was all destined to unfold this way that undercuts the dramatic tension within the story, and the longer that the series continues, the more solid and concrete this impression – and its negative effects on enjoyment – becomes. This is not as great a problem when re-reading the series, because you already have foreknowledge of events and their outcomes, and that is why the cause of the dissatisfaction is so difficult to pin down.
Take away the necessity for both to be literally true, and you get a far greater latitude and erase that inherent flaw in the Eddings approach.
Nine Combinations
With two prophecies, and three possible interpretations, there are nine possible combinations of outcome:
- Prophecy #1 and Prophecy #2 find a way to both be literally true, probably in succession.
- Prophecy #1 is literally true, but Prophecy #2 is metaphorically true, as might be the case when victory is achieved at the cost of the qualities that made the victory worth fighting for.
- Prophecy #1 comes true and Prophecy #2 does not – yet. Clearly, no matter how much circumstances resembled those described by Prophecy #2, this was not the foretold occasion.
- Prophecy #1 becomes metaphorically true, while Prophecy #2 becomes literally true. For example, the Fall Of Rome resulted in the “civilization” of the “barbarian tribes” who defeated the Empire. Thus, Rome can be said to have survived the conflict in one sense, but not in the literal one. (And yes, I know this is an oversimplification of history).
- Both prophecies become metaphorically true – for example, a conflict which leads to a peace settlement in which both sides somehow get what they wanted all along; the incompatibility of those ambitions being an illusion recognized at the time by neither combatant.
- Prophecy #1 becomes metaphorically true, while prophecy #2 fails utterly – for now. Nobody really wins when this happens, but one side loses more than the other. For example, contemplate the case when one side in a conflict is defeated, but their ideals and principles are adopted by the winning side, producing a metaphoric success for Prophecy #1 and seeming truth for Prophecy #2; but those adopted qualities lead to the eventual defeat and overthrow of the seeming victors, nullifying the truth of Prophecy #2.
- Prophecy #1 fails and prophecy #2 becomes literal truth – this is the same as combination #3, but the winners and losers are reversed.
- Prophecy #1 fails and prophecy #2 becomes metaphorically true – this is the same as combination #6, but the outcomes with respect to each prophecy are reversed.
- Both Prophecies fail utterly. Or perhaps, each sews the seeds of failure in the other. It’s also possible that the prophecies remain valid but simply haven’t happened yet – because people tend to want prophecies to come true, giving them a sense of purpose to the universe – even if it places them on the losing side.
Combinations In Sandboxes
Again, viewing these foretold events as historical leads to great clarity, and insight into how these conflicts can arise. A little thought shows clearly that the flaw lies in thinking each “story” is completely self-contained; when another “past prophecy” leads to an interaction that breaches that containment, it can upset the applecart.
This is most likely to happen in consequence of the sandbox approach – in other words, you have an established historical line, and when you generate a new piece of the sandboxed collage, the generation technique yields a prophecy that conflicts with that established historical line.
Solution 1: Breach The Sandbox
The easiest solution to this problem is to assume that anything in the newly generated content that conflicts with established history points outward, and doesn’t refer to those campaign elements whose history has already been known – in other words, a technical violation of the sandbox principle. But this doesn’t have to happen very often for the sandbox to be so full of holes that it falls apart.
Solution 2: The Untold Story
A more difficult solution is to have the “other side” in the story be an “untold chapter” in the history that has not been revealed to date. This can be achieved by altering the relative importance from the perspective of the established game content so that events are downplayed in the established narrative – to the point of not making any difference whatsoever – while still remaining significant in the development of the new campaign elements. This occurs quite frequently when there is a considerable disparity between the two, whether that be military, economic, or political.
Solution 3: “This is another fine mess you’ve gotten us into”
A third solution is to assume that the ultimate resolution has yet to play out, placing the PCs in the heart of events – though this brings the whole issue of “prophecies” back into question.
Solution 4: “The power is in your hands”
And a fourth solution – one of my favorites, though I don’t get to employ it very often – is to put the power of decision as to whether or not such a prophecy is literally true, metaphorically true, or completely fictitious – in the hands of the PCs, and make it very clear to them through events and reactions that their choices are the factor that determines the future history of the world. They are both the levers and the hand that pulls them.
Choosing
I’ve employed all of these. Solution 1 enriches the world, and is best employed early in the campaign, and in the campaign creation process. Solution 2 enriches the history of the world, and works best in the early-to-middle part of the campaign; it seems forced beyond that point, as I’ve learned the hard way, though it can still be managed if you’re careful. Solution 3 is the most difficult to employ, though it’s one of the easiest to implement anytime – so it tends to be my solution of last resort. And Solution 4 can be used anytime, but is (perhaps) at its most effective late in a campaign, when the stakes are high and the atmosphere charged, and events are looking to be resolved anyway. This is simply an event to be resolved that wasn’t previously on the PC’s horizon – and may even prove a stepping stone to the resolution of a problem that was.
Regardless of your choice, prophecy can be used to embellish and strengthen your campaign – and the players need never know, avoiding any concerns about the baggage that often seems to accompany such instruments.
This article was inspired by an email that I got a week or so back, from Peter Hollinghurst, about his new game, Fortune’s Wheel, currently in seeking crowdfunding through Kickstarter. Here’s what Peter had to say about it:
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While it’s a fully fledged game with a setting book, its also very much geared to helping GMs and players flesh out their games.
It’s Tarot-based and has a mix of tips and aids to get card meanings really working to create a rich layer above and beyond dice rolls – because its interpretative rather than prescriptive its much more flexible and powerful than the usual roll-the-dice-and-look-at-a-table-and-there-is-your-result approach I had used myself over the years.
