{"id":28074,"date":"2020-05-25T23:59:03","date_gmt":"2020-05-25T13:59:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/?p=28074"},"modified":"2020-05-18T21:37:37","modified_gmt":"2020-05-18T11:37:37","slug":"wisdom-of-the-ages","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wisdom-of-the-ages\/","title":{"rendered":"Wisdom Of The Ages: A Fantasy Campaign Concept"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Image by Elionas2<\/a> from Pixabay<\/a>, background frame by Mike<\/p><\/div>\n

Folk wisdom is a funny old thing. Sometimes it’s a pearl, other times it’s what in Australia might be called a Pearler.<\/p>\n

Much of the time, it’s sensible, practical advice when applied to situations that are comparable to that which gave rise to the saying;<\/em> – and incredibly foolhardy when not.<\/p>\n

For example, take that old aphorism, “Beware Of Greeks Bearing Gifts”. This, of course, is not meant to insult or even discriminate against our Greek cousins should they approach with bountiful parcels in hand; rather, it speaks to one specific occasion, when a clever ploy (hiding a band of soldiers, presumably a small one) inside a wooden horse which was gifted to the Spartans. You see, the Spartans had an excellent army of their own, and solid city walls, that the Greeks could not overcome – from the outside.<\/p>\n

Yet many people think that another saying – “Never look a gift horse in the mouth” – derives from the same incident, which makes absolutely no sense. If you looked in the mouth of the gift horse, you might discover that it was full of Greek soldiers! Shouldn’t the saying therefore be, “Always<\/em> look a gift horse in the mouth”? – with a meaning that something that seems too good to be true might well not be as honest as it seems. It seems to me that in this internet age of scams and identity theft, such a saying ground into the consciousness of all and sundry might not be such a bad thing.<\/p>\n

There’s even “don’t bite the hand that feeds” to pick up the slack – it only takes a little expansion of the meaning of “the hand that feeds” to give this saying 100% applicability to every situation in which the original “Don’t look a gift horse” would apply.<\/p>\n

I think that popular “wisdom” is wrong in attributing the original to the Spartan incident, anyway. It is far more likely to refer to some long-forgotten situation in which a horse was gifted to someone (or sold for a really cheap price), who showed ingratitude by making sure that the horse was healthy by checking it’s teeth – implicitly showing that he thought the gift-giver couldn’t be trusted not<\/em> to have given him a sick horse.<\/p>\n

Of course, it could have been a forgotten tale of the time someone gave away a horse with bad teeth and consequent ill-health to someone who deserved better from the gift-giver – and the meaning has simply gotten all twisted around because the original incident was lost.<\/p>\n

Nor does folk wisdom make any allowance for changing technology or expertise. Lemon and Crab-grass may well be the way your gr’gr’grandmother did it, but that doesn’t mean that better ways have not been discovered since.<\/p>\n

Bollocks or Brilliance? The only way to find out is to put the aphorism to the test by applying it in real life and seeing what happens. As a guide to sensible and courteous behavior, they are shaky at best. As a guide to practical actions, they are positively rickety.<\/p>\n

I was all set to write an article asking “What are the aphorisms in your game world that we don’t have in our culture?” and “Are they right or wrong, misapplied, or misunderstood?” When a new thought intruded: “What a cracking idea for a fantasy Campaign!”<\/p>\n

You see, I was contemplating how GMs might go about revealing the answers to the players. The dull way would be to give them a list. It would almost certainly be quickly forgotten, just another meaningless handout. But if you built a whole adventure around an aphorism, applicable either literally or metaphorically, what then? And why not extend the concept to all sorts of folk wisdom – everything from survival tips to naturalist advice to healing potions and lotions to, well, you name it!<\/p>\n

Characters shouldn’t be able to advance a level until they’ve completed the current adventure – and each of these adventures should earn the party enough XP that they will gain a level.<\/p>\n

