Some secrets are worth killing for, and it can be highly effective to build a campaign, and a campaign world, around that premise.

Image by Chil Vera from Pixabay

It can be very satisfying to build a campaign, or a campaign arc, around the Big Lie, but it can be harder work than expected. This article will lay out a blueprint that will take at least some of the effort out of it.

The Central Deception

The place to start is usually with the Big Lie itself. This needs to be selected with some care; there needs to be an ironclad reason for the deception that applies at the time that no longer applies in the modern world. It has to be significant enough that the truth is an existential threat to someone with enough power to establish the lie.

Those are some fairly narrow constraints, and it can take several attempts before an idea presents itself that ticks all the boxes. In terms of difficulty of execution, that’s probably the hardest step.

The Dangerous Truth

The place to start is with the truth that is to be covered up. An assassination? An act of Treason? A powerful artifact? A Curse? An enemy suspended in a trap? A secret Origin?

All of the above sound reasonable, but there are some specific requirements of this Truth, and not all of these satisfy them.

1. The Truth Must Be Significant

An Assassination could start an unwinnable war. Or a winnable one, perhaps with a high price.

An Act Of Treason could bring down a powerful family, even a Merchant Empire.

A powerful Artifact could imperil the whole world, or the stability of the Planes, or release a horde of Demons.

A Curse… depends on the Curse and who it affects. Compared to the first three examples, it seems pretty wishy-washy.

And that, right there, is the first requirement – the “Hidden Truth” had to entail repercussions that justify the secrecy.

Most of the suggested secrets – and there can be many others – will satisfy this requirement, but the odd one will fail it. So each idea has to be tested.

2. The Truth Must Be Dramatic

‘Drama is in the presentation’, I once read somewhere. ‘Anything can be made to seem dramatic if it’s packaged correctly.’

I completely disagree. A shopping list can be interesting, it can be intriguing, it can offer up a minor mystery – it can’t be dramatic. It can be attached to a dramatic revelation under select circumstances, but that’s about as far as it can go.

If you have to take time to think about something before the major implications are revealed, it’s not dramatic, though it can be presented in a dramatic fashion. At least one implication has to be so blindingly obvious and so disruptive that it is understood instantly, sweeping the rug out from beneath a pillar of the PCs world when the Truth is revealed.

It’s the speed and scope of the pennies dropping following the revelation that makes the Truth inherently dramatic. Scope comes almost inevitably from the Truth being Significant, so Speed is the essence of this Requirement.

No explanation must be needed, no additional world-building. Anything of the sort has to be given to the PCs in advance in some form, in the course of unraveling the tangled web – though its true significance shouldn’t be apparent at the time.

So this requirement can be tricky to meet.

3. The Truth Must Be Radioactive

…by which I mean that it grows less dangerous over time, however marginally. That’s necessary for the next requirement, but it means that something has changed since the secret was put in place – what is it?

4. The Truth Must Be Actionable

You can’t stage a big reveal of some dark secret without having it propel the PCs into a quest to do something about the situation. That might be to expose the secret, it might be to conceal the truth even more effectively, or it might be to engage in a quest to resolve the reason for the secret, once and for all – that’s up to them. When they learn the truth, they become responsible for it.

The action in question should still stretch them to their limits. There should be fanatics on all sides, and all of them hostile to whatever the PCs decide. But the potential for a solution needs to be there, now, in a way that it wasn’t, back then..

5. The Justification Needs To Be Iron-Clad

Last but not least, the justification for creating the secret needs to be absolutely irrefutable.

The Who and How

Once you know what is being concealed, you need to figure out who is doing the concealing, and how they would go about it. Depending on the personalities involved, this may require them to undertake actions that very strongly go against the grain. This should be understandable given the gravity of the situation, and can help conceal the secret.

Guardians Of The Truth

Someone has to know the Truth, even if they can never act on it, just in case. The discovery of who holds the power to reveal the truth is the holy grail of the mystery solution.

In many cases, it is whoever holds the ultimate authority – political, religious, whatever. In others, it is deliberately kept from them so that their decisions are not distorted by the knowledge of the Truth. Which way you should go in any specific case should consume some thought, and may depend on the nature of the hidden Truth and the reasons it was concealed in the first place. Having that information on hand, already decided, can make this step much easier.

