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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 2220606" data-attributes="member: 4937">I certainly wasn't implying that it would be easy.  But even if you set your campaign in the real world, and play Masque of the Red Death, Call of Cthullu, D20 modern, or whatever, you are going to have the same problem of player's immediately assuming every hint you drop that the orthodox history is false is proof that the orthodox history is false and probably do so immediately.The problem isn't so much just that players know the history, but that players have learned:a) Most radically unorthodox claims made in the real world turn out to be false, because the real world just usually doesn't work like that.b) Most radically unorthodox claims made in the game world turn out ot be true, because it's a fantasy afterall.The only solution to this would be to have a campaign that's rich enough in detail that you can have several competing historical/cosmological theories about the universe, at least some of which turn out to be false.  Once you've suckered the players a couple times into believing the first theory that they heard, they are going to be more wary.   However, even then you aren't going to be able to approach the power of unorthodox claims about reality simply because people don't have as much invested in thier character's beliefs as they do in thier real beliefs - and if that isn't true then you've got bigger problems as a DM. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" />Well, at least some level of 'wow' factor.  I don't hope to make the game as compelling as reality, just as compelling as say a good book.   I mean if the writer of 'The Di Vinchi Code' can pull off that sort of historical sleight of hand, then in theory you ought to be able to do it in a game. One thing I've always wanted to do is create a coherent explanation for the game universe which seems complete and compelling but which I've deliberately left a glaring hole in, so that, at some point in exploring the game universe the characters ask a simple philosophical question that causes them to fall off in that hole.   That question could be as simple as something like, "Ok, if that's all true, where do the souls of people come from?", which has no possible answer within the tightly laid out cosmology of the game world and hense implies that thier is something drastically wrong with the cosmology.</blockquote>

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