So, let’s cook ourselves up some folk wisdom!<\/p>\n

The process is simple: Take an existing piece of folk wisdom, replace one or more of the key terms with in-game terminology, create an incident that spawned the folk wisdom or some underlying logic that makes perfect sense (even if it doesn’t make such sense in our world), write the results down, decide if the folk wisdom is going to be right or wrong in the case that is about to engulf the PCs,<\/em> and then build an adventure around that piece of folk wisdom.<\/p>\n

There are some practical considerations that you should observe: anything related to healing should be early in the campaign when Cure<\/em> spells are hard to find, for example.<\/p>\n

Adventures should follow some sort of standard template, too: A briefing\/assignment to which the party can’t say no, someone offering the players the relevant folk wisdom as advice (sometimes it will be good, sometimes it will make matters worse), and then the adventure itself gets underway. At the end of the adventure, XP is conferred, PCs level up, and the celebrations begin. Roll the credits and start thinking about the next one.<\/p>\n

A good piece of folk wisdom will contradict reasonable advice for our world at least half the time – and remember that this advice has to be right, at least half the time.<\/em> By the time you’ve explored the consequences and ramifications and differences that this fact leads to, your game world might be very strange indeed – so it’s probably necessary to have all your pieces of folk wisdom lined up before character one is generated, and rigorously analyzed.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, it would be best to establish a pattern of the folk wisdom being helpful (even if that only becomes obvious in hindsight) before you throw a “bad” one at the party – otherwise, they will simply ignore them after the first time one bites them. It would be especially desirable if it could become obvious to the party that the flaw in the first “bad one” wasn’t with the folk wisdom but in their interpretation or application of it.<\/p>\n

That implies that you will need to choose the sequence of “pieces of folk wisdom” very carefully. This is your hand-crafted adventure seed, after all – and the seeds of adventures suitable to a party of 18th-level characters will be very different to those suitable to a party at 5th level.<\/p>\n

Chart a course, a through-line for the entire campaign, a (short) statement about the way the campaign will change and evolve as the characters progress through it, and use that as your guide to the selection and sequencing of folk wisdom.<\/p>\n

You may well find that you need many more items than you initially think. Besides, if you give the party three pieces of advice more-or-less at once, one that will turn out to have short term relevance, one that will be relevant to the middle of the adventure, and one that will be important to the resolution of the adventure – and don’t tell them to the PCs in order – they are never going to spot the bad ones. Especially if they decide “that can’t be right” (when it is) and get themselves in deeper trouble as a result.<\/p>\n

Don’t be afraid to mess with game physics, cosmology, biology, evolution, history, etc, in order to achieve the counter-intuitive validity that at least some items on your list should have. Yes, rose bushes do<\/em> wander under the full moon, in search of their lost love. It just so happens that their lost love is a legendary Vampire…. but take care to be consistent about it, try not to contradict yourself.<\/p>\n

Think of it as just another way to lead the players down the garden path (to the pit trap at the end)….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Folk wisdom is a funny old thing. Sometimes it’s a pearl, other times it’s what in Australia might be called a Pearler. Much of the time, it’s sensible, practical advice when applied to situations that are comparable to that which gave rise to the saying; – and incredibly foolhardy when not. For example, take that […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[65,67,83,74,89,221,12,91,94,96],"tags":[108,163,155,172,218,282],"series":[],"class_list":["post-28074","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-campaign-creation","category-dnd","category-fantasy-games","category-mike","category-npcs-etc","category-opinion","category-pcs","category-plans-and-prep","category-ideas-and-inspiration","category-write","tag-campaigns","tag-cultures-societies","tag-dd","tag-npcs","tag-pathfinder","tag-pcs"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1toiD-7iO","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28074"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28074"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28074\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28077,"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28074\/revisions\/28077"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28074"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28074"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28074"},{"taxonomy":"series","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.campaignmastery.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/series?post=28074"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}