The Dangerous Myth

With all the trappings settled, it’s time to construct the myth, the cover story that hides the Truth. This has to account for (almost) all facts, it has to cover the forging of false records, the rewriting of official documents and diaries, any expenditure of funds that took place, and so on.

The “almost” is very important – there needs to be a flaw in this cover story, and it can’t be an obvious one.

It can take some time to actually think of everything that the Myth needs to comprise and add to the ‘cover’ whatever is necessary. You are essentially constructing a false History in which the Myth is the reality.

Deciding the flaw is often the hardest part, because, while it can’t be too obvious, it also can’t be too subtle – you need the PCs to pull on that thread at the right time.

Guardians Of The Lie

No-one would go to this much trouble without setting guardians around the Myth – people whose job it is to arrange ‘accidents’ for anyone who risks exposing the deception.

It’s easy to get this wrong – depending on the secret, of course, you generally don’t want this to be someone perceived by the public as shadowy or underhanded.

Some super-secret sect within an honorable, law-abiding religious body is far better than some equivalent of the CIA.

Breadcrumbs Of Peril

It has to be assumed that the cover story was not as all-encompassing when first put forward as it is now. It had more flaws and imperfections, which have since been patched and covered over.

Almost all of those imperfections would have led someone to ask awkward questions, resulting in action on the part of The Guardians Of The Lie. If they hadn’t done so from the get-go, those Guardians will have adopted some sort of disguise as a group and started garnering a reputation. They are probably spoken of in hushed whispers.

They will also have set about acquiring tools, equipment, and training to be better-able to do their jobs. There may have been times when they have identified a point of contradiction between the narrative as presented to the public and the myth because of those impertinent questions and been able to falsify the evidence before exposure.

In at least half the cases, though, the discovery of the vulnerability within the Myth will be learned only after the fact. When that happens, they would have limited options with which to respond:

• Kidnapping / Recruitment
• A Deception Operation to convince the inquirer they were wrong
• Character Assassination so that no-one will believe the inquirer
• Intimidation
• Blackmail
• Exile / Imprisonment
• Arranging an “unfortunate accident”
• Assassination / Murder

The list increases in certainty as it descends. The last resort would normally become the first resort, with something less only considered if the extremes are unlikely to succeed or raise more questions than they resolve. The identity of the inquirer would play a part in that decision to a certain extent.

To create the opportunity to act, and awareness of the need, members of the Guardians would be seeded into every large organization from Palace Guards to Military Command. But secrecy and stealth impose size restrictions; the Guardians Of The Myth can’t become a full-blown secret police or intelligence service.

Quite often, disguising what has been done will require a new cover story. A known blabbermouth uncovering some small part of the truth needs to be exterminated, but everyone to whom he might have spoken also makes the list, leading to the depopulation of a small village somewhere. Protecting the falsehood is their number one priority, maintaining their autonomy is #2, preserving the secrecy of their existence is #3, moral limits are a distant fourth place, of necessity.

And so the Myth will grow more skins, more layers of deception, like an onion.

Onion-skins of Myth

The Myth needs to blame someone or something else for the events being protected. There are going to be groups that respond negatively to that, especially (but not limited to) those being blamed. Some of them will know that they are innocent, and will start seeking ways to prove it.

From the very beginning, there will be groups with a vested interest in attacking the myth. They may have no capacity to do so, or they may be powerful enough to pose a serious challenge to the Guardians Of The Myth.

Protecting the myth means emasculating the power of those who are its enemies. Operations to that effect would commence immediately; the first are likely to be hasty and succeed more by surprise than planning, but they will grow in sophistication and shrink in frequency over time.

It can be helpful if the enemies of the Myth are groups that the public are disinclined to trust, anyway, and even more helpful if encounters with them are rare enough that this perception is difficult to dispel.

Drow can be a good choice, as can Dark Fey. But these can also be seen as too obvious. A Lich or Ilithid created out of whole cloth by the Guardians Of The Myth and then “destroyed” makes a convenient vehicle for the Myth because it leaves no witnesses behind.

Such groups fall into two broad categories, and should usually be created by the GM separately: Those who have some inkling that the Myth is false are the most dangerous and take priority; those who think the Myth is true and have a negative reaction to it are less dangerous in the short-term but their focus on the Myth risks exposure of one of the flaws.

