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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Elder-Basilisk" data-source="post: 233291" data-attributes="member: 3146">That's the problem with being a dungeon master instead of God. You don't really know what's going to happen so you can't make comprehensible prophecies about stuff the PCs can effect.On the other hand, prophecies which are so vague as to be legitimately interpreted in a dozen different (and some mutually exclusive) ways (like Nostradamus, for instance) are rather useless and meaningless. That kind of prophecy would seem to be the hallmark of a charlatan rather than a real oracle or god. The prophecies of the Delphic oracle in Greek myth were somewhat different--you knew exactly what they meant it was just that the actions you took to avoid them inevitably caused them to come to pass (as in the story of Oedipus). A clever DM might be able to manage that in a game (although players might feel railroaded).A conditional prophecy might be a better way to simulate actual divine interaction with PCs. Examples of this are Moses fortelling the death of every firstborn son in Egypt not in a house marked with the blood of a lamb and Jeremiah prophesying to the men the Babylonians left in Jerusalem that if they fled to Egypt they would die. That's the kind of thing a DM can arrange. . . .As to the original question, you could always have the prophecy carved into the living bark of the World Tree by giants in letters as deep as a spear. Comprehend Languages on the World Tree! You've got to be kidding. You can't exactly take a rubbing of the letters either. And, as the DM, you could rule that comprehend languages gives knowledge of the writer's intent. Consequently copying the letters onto a paper that could be comprehended wouldn't work (the writer didn't mean anything by it. . . .)Alternatively, you could let the PCs use their comprehend languages ability but make the prophecy a recording of a vision that doesn't make sense to the PCs (or has many possible interpretations). In order to decipher it, they must seek out a prophet gifted in the interpretation of dreams and visions (such as Joseph or Daniel in the Bible). Or the end of the prophecy could refer include a scribe's commentaries "the meaning of the dragon is clear, having been made manifest in the first of Bede's visions. . . ." That would require the PCs to find the other prophecy in order to properly interpret the one they just found.Incidentally, though, you can't take 20 on decipher script--you can't even retry it. Either you can figure it out or you can't--more time doesn't help.</blockquote>

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