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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Beginning of the End" data-source="post: 5493891" data-attributes="member: 55271">This.Also:- Not all prophecies have to be true.- Not all prophecies need to pertain to the PCs.- Prophecies can be vague.In my last campaign, the PCs encountered several dozen prophecies.One particular scenario resulted in them finding a manuscript page which listed literally two dozen prophecies. Roughly 2/3rds of these were written to relate directly to stuff that the PCs were either involved in or which I expected that they would get involved in. The other third were prophecies about stuff that had nothing to do with them, many of which were essentially events that they were unlikely to hear about. (They might have even been completely wrong. I dunno. Doesn't really matter.)Some of these prophecies had already come true (thus nicely cementing the document as accurately oracular). Others were stuff that the PCs really had no ability to prevent ("the seal of black onyx will be broken by the demon with three horns"), but when they later learned that, yup, the black onyx seal of the Dread Emperor had been broken by the demon that was previously trapped inside the prophecy came true.(What if they had gone to investigate the black seal, figured out what it was, and then broken it open? Well, maybe the demon claims responsibility. Or it turns out that the translation was wrong and it should have more properly read "the seal of black onyx will be broken, releasing the demon with three horns". Or the demon planted this prophecy and is, thus, responsible for the PCs breaking the seal. Or the prophecy was just wrong.)Other prophecies encoded factual information, some of which the PCs figured out and were able to pursue. (For example, the location of a villain they'd been looking for.)In many ways, these prophecies worked just like prophecies in the real world: With 20/20 hindsight, you tend to pick out the prophecies (or parts of prophecies) which were true and ignore the rest. By making the other prophecies sufficiently vague and interpretive, the "misses" will either be reinterpreted until they have a kind of truth; assumed to describe something else entirely; or ignored.</blockquote>

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