In both cases, Operations to confine the risk are essential, and those operations will also need to be covered up. Especially since none of them are guaranteed to be successes. And so the Myth grows new layers, wrapped around the old – deceptions aimed only indirectly at protecting the secret.

Each of these groups have enemies and rivals, who can be blamed by these cover stories. But they also probably have allies. Each such operation expands the scope of what needs to be protected, demanding new layers of deception.

Webs Of Apprehension

It won’t be too long before those multiple layers of falsehood begin to interact with each other. People will act on falsehoods believing them to be real, when they would not have taken action otherwise.

Other people may avoid taking action, when they would have acted. Some may discover that part of the Myth is false, but – rather than investigating properly – will leap to conclusions, cause a bit of a fuss, and discover that the conclusions were wrong, giving the Guardians Of The Myth plenty of time to bury the over-reactors.

And some people will put 2+2+2 together to make 8, where the first two is Myth, the second 2 is circumstantial or coincidence, and the third 2 is a prejudice of some kind.

Some may conflate the myth with ancient prophecies of some kind.

These cross-connections form an interlocking web of deceptions and misinterpretations. You don’t have to detail them all, thank goodness – just a handful of the more significant ones, with maybe a minimum of one of each type.

It’s more important to assess, as a particular group get involved in the plotline (even if irrelevant to the main plot)l, what cross-connections they have to the Myth.

It has sometimes been said that a Lie is cancerous to the truth. While you may or may not agree with that, it’s definitely something to keep in mind.

The other thing that should happen, historically, is that the Guardians Of The Myth should undertake some random acts now and then that have nothing to do with their mandate, simply so that no-one can deduce from the things that they do act on, what their true motives and purposes are. Some of these acts should be negative / hostile; others should be positive. The purpose is to cloud the story – essentially, these random acts are yet another layer of deception.

Unraveling The Web

The final part of the creative process is a road-map to the revelation of The Truth. Below, I’ve sketched out a 10-point plan. Many others are possible; this is one that works as well as any. It’s being presented here as an example, not a straitjacket.

a. Foundations

The path to revelation shouldn’t begin right away. For the main plot to have the proper impact, you need time to get the players used to the world as the Myth would have it appear.

Take that time and use it to introduce important groups and playing pieces without hinting at the importance they will have in the main plot. Name-drop without showing, in the case of the Guardians of the Myth.

b. The Patsy

You also need to prepare a trigger event that will start the PCs on the path of discovery. For that, one of the best mechanisms is to introduce a patsy in the foundations phase.

The patsy should be a clerk or administrator somewhere, giving him access to records. He should be mousy and inoffensive, a threat to no-one, a puppy-dog. He should befriend the PCs and maybe help them out early on, and the PCs should come to care about him. Each time he appears, he should have some piece of trivia to offer, and at least once, that should prove to be useful information.

c. The Sacrifice

When you are ready to initiate the main plot, he shows up as usual, bubbling over with excitement. “You’ll never guess what I found int he archives today! It’s amazing!!” — and right then, an Assassin from the Guardians Of The Myth offs him, right in front of the PCs, and then escapes (perhaps after some difficulty). The manner of death should establish that the only reason the PCs weren’t also killed is because The Patsy was eliminated before he could reveal his discovery.

Or maybe the PCs manage to protect him from the assassins and he gets to reveal his discovery – a minor discrepancy somewhere in something, it all sounds trivial – but clearly, it’s not. That provides a shortcut through some of the early phases of the plot arc, but otherwise doesn’t make a big difference in the grand scheme of things. Of course, now they can be presumed to know, they will also be targeted for extermination. Just how valuable is this secret, anyway? How many are those protecting it willing to kill to keep the secret secure?

d. The Mystery

This motivates the PCs to ask “Why?” What secret had he found that was so important to protect that it justified, in someone’s eyes, a public execution?