As an example – if you wanted to use dice to get an idea for a setting you would just roll the dice, look up the result, take the result as the setting or roll again.
In Fortunes Wheel you draw a card and interpret it through the picture, the card meaning and any connections that spring to mind – so a card in the suit of cups might make you think of taverns, the image of the people on the card might suggest whats happening in the tavern and what sort of tavern it is – but it could also bring to mind a lake and people boating on it or a host of other things.
The tables we do have in the game are really just prompts, starting points to help people out. We have used the system to get an incredible level of detail, background and even whole adventures started from a few card draws.
There’s a free sample quickstart PDF available from the Kickstarter page. At the moment, the fundraising effort needs a great deal more public support than it has received, so make a point of taking a look by clicking on the link provided or on the image above; there’s something for just about every GM, regardless of game system.
Prices seem quite reasonable considering what you get, and as always, if the campaign fails to reach its target, it costs you nothing but a little time and disappointment.
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October 20th, 2015 at 8:15 pm
Wow – that is a stunningly brilliant article.Very thought provoking.
You nailed a lot of the things I am addressing in the system with Fortunes Wheel there as well.
There is an innocuous looking little section on truth in the game in the sampler pdf that is actually kinda important and ties in well with your article. An important idea in Fortunes Wheel is that it is constructed around the way conspiracy theories often work, bolting a mix of facts and speculations and sometimes outright lies together to make some kind of overall cohesive sense – it generally involves overlooking a few things and bashing a few others into shape to fit, but it gives a remarkably convincing narrative.
What happens though if parts of that narrative start to fall apart? If new information (and in the game card draws or player/GM input) seem to contradict previous information?
The simple answer is that people act based on either a sense or belief that something is true, or if they dont believe that simply by lying. In Fortunes Wheel any character, event or card result can have aspects that are believed to be true and is, believed to be true but isn’t, or is an active lie. If things are not fitting together you start to look for the deception or mistaken belief. Or in the case of the cards the interpretation that no longer fits gets reinterpreted integrating this realisation.
One long term goal I have for the system is using it to create an improvised murder mystery where you never actually know if you caught the murderer – you just believe you probably have because the (random and interpreted) evidence seems to point to them more strongly than to anyone else that got created along the way. We never really know if something like a court verdict is correct irl unless you were a witness (and even then you have to persuade others you are reliable), we only know it in fiction where the audience either sees the murder or trusts the deductive power of the detective- irl we just go with it as most probable.
Prophecy can be very similar if its vague, as can interpretations of cards. You pin it down more as things start to fit well and it becomes more concrete but if it all falls apart you have actually created a new narrative about a deception – its not ‘wasted’ in the game, it becomes something else to explore.
Thanks for mentioning and linking to the game – the Kickstarter is going slow at the moment perhaps because card based games are a bit of a niche idea and people have not always had good experiences them. I have been playing rpgs for 38 years now and have played several card based games and not been satisfied with them – but playing Fortunes Wheel we have had some of the best and most rewarding games I have ever played. Thats something I really want to share with people – the way it does open up new possibilities of much richer characters, settings and stories that really help bring a game alive.
It can be played with the setting that comes with it, or used with ones you create with it yourself, or just bolted onto an existing game as an added dimension to play. I even have some tips on using dice for people who just hate using cards (though I find it works best with cards myself).
Anyone who is interested in getting a richer gameplay experience please do back the Kickstarter, we have pretty modest funding goals and only need a couple of hundred pdf only backers for it to get funded and I really do feel its something different that can benefit roleplayers generally.If you have an active gaming group – get them on board as backers as well. Lets make it happen!
October 21st, 2015 at 12:01 am
My pleasure, Peter, and I appreciate the lengthy reply. The article’s not bad for about 3 hours of last-minute work!
I’ve occasionally speculated myself on doing an adventure in which random bits of evidence appear to cobble together to form a conspiracy theory in the PCs’ minds which is then disproved by the subsequent events that they lead to, only for the whole thing to turn out to have been manufactured as a distraction by a real conspiracy, but came to the conclusion after a couple of attempts at making notes that the retention and accurate recalling of details by players would not be good enough – though this might make an excellent novel or movie!
I fear that your murder mystery proposal might suffer from both the same problem and from the even more heinous sin of being unsatisfying to the players, though the GM would be vastly entertained. But I could be wrong!
Again, best of luck with the kickstarter campaign!
October 21st, 2015 at 12:16 am
Its a very good 3 hours of work.
A conspiracy should be a lot easier than a murder mystery – since conspiracies by their nature tend to involve lots of deliberate blind alleys and misdirections and are often, well, not exactly based on truth.
I have on several occasions constructed an entire game session based on a few simple seeds and then prompting players to suggest what they think is going on – they generally start to suggest all sorts of amazing ideas and work out the adventure for you. the trick is in persuading them that they uncovering what you already had planned instead of revealing they are the ones creating it because once they realise they tend to dry up or feel a bit cheated. Its remarkable how engaged players are when they think they have been clever and solved something though…they loved it and would gush on about it was one of their best ever games. The moment you told them what you had been doing they felt cheated.The thing is, that actually doesn’t change the simple fact they had a great time while playing that way.
After a while I did find you get people to deliberately collaborate that way, but it was really entertaining when they didn’t realise they were actually GMing not me.
I agree a murder mystery would be tricky. Its a very tentative idea because we do have this sense that there is some sort of factual genuine answer to the mystery and that the point is in finding it – but really in a way that sense is just a sense because we really dont know if its been fulfilled, so maybe it cold still work. I shall have to give it a go and see if its a disaster or poetry in motion!
October 27th, 2015 at 4:26 am
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