What The patsy had found should lead not to the core Truth, but to a weak spot in one of the layers of the onion – a hint at some gap or deception in the official record. It should appear to be something trivial – but obviously isn’t. It’s that dichotomy that should keep the PCs digging.

e. The Awkward Attempt

Of course, the Patsy’s known contacts, including the PCs, will be kept under surveillance. As soon as they start digging into the murder, this surveillance will trigger a response, but it will be organized in haste and go astray.

f. The Stakes

This should tell the players that they are onto something, and that it’s bigger than they thought; they will need to take precautions to protect themselves, maybe go underground or assume false identities.

g. The Peril

The PCs have to make a covert penetration of the place of employment of The Patsy and uncover his discovery. If they are clever enough about this, they can shorten the quest for an explanation by learning which records the Patsy had been working on recently.

With the information at hand, they begin following the breadcrumbs through the layers of deception, with danger dogging their every move – and some unexpected allies coming out of the woodwork to help them through. This is where the world-building attached to the Myth pays off.

h. Decisions Of Power

Meanwhile, the authorities should be reacting to all this activity. If they are not in the know, they may even covertly assist the PCs, even while their public acts seem aimed at hunting them down. The PCs should increasingly become the pivot point around which events swirl, some directly connected to the Myth, and some not.

Some groups that they might have expected to be on their side turn out not to be, and vice-versa. Every such interaction deepens the apparent significance of the story, and leads them one step closer to discovering the Truth.

i. The Revelation

The GM should give a lot of thought to the circumstances of the Revelation, where the Truth is finally going to be exposed to ‘outsiders’. This is supposed to be the climax of this entire event sequence, so it needs to be big and dramatic and to have the PCs at he very heart of events.

Personally, I like the idea that not even the Guardians Of The Myth know what the Truth is – what they don’t know, they can’t be compelled to reveal. Some people in their organization need to know who the Guardians Of The Truth are (so that the organization doesn’t inadvertently target them), that’s as far as it needs to go. It is also reasonable that the Guardians Of The Myth might need to protect the Guardians Of The Truth.

The latter would also have come up with a safeguard in the event of an early death through misadventure (i.e. before the Truth is revealed to the next Guardian) That might o might not figure into your Revelation Planning.

Another element that deserves careful consideration is the age of the current Guardians of Truth. Are they old, stodgy, set in their ways? Or young and willing to embrace a new way of thinking? If the latter, I would try hard to recruit a new player to make them a new PC from the moment of Revelation onwards.

The other box to tick off in the revelation is this: Just as the logic for creating the secret needs to be ironclad, so the inevitability of the revelation once the PCs reach a certain point in their investigation needs to be equally rock-solid. If there is any way out of it, the Guardians Of The Myth would simply spin a new fairy tale out of whole cloth and present that as the “Truth”.that the PCs have uncovered. In fact, they might well have such a “final deception” in place, ready to go, just in case it’s ever needed.

j. The Quest

When the PCs learn the Truth, the obvious next question is “What are they going to do with this knowledge?” Their entire world has been built on a tissue of lies, but the curtain has been stripped away at last.

This is why the “Actionable” requirement existed in the original event. Circumstances have changed somehow since the Myth was established, and a new Quest is now possible – to prevent / defeat whatever the Myth was protecting from.

Without this, the PCs options are severely limited – expose the Secret and live with the consequences, or join with the Guardians of the Myth to again suppress it.

They can still follow either of those paths, if they choose. So there are three directions things can go, and the GM has to be ready for all of them.

A Changed World

But I like the ‘actionable’ path because it adds a new climax to the entire event chain, one that lets the PCs see the game world through the new ;ens of the Truth, and see how the Myth has reshaped it, however much its architects may have tried to prevent that.

This is the next element that needs careful attention from the GM. All of the groups and organizations need to be evaluated in terms of their response. Allegiances will shift, alliances may be torn asunder, enemies become friends and vice-versa. If the truth comes out, the PCs entire world will be upended.

And that’s the real payoff, in a way – the actions of the PCs have clearly made a lasting mark on the world, and it should never be the same again.

Running In Reverse

If you ever get stuck, planning a sweeping campaign arc like this, it can sometimes be helpful to skip to the end in your planning and work backwards for a bit. Start with the Quest, and tailor everything prior to it so that it can lead to that outcome. Walking through the many doors erected between that outcome and the initial state of affairs surrounding the PCs is still up to them – you can manipulate them to try and get the outcome that you want, but that’s as far as you can go without treading on the hallowed ground of Player Agency.